The club session that turned into a plastic pollution campaign

"Uncle, I want to help save whales."

That was an 11 year old in one of Ebipa David Ikpilifu's clubs, after a session on what our environmental actions do to wildlife like whales. He had been wondering what he could do to make the world a bit safer for whales, and he came up at the end and said it. The two of them brainstormed and ended up with a plastic pollution campaign. "Quite frankly, at the time, I wasn't going to push for it," Ebipa says.

“A utopian society begins with a utopian mindset.”

Ebipa David Ikpilifu

Then the boy came back a week later with a bunch of classmates who wanted to work on it with him. Seeing how devoted the students were to the cause is what decided it. "I knew we had to bring it to life," he says.

They started planning. People volunteered, others supported it financially, and the campaign happened. Ebipa watched children that age pick plastic and stop people on the road to explain what plastic pollution does. The boy kept going after it ended, reading about wildlife conservation and climate change, and when Ebipa saw a wildlife storytelling competition he helped him enter. The story came third regionally.

That is what the clubs are for. Leadvocacy for Utopia is the organisation Ebipa started, a youth led network with over 40 volunteers across Nigeria, United States, Iraq, India and Canada. The team visits a school, starts a Leadvocacy club and runs an intensive 8 week programme with the students. There are 9 clubs so far. The aim goes beyond creating the club system, he says. It is to give students a chance to explore their interests and become leaders in them, because at Leadvocacy a leader is someone who can identify a problem and offer solutions to it.

He knew the gap because he grew up in it. The high schoolers in the Nickelodeon shows he watched as a child all had clubs, "a place where they'd go to be nerdy about their interests." For many Nigerian students like him, the club system did not exist. He pushed for a poetry club at his own school and it kept getting rejected, until he started entering competitions and his first regional win made the school open one.

Leadvocacy is now looking at expanding the clubs into other fields, like tech and skill acquisition.

"If every child, every young person has a space where they can be obsessed with their interests and curiosity, I believe it creates a large possibility for many problems in our society to be solved," he says.

It is, as he puts it, "a reminder that our ideas and visions may not seem pleasant at first, but we must push for it until the world starts to see it too."