Kabiru Adisa Adeniyi is the founder and President General Guildance Community Development Foundation, a non-governmental organisation that reaches out to orphans and vulnerable children. The organisation which is also into skill acquisition and empowerment program for younger ones yet gives out free-interest rate soft loan scheme to young small scale business owners. This he said is his passion and his own way of impacting on the lives of people.  He is our role model this week.

What inspired you into this? 
My late father was known for his community service.  He was a community leader whose passion was to address community issues.  Each time he was going for community meeting, he took me along and I learned a lot from him.  The passion for serving the community grew from there and I saw myself filling pot-holes, clearing the sewage and canals in and around my community and from there it developed into looking at various issues that affect people around me and attempting to proffer solution to them.  Later in life, I was transferred to Aba from where I was working, and there I saw some women engaging in child trafficking. That enraged me and lots of ideas came to me on how to contribute my own quota to the development of humanity.  I decided to set up an NGO to address some of these problems.   

What have you done so far?
We have done quite a lot.  We are into health related issues, skill acquisition and empowerment.  We had cases of people with asthma, chronic diseases and other problems. HIV/AIDS awareness and control, empowerment and poverty alleviation are also part of our programme.  We actually don't give treatment but we assist people who don't know how to go about their health issues and in some cases provide financial assistance where we found very necessary and also provide drugs to patients who cannot afford it.  So, far, it has been self financing, we have not got any dime from donors. I use money from my other source of income to finance the project just because of the passion.  I derive a lot of satisfaction doing this; it is all about service and nothing more. On HIV/AIDS, we spend less because we work with some agencies like the Ladoke Akintola Teaching Hospital,Osogbo in Osun State.  The hospital assisted by providing HIV Test-kits. Besides, they have also assisted us in manpower training, in the area of seminars and workshops. We received about 400 from them recently. 
It is difficult for me to mention those who had benefited from the programme in figures but not less than 30,000 people from different areas have benefited; not to talk of those who have been affected positively by our awareness campaign.  There was a conference we did in Iwo, Osun State, about 1500 benefited.

After the test what then do you do?
I know that you cannot just be talking to people and believe you have changed their lives.  This is where monitoring comes in.  We determine the level they are and also live a lasting change in them by helping those who are positive to live their normal lives without any fear and assist them in their new life.  We refer HIV positive to Hospital where they can be placed on ART. 

What other areas of life have you affected too?
The orphans are vulnerable children in the society, ones we are able to determine that a child is an orphan; we give every attention to the child. We focus on his well-being and education. That is our narrow area. The relationship with the HIV/AIDS campaign is that a child may become orphaned as a result of the death of the parent due to HIV.  Besides, we also comply with the USAID regulations and the Ministry of Women Affairs; a child that is orphaned between the ages of 0 - 17 are our targets. We have done quite a lot in that regard.

Again, we also have a programme for youth empowerment.  We train young men and women on several vocations to which they can become employers of labour instead of seeking employments.  Right now, we have about 42 different areas of vocations.  We have resource persons that are into different areas of these vocations. Personally, I teach about four vocations and we have others like that in our organisation and several medical doctors who specialise on health related areas.  We go to groups, associations, religious gatherings and ask them to choose the areas of interest of their members and move there to carry out the training free of charge.  We advise that each participant will specialise in one after the training and we do a follow-up on them to ensure that they make something out of it.  In the past, we used to give a small grant to people who we train to start their business but resources are scares, we really cannot meet the demand now.  But if we are able to get funding from organisations and donor agencies, we will be able to impact on more lives.  But we have what we call a revolving fund we give to people on interest-free basis.  The idea is to empower who want to start up a business and desire a  micro-credit to achieve that, but we basically give priority to those who had received vocational training and want to specialise in a specific area. 

What are those things you think this job has taken away from you?
It has taken my time, I go to bed not later than 2am, I write a lot of proposal for people especially on NGOs. I cannot do that during the day because I use the day for some other means of livelihood. Sometimes I use the whole week doing like strategic planning, preparing, writing seminar papers.  I also receive a lot of visitors from Nigeria and exchange students outside the country.  Recently, we received visitors from China and UK to see what we are doing, also next month; we will be hosting nine students from Cameroun for the same purpose.  No doubt, it has taken my time, but I am happy doing it because I know somebody is being affected positively.

Your advice for the youth
My advice for the youth whether in the secondary school or university is that they should learn a vocation.  It will make them self-employed instead of seeking employment. It is also better that governments incorporate into the curriculum a choice vocation whereby you cannot graduate except you pass a vocation at secondary school level.  The moment it is made compulsory, everybody will be serious about it. This will make them to be useful to themselves after graduating instead of depending on white collar jobs.    Again, there should be a vocational fund for development of the micro-industries.  If a student learns a vocation and did very well in it, government should give him a grant to start up the business and in no time, the hydra-headed unemployment will be a thing of the past.