The Whys to My Whats

Ever since I was young, I have had one constant fear: failure.

I grew up accustomed to doing well. Excellence in school was expected, and for a long time, failure felt almost foreign to me. So, when I eventually experienced it, it shook me more than I expected. I responded the only way I knew how: by becoming even more dedicated, trying to work hard enough to make failure impossible.

I came to Ikore’s NextGen Graduate Trainee Programme carrying some of that mindset with me. I wanted an opportunity to learn, build my communication skills, gain professional experience and understand project management through hands-on experience. I expected a lot of work, back-to-back trainings and assessments. I did not expect the programme to challenge something much deeper: my understanding of failure itself.

One of the earliest responsibilities I received was overseeing the implementation activities for the launch of the Ikore AgDiL platform. I was tasked with tracking changes, following up with the IT and Technical team, escalating outstanding issues, reporting progress and keeping activities aligned with the launch date. For a graduate trainee, it felt like a lot to hold together. There was always the thought: What if I get this wrong?

But that question became less frightening as I worked.

I was also trusted with research assignments during my first rotation. Later, while working with the Finance team, I noticed that mileage reimbursement calculations were being handled through a lengthy manual process. I developed a single Excel spreadsheet that simplified the calculation and reduced the time and number of people needed to complete the work by more than half.

These experiences taught me something I had not fully appreciated before: being trusted with responsibility is itself an opportunity to grow into responsibility.

Then came a lesson that changed how I viewed failure.

During one of our sessions, a Managing Partner of Ikore, shared a principle that stayed with me: in achieving anything, you will fail at some things, but to progress, you must fail fast and fail forward. I began to see this principle playing out around me. I watched professionals who had been working in development for years encounter things that did not work, identify what went wrong, document the lessons, make adjustments and move on to the next phase.

They were not planning for success alone. They were planning for failure too.

That was different from the way I had thought about excellence. I had been trying to avoid failure. Ikore was teaching me to learn from it.

This shift became even clearer through Root Cause Analysis and Systems Thinking. I began to understand that solving a problem is not necessarily the same as addressing its cause. Examples from previously implemented projects showed me how an intervention can fail to last when the underlying cause has not been properly understood. The same problem eventually resurfaces, sometimes becoming even more difficult to solve.

That lesson became real for me through the Food System’s Project: Ikore Livestock Health Plan, or Project LHP.

The project seeks to test whether a cooperative-mediated, prepaid livestock vaccination model can become commercially viable, allowing smallholder livestock farmers in Nigeria to access preventive animal healthcare through existing cooperative structures without perpetual dependence on donors.

My role has involved identifying the regions and stakeholders needed to build a market system that can continue functioning even when Ikore steps back. This has meant confronting realities that are easy to overlook on paper: language barriers between us and local farmers, the importance of working through native speakers and trusted partners, and the need to understand the incentives and relationships that determine whether a system will actually work.

Perhaps most surprising was how much responsibility the programme allowed us to carry. I never imagined that ideas developed by graduate trainees could eventually lead to actual contractual partnerships between Ikore and private-sector actors. I assumed trainees would test a small project or assist with existing ones.

Instead, as part of LHP’s objective to build market-system foundations, I initiated and led engagements that progressed to formal contractual arrangements between Ikore and two private-sector companies, culminating in their publicised signing by the appropriate leads.

That experience forced me to confront another fear: What if I mess this up? What if I create a problem for the organisation?

The answer, I have learned, is not to eliminate every possibility of getting something wrong. It is to understand the problem, prepare properly, ask better questions, act deliberately, learn quickly and improve.

I have also discovered something less flattering about myself along the way. I overthink. I sometimes try to perfect things when what is actually needed is to deliver, learn and improve. Ikore has made me more conscious of that tendency and, more importantly, has shown me that progress does not require perfection at every step.

Coming from a Civil Engineering background, I was used to thinking about solving physical and technical problems. My experience at Ikore has expanded that perspective. Development problems require understanding the human, economic, institutional and behavioural systems surrounding an issue. The structure may be sound, but if the people and systems around it do not work, the solution may still fail.

That is probably the biggest change I am taking with me.

I came to Ikore looking for answers.

I am leaving with better questions.

And perhaps that is a better way to approach any problem worth solving.