Chidi Nwaogu

Co-founder and Head of Fellowship Program

Savvy was founded to help at least 10,000 young professionals around the world transition into entrepreneurship, equip them with the relevant knowledge and skills to become successful entrepreneurs, as a way to reduce global employment thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, we’ve trained over 3,800 individuals in 136 countries, who have gone on to start over 900 impact-driven businesses across diverse sectors in different regions. Savvy consists of three components—the learning, assessment, and mentorship sessions, which all take place online.

For 12 weeks, selected participants learn how to start, build, and scale an impact venture. Using visual presentations, Savvy helps them answer all the relevant questions on their mind. The Savvy program is available in over 100 languages, including English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Zulu, German, Italian, Portuguese, Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa. This fosters easy learning for those whose native language isn't English. They learn how to gain early traction, achieve product-market fit, and scale into newer markets.

While learning, Savvy participants are offered mentorship as well, which is a great way for them to have a better understanding of their chosen industry. Mentorship comes in two ways: peer-to-peer mentorship and expert mentorship.

The Savvy mentorship team is made up of 140 seasoned entrepreneurs from 37 countries, creating change in diverse sectors, and across different regions. Each, with an average of over 6 years of entrepreneurial experience, these entrepreneurs have been trained or recognized by MIT, Harvard, UN, Acumen, ITU, Forbes, Product School, Halcyon Incubator, World Economic Forum, Ashoka, One Young World, Obama Foundation, Singularity University, etc.

Co-founder and CEO

Publiseer is a digital platform that helps independent and underserved African writers, musicians, filmmakers, and video game developers, typically those from low-income and disadvantaged communities, to earn above the minimum wage and live above the poverty line from the sales of their creative works. Publiseer achieves this by helping them distribute, protect, promote and monetize their creative works worldwide, at no charge, with just a single click, and the digital platform shares in the revenue it generate for these creators, which in turn goes back into helping more creators in Africa. So far, Publiseer has helped over 6,000 African creators from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, to earn over $240,000 in revenue since inception in August 2017.

In a nutshell, every day, Publiseer discovers extraordinary local African creators and gives them a platform to focus on doing what they love doing the most and what they know how to do best, which is to create, while Publiseer handles the tedious but important business of transforming their creativity into wealth for them. When Publiseer accepts a creator on its platform, Publiseer fine-tunes their creative works to industry standard, so that the creator stands a chance to compete on a global scale. Then Publiseer distributes it to its over 400 well-established partner stores so that the creator is easily discovered. Publiseer also protects this content from illegal distribution and intellectual property theft, so the creator truly owns the content. The creators can monitor their sales performance on Publiseer's centralized dashboard, and their receive royalties via African-tailored payment methods, such as into a local bank account or through a mobile money wallet.

Co-Anchor

So on April 2, Jason Njoku, a famous Nigerian entrepreneur tweeted about how entrepreneurship abuses and consumes us if we let it. And this is nothing but the truth. Entrepreneurship isn't glamorous at all, and often it affects our mental health. However, in contrast to Jason's opinion, we believe there is true happiness in it if you share your pains, mistakes, worries, failures, and shortcomings with other like-minded entrepreneurs, and receive feedback and help, and grow with it. In a bid to achieve this, we have started a podcast for entrepreneurs called "Dear Entrepreneurs". Chidi Nwaogu and Olamide Akomolafe will be anchoring this podcast every Saturday, where we will talk about our experiences as entrepreneurs, the good and the bad, in order to encourage other entrepreneurs going through tough times.

Co-founder and Lead Web Developer

After the acquisition of LAGbook, I co-founded PRAYHoUSe with my twin brother, an online Christian prayer directory of more than 10,000 prayers from the Scripture. I organically grew PRAYHoUSe from zero to over 200,000 users in less than six months. In March 2014, PRAYHoUSe was acquired by the American non-profit organization, Ten Doves Charity.

