The 7th Edition of Omilola Oshikoya’s ‘Do It Afraid’ Conference was Impactful | Here’s How It Went Down

The annual “Do It Afraid™” conference organized by Omilola Oshikoya International took place on Sunday, November 7, 2021, at the Transcorp Hilton, Maitama Abuja with the topic “The Rising Star,” which streamed live to about 2,000 participants across continents.

The conference is a wealth creation event focused on the psychology of an entrepreneur intending to inspire millennials to fulfil their dreams, visions, and purposes by overcoming fear.

This year’s conference also marked the 7th anniversary of the epoch-making event. Since its inception in 2015, there have been a total of 7 conferences and 1 workshop with circa 90 speakers who have impacted circa 5,000 physical attendees and thousands more online.

The convener Omi Oshikoya in her welcome address described Stars like huge balls of fire that emit a tremendous amount of heat and light. “The Sun is a star and one of the smallest stars. It shines the brightest because it is the closest star to us on earth. Stars don’t form in a few seconds, minutes or hours. It takes millions of years for a star to form.”

Omi explains that “stars are formed when a supernova or galactic explosion causes dust and gas to come together through the pull of gravity to form a protostar which is a very young star. The protostar then takes millions or billions of years to become a full star. She explained how the recent Covid pandemic is a supernova explosion that has occurred on the earth and stressed that now is the time for over 200 million Nigerians (dust and gas) to come together and rebuild our nation and economy.”

In her welcome address, Omi further emphasized that we all have a part to play in Nigeria becoming a rising star and that we must work collectively in rebuilding our economy and nation at large. She stated that there is a dire need for those who have strategies in agriculture to build the agricultural sector, those in healthcare to build the health care sector, those in education to build the education sector. She said technology is the common denominator and investing in technology would help Nigeria leapfrog from a developing nation to a developed economy in record time. Technology would involve using technology to solve problems and transform the other sectors.

She ended her speech by stating that engagement with the stakeholders in the Nigerian economy is critical to receive blueprints and solutions to rebuild our nation.

The main panel session was graced by Laoye Jaiyeola (CEO, Nigerian Economic Summit Group), Oswald Osaretin Guobadia (SSA to The President on Digital Transformation) and Tosin Faniro-Dada (CEO, Endeavor Nigeria) and Omi Oshikoya was the moderator. Intelligent and Strategic conversations sparked technology infrastructure, startup-bill and education. Oswald in one of his responses stated that “We are not suffering from lack of ideas. What we need is execution.”

“Nigeria has always had a history of doing business in clusters, what we need are enabling laws to ensure scalability.” Tosin shared the need for the startup bill to create incentives for access to the market to further empower entrepreneurs to scale with their products and solutions.

Laoye at the panel stressed the need for us to innovate across several value chains particularly in Agriculture in a bid to increase our food sufficiency. Comments were steered around how youths should engage the government stakeholders in a way that will prove effective and productive.

The panel session ended on a very high note with Omi stating that we all have a collective role to play in rebuilding the economy.

There was a special music art therapy session on “visioning” which was directed by Ini-Abasi Leye where she took the participants through a visualization process where everyone wrote down the visions they saw around their roles in rebuilding Nigeria.

Esther Longe in her keynote speech challenged the conference participants to begin to channel their talents, gifts and skills into the ongoing rebuilding work. She climaxed her speech by stating we must contribute to re-writing the story of Nigeria as we all collectively change the narrative.

Omi Oshikoya brought the conference to a close-by releasing declarations over Nigeria. While giving the vote of thanks, she urged all participants to begin doing it afraid in their various respective spaces as we all work towards rebuilding the economy of our dearest nation.

The 7th Edition of the Do It Afraid Conference was supported by BellaNaija, Transcorp Hilton, Wells Carlton, Lumi Ixclusive, SW Motion Works, Mr. Russel & Co, etc. The costs of the event were financed through crowdfunding from the founder’s network and people who have been impacted by the conference over the years. We raised over N2 million in about a week.

You can watch the entire event by clicking below.

See photos from the conference below:

Do It Afraid is a trademark owned by Omi Oshikoya.

To know more about the Do It Afraid Initiative, follow @doitafraidconference on Instagram.