The skill was the starting point: seven youths share on what learning actually changes | World Youth Skills Day 2026
Locke’s goal-setting theory is the idea that people perform better when they are given specific goals rather than vague instructions to “do their best.” It is usually applied in offices. Yet Shulammite Akinloye, an instructional design fellow at CcHUB, wanted to know if Locke’s theory could improve learning outcomes for children. Caption: Photo of Shulammite Akinloye She built a game that gives children clues and asks them to identify the correct object, with each task becoming progressively more challenging. The first version is live , and your kids can try it out right now. Before the fellowship, Shulammite understood the theories but had never had to translate them into something a child could use. “Putting knowledge into use isn’t always straightforward,” she says. The exercise showed her how much work goes into designing a good learning experience. Shulammite is one of seven young people we spoke to for World Youth Skills Day across two CcHUB programs: the Instructional Design Fellowship and GATEWAY. Caption: Photo of Franklin Alegu Franklin Alegu joined GATEWAY’s digital marketing track as a brand and digital designer. Based in Benin City, he already knew how to help companies become more visible. What he wanted was to understand if that visibility was translating into revenue. “For a long time, I viewed marketing mainly as creating awareness and engagement,” he says. The program track taught him to measure marketing performance more efficiently. Instead of stopping at impressions, clicks, and likes, he began asking harder questions: How much did it cost to acquire a customer? How much was that customer worth to the business? Did the campaign generate more money than it cost? It has changed the kind of work Franklin wants to do, and he is now building a practice that combines branding and design with the numbers that show how he’s helping businesses grow. Franklin came to marketing from the creative side and learned to follow the numbers. In Ibadan, Ahoma Chijiamara Kindness was making the journey from the opposite direction. Caption: Photo of Ahoma Chijiamara Kindness An accountant by training, Ahoma already understood bookkeeping and financial reporting. But she had reached a point where her role felt narrower than what she believed she could offer. Through GATEWAY, she learned how businesses build customer personas and use them to create more effective marketing campaigns. For Ahoma, the appeal was combining her analytical background with a better understanding of what customers want and how businesses speak to them. She now wants to work at the intersection of finance and marketing, helping businesses use customer data and financial information to make better decisions. Caption: Photo of Martina Emmanuel Martina Emmanuel was already teaching herself UI/UX design through online courses when she joined GATEWAY. The program helped her see two gaps in how she approached work: she was underselling what she could offer and assumed she had to handle every part of a project alone. During the business management modules, she realized she could draw on the designers, developers, and other skilled people in her network to form temporary teams for larger projects. “I have enough people in my network that are skilled,” she says. “We can come together to create a flash team for projects.” She now plans to assemble teams around the needs of each project while continuing to operate independently. Caption: Photo of Rukevwe Akhidue Rukevwe Akhidue joined the Instructional Design Fellowship after years as a classroom teacher in a Nigerian-British school. She already knew she would eventually leave the classroom. “When this opportunity presented itself, I was already standing at the door,” she says. One of the most useful skills she learned was needs analysis, which involves investigating why people are struggling before designing a course for them. A lack of knowledge may be the problem, but people may also be held back by poor tools, unclear processes or weak incentives. In those cases, another training session will not fix anything. Rukevwe now begins by identifying the actual problem, the people affected and whether training is the right response. The fellowship also introduced her to the science of how adults learn. “Learning doesn’t just happen,” she says. “There is a theory behind how humans learn.” That understanding now shapes the questions she asks before designing any learning experience: Who is this for? What do they already know? What is stopping them from doing what they need to do? Caption: Photo of Mary Anya Mary Anya wrote scripts that taught educators cross-functional skills before joining the fellowship. The shift came during her capstone project, a learning experience designed for professionals. That was when she saw the gap: most Nigerian schools use one general form of teaching for every student and hope it clicks. She now builds learning experiences tailored to how people actually learn, whatever their learning challenges. Caption: Photo of Ibok Anastasia Ibok Anastasia, also a former teacher, found her focus while working on her project: why so many learning solutions fail. “Too often, people design courses that try to teach everything at once or create solutions for only the easiest learners to reach,” she says. Accessibility and inclusion get treated as afterthoughts. Ibok wants to flip that order. She supports EdTech startups to build solutions where accessibility is considered from the start, not added later. Before they left, we asked each of the seven to complete one sentence: Young people across Africa deserve access. Opportunity. Infrastructure. Learning experiences that transform them, not just inform them. Then we asked what they’d tell a young person who thinks opportunities like this aren’t for people like them. Every single one said a version of the same thing: don’t count yourself out before you even begin. This World Youth Skills Day, take their word for it. The GATEWAY program is still open. Join the train . The post The skill was the starting point: seven youths share on what learning actually changes | World Youth Skills Day 2026 appeared first on Co-creation HUB Africa (CcHUB) .