She remembers vividly the early days in Lagos, curious, eager, and full of questions, but with limited access to tech role models who looked like her.

That all changed one summer when she stumbled upon a beginner coding course using Scratch at the CoCreation Hub in Yaba. That spark lit a fire.

Years later, standing at the heart of the global tech capital as a student at Menlo School, Camille decided to give that spark a name and a mission. SPARK Tech Africa was born: a platform to Support Passionate Africans through Relationships, Knowledge, and Tech.

Launched in Lagos, SPARK Tech Africa is not just another tech initiative, it’s a movement designed by a teenager who knows what it’s like to need a mentor, and who now wants to be the reason someone else never feels alone on their journey.

“SPARK is my way of giving back the guidance I once received,” Camille says. “I’ve had the privilege of learning from brilliant minds at Stanford, Berkeley, and through programs like MAGIC. But I never forgot where my journey started, or the thousands of girls still waiting for a chance to begin theirs.”

A Platform Built with Purpose

SPARK’s mission is clear: connect African teenage girls with world-class tech mentors, from Silicon Valley to Nairobi, and help them build skills, confidence, and real-world solutions.

Through its smart portal, SPARK offers:

• The Learn Page – A library of beginner-friendly coding and project-based resources.
• Matching Page – AI-assisted pairing of mentees and mentors based on shared goals.
• Women’s Stories – Video interviews of women in tech, sharing real stories and advice.
• Progress Page – Weekly updates that track growth, challenges, and successes.
• Final Showcase – A gallery of completed projects, with top entries earning a spot at the Silicon Valley summer camp.

From Lagos to the Valley

Each year, SPARK runs from December to April, culminating in an exclusive two-week summer camp in Silicon Valley for the top mentees.

There, these girls not only visit tech giants, they present their ideas, network with global innovators, and see what’s possible when dreams meet opportunity.

The first cohort has already sparked excitement, with applications for the 2025–2026 cycle now open. Camille’s goal? Equip 10,000 African girls in the next five years with the tools to build, lead, and transform.

“Tech is the tool, but mentorship is the fuel,” Camille adds. “If one girl can go from Scratch in Yaba to coding at Berkeley, imagine what a generation of girls can do when they’re connected.”

Join the Movement

SPARK is currently open to both mentees and mentors who believe in the power of girls, guidance, and global tech impact.

Visit he website to apply or volunteer.

Because when one girl rises, the future lights up for us all.

Gabriel Ayodele is working to change that.

“AI research isn’t just about building models,” he says. “It’s about managing data, tracking experiments, and ensuring discoveries can scale beyond the lab.”

Ayodele, a UK-based data infrastructure engineer and Member of the British Computer Society, has developed a modular, cloud-native data stack tailored to the realities of African research environments.

Cited in peer-reviewed studies, the system provides an end-to-end foundation for data ingestion, transformation, model training, and reproducibility.

It’s not just a tool. It’s a launchpad helping researchers and startups build on solid, scalable infrastructure.

Fixing the reproducibility gap

Many African researchers face broken pipelines, limited compute power, and poor experiment tracking.

“You’ll find brilliant minds rewriting scripts and manually syncing data,” Ayodele says. “Reproducibility suffers.”

His stack integrates Apache Airflow, MLflow, Spark, and Postgres into a resilient system optimized for hybrid, low-bandwidth environments. In one accelerator cohort, teams reduced model training time by 60% and improved reproducibility by 40%.

Startups are already benefiting. AgroVue, a precision agriculture company, used the stack to process satellite data and predict crop yields in half the time.

Langbot, a multilingual chatbot spun out of university research, deployed its API through the platform to streamline monitoring for government pilots.

Compared to traditional platforms, Ayodele’s stack delivers 80% of AWS SageMaker’s capabilities at under 20% of the cost, making it highly accessible for budget-constrained labs and startups across Africa.

Several other research-originated projects have since evolved into commercial pilots, closing the lab-to-market gap Ayodele is passionate about solving.

Why it matters

From agriculture and public health to language translation and climate forecasting, African AI research is growing. But many promising projects stall before reaching production or publication quality.

