A Co-Founder’s Story | By: Ose Iyoke
The Journey Out
In July 2019, I had just arrived in the United States to attend a programming Bootcamp in Silicon Valley. Prior to this, I had never left Nigeria, my country. Immediately I arrived, I was amazed at what a country looks like when certain things just work. I was struck by how seamless their means of transportation were. You could travel between cities and states in a couple of minutes through their railway system. Busses and large trucks/tankers have their designated lanes and routes, access to good health care and education.
All I could think about was “how would Nigeria look like if things worked?”, this led me to ponder “why Nigeria is the way it is”. I spent the next few months, wandering and exploring this foreign country, asking myself questions, like “Why are we still underdeveloped over these many years?”. It was from these questions that I conceived an idea. An idea that led to my urgent and early return home, cutting short my stay in Silicon Valley.
A Return Home
Since returning, I and a group of extremely brilliant minds, who share the same vision of a successful Nigeria, have worked tirelessly to create a solution to one of the problems we face. The first step was understanding that we as a country and people did not lack ideas or exposure to the systems of functioning countries. Despite this, we are still not where we should be, so we knew there was more to this; we thought CORRUPTION! That must be it!
However, we soon realised and acknowledged that corruption was not our only problem. We also discovered very little to no coordination among government agencies, and a general lack of interest and participation from citizens, to name a few. After much research, we came to understand that a combination of these problems and more contributed to a substandard delivery of the ideas we were certain exist.
A Call To Action
But beyond knowing the problems, the bigger question was, what can one do about it? Our answer to that was to create a platform that enables citizen-driven governance. A platform that fosters roundtable discussions with the citizens, the government, the contractors, and the Civil Society Organisations to ensure optimal delivery of these ideas.
Though it took a tremendous amount of hard work, learning and unlearning, this platform is what we eventually christened Eyemark. With Eyemark, an Igbo trader in Lagos can track government projects within his vicinity whilst advocating for infrastructure development in his hometown. Any and every citizen in Nigeria will have the ability to see exactly how much has been budgeted for a particular project, the expected time of completion, which contractor is in charge of the project and even give constructive feedback and suggestions directly to the government for improvement.
Eyemark is a project born out of sheer passion and devotion to a better Nigeria, to a Nigeria that works. A Nigeria where you can live in Kaduna and work in Abuja or move across states easily because we have the infrastructure. A Nigeria where buildings stand firm and strong for decades because appropriate materials and resources were used. A Nigeria where government projects are completed within their expected timeframe, without compromising quality. A Nigeria where development is driven through dialogue and cooperation from all stakeholders.
Although Eyemark is still in its early days and just a snippet of our overall dream which we continue to tirelessly work on day in and day out, we truly believe that the current Eyemark contains the first steps for us and our fellow citizens towards the development of our dear Nigeria. We hope our passion can be seen through our work and that as Nigerians start using Eyemark, their passion for citizen-driven governance would also come alive.
Edited By: Allen Agozie