Lead Front-End Architect

As a Front-End Architect, I was responsible for the look and feel of the social networking utility, and everything you'll see with your eyes. I made the social network mobile-friendly and added a 'friend suggestion' social feature to the platform, written in JS. I added all the cool stuff you'll see on the social utility. In a nutshell, I designed the social network from scratch, adding style to it. TagWorld is a social network created in 2005 by American serial entrepreneurs, Freud Krueger and Evan Rifkin as a rival to MySpace, another social network. TagWorld reached a million users in 2006 and received $7.5 million in funding before MTV acquired it in 2008 as the growth of the social network continued. In 2010, an American social groupware platform, GROU.PS acquired TagWorld and its users while MTV continues to own the firm’s social media technology.

Co-founder and Co-CEO

At the age of 19, I co-founded, built, and organically grew LAGbook (otherwise known as Ladies And Gentlemen book) with my twin brother. LAGbook grew from zero to over one million registered members in less than three years. It was initially created for students of the University of Lagos but later expanded to the youth demographic (18 - 30 years) in Africa. The social network was acquired by the Canadian technology company, Gulf Pearl Ltd. in January 2013. LAGbook was featured on TechCrunch for garnering 30,000 new members in less than six months, and on African Business Review for signing an eight-week advertising deal with the multinational company, BlackBerry.

Co-founder and Lead Game Developer

In 2006, I co-founded 9ja Boi Interactive, a video game developer, with my twin brother. We developed video games with the Game Maker software, and wrote our video games in GML, using DLL to extend its functionalities. Our first video game was "Save The Admiral", which is a 2d space shooter that combined AI and gamification to explain global warming to teenagers. Save The Admiral was first released in 2008, with further development and releases spanning till 2009.

eFounders Fellowship Program, Class 9

The eFounders Fellowship program provides first-hand exposure to e-commerce and digital innovations, access to business leaders across Alibaba and China, as well as an opportunity to connect with like-minded, leading entrepreneurs in your region.

Business Lessons

The lessons are designed for working professionals, leaders and entrepreneurs, and even college students and recent graduates who want to advance their careers with core business concepts. Professionals can develop knowledge to help their organizations achieve success, while college students can gain a competitive edge when entering the job market with new, actionable skills.

African Presidential Leadership Program, Cohort 3

The idea of the program was launched as part of the implementation of one of the recommendations of the 2018 World Youth Forum and coinciding with the 2019 Egyptian Presidency of the African Union. The program aims at bringing together African youth with different affiliations and beliefs under one umbrella aimed at development and peace, complementing Egypt’s role in effective participation with other African governments. The program is designed to give more than 1,000 young people from Africa a chance to participate in 10 sessions of 100 young African people each.

ITU Magnet Acceleration Program

The ITU Magnet Acceleration Program-Istanbul is managed by Istanbul Technical University's Technology Park, ITU ARI Teknokent, in order to strengthen the ecosystem of technology-based entrepreneurship in Turkey and the Region. The aim of the program is to inspire and support its technology start-ups at any stage and contribute to their success in the market and lead start-ups to get national and international traction.

MIT Venture Scaling Bootcamp

MIT Venture Scaling Bootcamp is for founders, CEOs, key leadership team members whose ventures have demonstrated product-market fit and now ready to scale up. One semester condensed into a week. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant university, with an urban campus that extends more than a mile alongside the Charles River.

Software Entrepreneurship

MEST offers a 12-month, full time, fully sponsored program in which the students – known as Entrepreneurs in Training (EITs) – complete a graduate-level course in software development, business and communications. The MEST program provides rigorous entrepreneurial training and extensive hands-on project work, designed to ensure EITs master industry-proven methodologies for developing startups. This coursework is supplemented by a series of guest lectures, featuring the experiences and insights of internationally-recognized executives and successful entrepreneurs. The course culminates in an investor pitch and the chance to receive seed funding and enter the MEST incubator.

Global Startup Program

African Young Leaders Fellowship Programme

Venture Incubation Programme Winter School 2018

The Venture Incubation Programme (VIP) is designed to provide a supportive ecosystem to help startups build viable and scalable innovation-driven companies. The UCT Graduate School of Business is home to the only full-time African MBA ranked in the top 100 by the prestigious Financial Times and as just one of 73 schools world-wide to be “triple-crowned” (schools which are accredited by AMBA, EQUIS and the AACSB), the school is among the best in the world.

Bachelor's degree, Physics