“You can’t scale innovation on fragile foundations,” Ayodele explains. “And you can’t collaborate globally if your work isn’t reproducible.”

The platform includes model drift detection, version control, data lineage tracking, and reproducibility scoring. Several universities are now in talks to adopt it into their AI labs and postgraduate curricula.

Beyond code: Building ecosystems

Ayodele has spoken at AI conferences across the UK and Africa, including the ACM/SEC Conference in Seattle. He mentors early-career engineers through the British Computer Society, the Chartered Institute for IT, and Utiva, focusing on technical skills, research writing, and product thinking.

His research on explainable AI and infrastructure resilience is cited in academic and industrial publications. “When we talk about trustworthy AI,” he says, “we have to start with how we move and monitor data. Trust isn’t built on flashy results. It is built on process.”

What’s next

Ayodele envisions an Africa where every researcher and builder has access to world-class infrastructure.

“Whether you’re a master’s student in Accra or a founder in Kigali,” he says, “you should have tools as robust as what teams use at Google or Snowflake.”

The system has been recognized by technology experts as a promising model for scalable and ethical AI infrastructure in emerging markets.

With open-source components launching and institutional partnerships underway, Gabriel Ayodele’s work is quietly transforming the foundation of African AI, one reproducible system at a time.

Spark, founded by Nnaemeka Clinton, is a product-led platform transforming how Africa’s innovation ecosystems come together and stay connected.

So what makes Spark… well, Spark? Here’s what you need to know:

1. It’s Not Just an Event Tool, It’s Infrastructure

Spark isn’t another event tech startup. It’s a scalable, AI-powered software that powers every layer of startup ecosystem engagement, from onboarding and matchmaking to lead tracking, analytics, and post-event ROI measurement.

Whether it’s the Africa Startup Festival or an invite-only VC roundtable, Spark powers it with real-time insight and a clean digital backbone.

2. It’s Built for Ecosystems, Not Just Organizers

While most event software is designed for logistics, Spark is designed for outcomes. The platform’s intelligent matchmaking connects investors to startups, enterprise leads to vendors, and governments to local innovators, based on interests, behaviour, and deal readiness.

For Clinton, it’s not just about who attends, it’s about what happens next.

3. It’s Born in Africa, Built for Everywhere

Spark was born out of African challenges, fragmented events, low follow-up rates, and a lack of systems to measure engagement. But it was built with a global mindset. It’s modular, cloud-based, and adaptable for governments, accelerators, and trade bodies across emerging markets.

With interest already coming from partners in Europe and the Middle East, Spark is quickly positioning itself as a white-label ecosystem engine.

4. This Founder Thinks Like a Builder

Nnaemeka Clinton isn’t a conventional founder.

He calls himself a “systems thinker with a product obsession.”

A deep observer of how networks form and fail, he’s building Spark with long-term discipline and short-term clarity. No hype. Just product.

“We’re not in the business of throwing events,” he says. “We’re in the business of making ecosystems work better, and AI helps us do that faster and smarter.”

5. It’s More Than Software, It’s a Shift

Spark is showing that Africa isn’t just hosting innovation, it’s building the platforms that will define how innovation is organized globally.

With AI at its core, Spark doesn’t just react to trends. It’s actively shaping them.

Bottom line?
Spark is what happens when a founder builds for function, not flash. It’s tech with a purpose, and it’s only just getting started.

Or a company through whose creed and deeds, over the many decades it has been around, people can see corporate responsibility and sustainability lived (first) and preached (subsequently)?

If the above set of questions constituted a question in an examination hall, it would be one of the easiest of questions to answer. Not one person would fail it. Outside the examination hall, the answer to this question that seems as easy and simple like the question of 2 + 2 may not be as easy and simple. It may be complicated by all the cleverly arranged noise and claims projected at people to make it difficult for them to see and accept the obvious.

So, it is incumbent on people who know, and care enough (like this writer), to keep stating and restating the obvious.

This is in the hope that doing so would help others to take full cognisance of the obvious and not allow themselves to be bamboozled by image without substance and rhetoric without pedigree.

