AltBank, Foundation Partner To Empower Nigerian Teachers With Critical Skills

The Alternative Bank (AltBank) has partnered with the Busayo Ademuyiwa Foundation (BAF) to strengthen the capacity of frontline educators in Nigeria.

The two firms hosted the 2025 BAF Teachers’ Conference in Lagos to provide hands-on training to hundreds of primary and secondary school teachers from underserved communities, addressing critical issues such as teacher burnout, mental resilience, and digital skill development.

Nigeria’s education sector sits at a critical inflection point. With over 65 per cent of classrooms in underserved regions lacking access to trained educators or modern teaching tools, the learning crisis represents a structural failure with long-term economic consequences if not adequately addressed.

Rather than focus on policy rhetoric or aspirational targets, the conference tackled hard realities including teacher burnout, mental resilience, classroom innovation on a budget, and digital skill development.

The executive director (South) at The Alternative Bank, Korede Demola-Adeniyi said, “the people who hold up Nigeria’s education system don’t need applause, they need backup.”

“We see this platform as critical infrastructure. Equipping a teacher with the right tools and support is the most direct path to long-term national productivity.”

Key stakeholders in attendance included policymakers, school heads, and representatives from Nigeria’s corporate CSR sector, underscoring the convergence between social investment and educational equity.

Featured speakers included Comrade Audu Amba, president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT); Doyinsola Jawando-Adebomehin of Sequoia Span; Anthony Amawe, general manager of BIC Nigeria; and Dr. Hope Ifeyinwa Nwakwesi, founder of Almanah Hope Foundation.

The conference aligns with The Alternative Bank’s HEART Strategy, a long-term investment thesis focused on Health, Education, Agriculture, Renewable Energy, and Technology. Under this framework, the Bank continues to deploy capital and partnerships into scalable solutions targeting Nigeria’s most underserved sectors.

Beyond its involvement with BAF, AltBank recently co-launched the Women in Tech Scholarship in partnership with Utiva, a nationwide initiative providing digital and business skills to women entrepreneurs in rural and peri-urban communities. The program is already showing early traction in reducing the gender gap in tech participation, while equipping recipients with tools to scale income-generating ventures.

Demola-Adeniyi stated, “the challenge in Nigeria’s education sector is execution, not awareness.”

“This partnership is part of a broader operational strategy to find the pressure points, inject support where it changes outcomes, and back it with measurable value. Our role is catalytic, not just financial.”

The BAF Teachers’ Conference 2025 represents a proof-of-concept for what targeted ESG-aligned investment can achieve at the grassroots level – blending human capital development, community infrastructure, and financial innovation into one deployable model.