The Executive Director of Ideation Hub Africa, Debola Deji-Kurunmi, has said Nigeria is suffering from weak national values necessary for scaling up its development.

She made the remark during the envisioning retreat held recently in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of IHA.

Deji-Kurunmi cited weak national values as one of the factors fueling the misappropriation of funds by some nongovernmental organisations in the country.

“There is a pandemic of sorts, and it is rooted in our national values. We are a people of very weak values. People get away with bad behaviour. So, we have weak national values,” she stated.

According to her, operational inefficiency has also forced some Nigerian NGOs with integrity into embezzlement of funds.

She said, “Even though our national values are weak, about 20 to 30 percent of fund mismanagers in the NGO space did it innocently due to poor planning of their expenditure. So, operational inefficiency can make you an unintentional defamer of the donor industry, which means you can mismanage funds even though you have integrity.”

Deji-Kurunmi said the need to innovatively help some emerging NGOs and social entrepreneurs fine-tune their action plans and deliver enviable impacts in 2025 inspired the envisioning retreat.

“We are at the Envisioning 2025 retreat for non-profit organisations, and the real focus of this retreat is to gather non-profit leaders and social entrepreneurs to help them set their goals for the year and fine-tune an action plan for creating impact throughout the year.

“We have an original assessment that covers ten pillars of a healthy non-profit organisation. We debriefed that assessment with them and walked them through each of the ten pillars that help an NGO leader understand where to focus their efforts if they want to create impactful programmes and deliver innovatively,” she said.

One of the attendees of the retreat, Ugochi Obidigewu, the Founder of Safety Chic, described the programme as value-packed, saying it provided her with a space to reflect, learn, activate new streams of ideas, get energised for the next phase of work, and connect with like-minded individuals.


https://punchng.com/nigeria-suffering-from-weak-national-values-expert/