The concept of corporate responsibility and sustainability is not about the clever or manipulative use of marketing buzzwords by corporate citizens. It is about impact, net positive impact, in the lives of real, not imagined, people through the deliberate and well-planned activities of socially-responsible corporate citizens.

Even if history is no longer taught in most schools in Nigeria, the records are there. The records show that Nigeria has been blessed to have standing by her, at all times, a corporate citizen which understands the concept of corporate responsibility and sustainability.

This corporate citizen has been standing by Nigeria before the country’s founding, through its amalgamation, Independence and all the conflicts and crises Nigeria has gone through and still faces. Today, the corporate citizen still stands by Nigeria.

First Bank of Nigeria Limited, a lender of unmatched pedigree, a bank with a history of unparalleled support to Nigeria and Nigerians (right from the colonial era to date, even serving as Nigeria’s central bank at some stage of our national development), has been a corporate citizen like no other.

A brand that has backed innumerable groundbreaking projects across Nigeria and beyond, FirstBank has demonstrated that real impact that can be seen and felt by all, and not mere marketing buzzwords, is the real measure of an institution’s understanding of corporate responsibility and sustainability.

It is incontrovertible that whichever way corporate responsibility and sustainability is understood or defined, FirstBank is sure to tick all the boxes. Just name every parameter for assessing a company’s efforts in corporate responsibility and sustainability and match each against what FirstBank has been doing. Is there any parameter that FirstBank has not surpassed?

FirstBank has been living corporate responsibility and sustainability for most, if not all, of its existence as a going concern. Knowing it cannot do it alone, the bank has also devoted resources to efforts that will enable it to preach or pass the message so other corporate citizens, groups and individuals will emulate it.

One platform the bank has used effectively for this purpose is its Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability (CR&S) Week. 

The CR&S Week is a full working week that the FirstBank Group, in-country and across the world where it operates, dedicates to the promotion, execution and celebration of social responsibility initiatives.

The Sustainability Week also includes a huge kindness campaign to reorient citizens towards the right values and reignite acts of kindness in society. It is only one of the many ways FirstBank is living true to its brand promise to always put customers first.

And the Sustainability Week seeks to invite others (individuals and corporate citizens) to follow the bank’s example and begin to intentionally create positive impact in their immediate communities.

From the inaugural edition in 2017, where the theme was “Promoting Kindness: Putting You First”, the Sustainability Week has helped to reinforce FirstBank’s role as a nation-builder that is driving sustainable development across communities where it operates. It was an opportunity for the bank to encourage others (individuals and corporate citizens) to follow in its steps, even if all they can afford to take are small steps.

Taking small steps may have informed the choice of theme for the second edition of the Sustainability Week in 2018: “Touching Lives: You First”. The bank sought to debunk the notion that touching lives in meaningful ways and making an impact on society require big-ticket projects, whilst emphasising the power in the little things people do and the small steps they take.

After all, is it not little drops of water that make a mighty ocean, like the saying goes? And does the journey of a thousand miles not begin with a (small) step, like another saying puts it?

Just take a look at SPARK (Start Performing Acts of Random Kindness), a values-based initiative that raises consciousness promoting kindness to one another in society, which the bank started during the inaugural Sustainability Week in 2017.

Aimed at reinforcing FirstBank’s corporate culture of encouraging giving and volunteering among its staff and the larger society, its magnitude today and the many kind initiatives it has sparked off across the country could not have been imagined when the seed was planted five years ago. Incalculable manhours and financial resources from FirstBank staff and partners have been contributed willingly.

Children in orphanages, internally displaced persons (IDPs) in various IDP camps, widows and other underprivileged or vulnerable groups have been visited and their challenges alleviated if not totally eliminated. Scores of career counselling sessions with secondary school pupils across Nigeria has also been organised as part of the Sustainability Week, which has been the first of its kind in Nigeria’s financial services industry.

In 2019, the third edition of the Sustainability Week with the theme: “Ripples of Kindness: Putting You First” enunciated the values (or pillars) of the SPARK initiative to include Compassion, Civility and Charity. FirstBank believes that these values and the acts of kindness that flow as a result of embracing the values are critical to promoting and building peaceful co-existence and prosperity in society.

