01
The work begins
Prikkle Academy was founded with a belief that education should help young people recognise their abilities and turn learning into action, not simply collect credentials.
Inspiring Community Builders in Africa.
Prikkle Academy is a Nigerian nonprofit working at the intersection of learning, making, community development, and enterprise.
We help children, youth, and educators discover what already works in their lives and communities, and turn those assets into useful skills, innovations, and sustainable solutions.
Who we are
We start with potential, not deficiency.
Young people in grassroots communities are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They already carry gifts, knowledge, imagination, relationships, and lived experience.
Our role is to help make those assets visible and useful through open learning resources, evidence-based programmes, practical tools, collaboration, mentorship, and opportunities to act.
That work can happen in a physical makerspace, a classroom, an online fellowship, or within a participant’s own community. Prikkle Academy is the organisation that connects these forms of learning, not a single place.
Our journey
Ten years of learning what it takes.
Prikkle’s story is not a straight line of programmes and numbers. It is a decade of testing ideas, learning from communities, and understanding what meaningful opportunity requires.
02
A makerspace in Afon
Together with young people and community partners, Prikkle established a grassroots makerspace in Afon, Kwara State: a shared place for making, peer learning, experimentation, and community problem-solving.
03
Learning across formats
The model expanded beyond one building through school activities, community projects, open resources, partnerships, virtual learning, and programmes for makers and educators.
04
A renewed chapter
Ten years of practice now inform the next phase: clearer programmes, stronger evidence, wider access, and an institution built to support adaptive innovators for the decade ahead.
What makes the work distinct
Education designed to move.
We merge indigenous wisdom with transferable, hands-on STEAM learning to nurture curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and pathways to fulfilling, future-ready work.
Asset-based
We begin with what people and communities already have; their strengths, knowledge, relationships, materials, culture, and imagination.
Learning by doing
Participants question, make, test, teach, document, and improve. Learning becomes valuable when it can move into real life and real work.
Locally rooted
Indigenous wisdom and local context belong alongside transferable STEAM skills, global knowledge, and emerging technologies.
Open and connected
Physical, virtual, and hybrid pathways allow learning, expertise, and opportunity to travel beyond the walls of any one programme or building.
The method in practice
Begin with the assets a person already carries.
Purpose Discovery makes the asset-based approach personal. People identify gifts of the Head, Hand, and Heart, then ask how those gifts can become learning, work, and contribution.
01
Head
What do you know or want to learn?
Knowledge, ideas, teaching, analysis, language, technology
02
Hand
What can you make or do?
Drawing, building, cooking, repairing, performing, organising
03
Heart
What do you care enough to act on?
People, problems, causes, relationships, and responsibilities
Programme continuity
The names evolved. The learning carried forward.
Prikkle Academy's present programmes are not a break from its history. They organise a decade of field practice into clearer pathways for learners, educators, makers, and partners.
Earlier foundation
Grassroots Makerspace
Current expression
Makerspace
The physical Afon space remains the practical centre for making, reading, peer learning, and community experimentation.
Earlier foundation
Innovative Classroom
Current expression
Creative Classroom
The school-based model continues with a clearer focus on curriculum-linked models and locally available materials.
Earlier foundation
Prikkle Sparkle + Collaborative Community
Current expression
Method across current programmes
Their asset inventory, community collaboration, and project-building practices now inform multiple pathways rather than one programme name.
Earlier foundation
Senaraba
Current expression
Knowledge-sharing legacy
The indigenous-language and community-knowledge work remains part of the institutional record, though it is not presented as a current standalone pathway here.
Where the work has taken root
Three communities in the decade record.
Afon is the current operational base. Mbagishi and Awowo remain important parts of the organisation's history and the field learning behind today's programmes.
Primary base
Afon
Asa LGA · Kwara State
Home of the continuously operating grassroots makerspace and the centre of current school and community engagement.
Origin community
Mbagishi
Vandeikya LGA · Benue State
Where Prikkle Academy's first full-time community practice began in 2016 through asset mapping and locally built solutions.
Expansion community
Awowo
Ewekoro LGA · Ogun State
The organisation's first south-west Nigeria footprint, launched in 2019 through community and school-based work.
Create pathways for people to discover their gifts, collaborate, and turn learning into tangible community solutions.
An Africa where grassroots youth are valued as community builders and play a critical role in shaping its future.
The people behind the work
Our Team
Prikkle Academy is powered by facilitators, makers, educators, community builders, and operators who turn local insight into practical learning experiences and lasting opportunities.
Fasoranti Damilola
Chief Listener
Adam Abdulraheem
Community champion
Abubakar Balogun
Tech Lead
Jamiu Balogun
Makerspace Lead
The next chapter
The first decade gave us evidence. The next one asks us to build with it.
We are strengthening Prikkle Academy as an institution that can connect grassroots talent to learning, tools, expertise, networks, and enterprise, wherever participants live or move to.
Build with us