Among the key highlights of the 2019 Sustainability Week was a “Nice Comments Day” that was a day set aside to foster words of encouragement, support and kindness to people around one, regardless of ones’ familiarity or close ties, in recognition of the instrumental role kind words play in lighting up people’s day and bringing out the best in them.

Another highlight was the SPARK School Engagement that promoted the SPARK initiative in schools, with the objective of embedding the values of SPARK amongst school children at a young age so the values become part of, and habitual to, them as they develop into adulthood.

Due to COVID-19 pandemic and government-imposed lockdown, the year 2020 witnessed no edition of the Sustainability Week. Any attempt to stage the kinds of activities and events that usually accompany the Sustainability Week would have been counterproductive, spreading infections and possibly deaths instead of kindness and joy that the Sustainability Week has become synonymous with.

However, FirstBank’s avowed commitment to corporate responsibility and sustainability would not allow it fold its hands and just watch while COVID-19 and its debilitating effects tried to make living and learning difficult for most Nigerians.

Working virtually or remotely and, where it could not do otherwise, physically but in strict adherence to COVID-19 safety protocols, FirstBank executed several initiatives meant to ameliorate the very difficult situation in Nigeria then.

The bank contributed to efforts to provide palliatives to vulnerable Nigerians, announced a moratorium on repayment of loans, set up a special loan fund for businesses run by women, established another for school proprietors in collaboration with a state government and drove an e-learning initiative that sought to move one million school children to a safe online learning platform so their educational progress would not be set back due to COVID-19 restrictions, government-ordered lockdown and the closure of educational institutions for the greater part of 2020

“Kindness: A Way of Life” was the theme for the fourth edition of the Sustainability Week held in 2021. Highlights of activities of the 2021 Sustainability Week, designed to entrench a culture of kindness, included a practical-oriented training webinar for staff to embed a culture of kindness in the bank by driving understanding of how kindness (or the lack of it) can impact the workplace, the marketplace and the communities in which staff live and work.

Another important feature of the Sustainability Week was the “Kind Comments Days” that ran all week to inspire a consciousness of kind choice of words and consideration for others. There was also a dedicated programme in secondary schools designed to institutionalise SPARK by using school SPARK champions (including students and teachers) alongside other partners such as Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN) and Lagos State government to inculcate the SPARK values in school children.

One other feature was the ground-breaking ceremony for the Lagos State government’s OCAAT (One Community At A Time) initiative to provide the Primary Health Care Centre at Ijedodo community in Alimosho LGA. Set up as an initiative to improve the health and welfare of the members of various communities in Lagos State, FirstBank partnered the government on the project as part of its contribution to global efforts to meet some specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

There were also webinars: a general webinar with the sub-theme: “Education: Does Kindness have a Role?”; and a millennial webinar with the sub-theme: “Making the Cyber World a Kinder Place” which sought to proffer solution to the question of how people could become kinder on social media platforms.

All the past editions of FirstBank Sustainability Week highlight the longstanding and relentless commitment of FirstBank not only to continue to live but also to preach the message of corporate responsibility and sustainability.

Given its unmatched pedigree in corporate responsibility and sustainability, FirstBank has earned the right to address all other corporate organisations as well as individuals and groups on matters of sustainability. The bank has earned its right to the people’s audience.

It is against this backdrop that FirstBank’s forthcoming 2022 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Week should be welcomed by other banks and corporate citizens, irrespective of industry, as an opportunity to come together and take lessons from Nigeria’s foremost corporate citizen with regard to corporate responsibility and sustainability.

FirstBank does not consider itself too big to take lessons from other corporate citizens in areas where they have distinguished themselves. So other corporate citizens should not feel too big to take lessons from FirstBank in this area where the bank stands highly distinguished.

Or can anyone claim not to know that if the concept of corporate responsibility and sustainability were to be represented by one corporate citizen per country on a world map where countries are denoted by their foremost corporate entities, it is unarguable that FirstBank would be the company eminently representing Nigeria on that map?

[Culled from Leadership Newspaper]