What We Do
We organize LightOut concerts across secondary schools and colleges in the country. We have so far held nineteen (19) editions of these concert experiences in schools, reaching over 28,000 students. Some of the schools are Kings College, Queens College, Greensprings School, Dansol High School, Lafiaji High School, Oxbridge Tutorial College as well as various youth groups and teenage camps.
The concert excitement helps to forge a connection with the students; this connection is what then eases the advocacy of values that we really seek to communicate to them – integrity, stewardship, abstinence and delayed gratification.
We educate the students on the dangers of drug use and the importance of abstinence in preventing abuse, transmission of STDs, teenage pregnancies and maternal mortality. We also provide the girls with sanitary pads.
Through our partnerships with financial institutions, we actively engage students in financial literacy games that promote valuable money habits, such as the importance of saving.. Additionally, we have professionals from partner brands address and creatively educate the students on these and more topics.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
LightOut focuses on three (3) of the 17 SDG's through the work it does - SDGs 3, 4 and 12.
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Our work is directly related to the achievement of this SDG in the areas of drug use, teenage pregnancy, reproductive health, sexually transmitted diseases, maternal & child mortality in Nigeria.
By promoting abstinence among young people, we reduce the risk of teenage pregnancy, thereby reducing the high maternal mortality rate, due to their emotional and mental unpreparedness. Abstinence also reduces the chances of developing multiple sexual partners, which often leads to the spread of STDs like AIDS. We also provide secondary school girls with sanitary pads, thereby alleviating period poverty and reducing the risk of infection that young girls are often exposed to.
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
We contribute to the achievement of SDG 4 by creatively teaching financial literacy to students who would otherwise not gain access to this knowledge due to Nigeria’s outdated curriculum. We partner with financial houses, like VISA, to expose them to savings, investment and other productive financial concepts. We engage the students in fun games and activities that teach them the fundamentals of how to properly manage finance. We also have highly successful professionals speak to the students on the subject of money.
Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
We are working towards reducing plastic waste on our streets, in our drainages and water bodies.
As part of the work we do with teenagers, we teach them not to litter, to properly dispose of their waste and very importantly, to practice recycling. We often engage them in exciting recycling competitions. Through our partnership with recycling organizations, we provide students with branded bags and the competition is to find the first students to fill their bags with plastic waste littered in their environment. These plastic wastes are then sent in to recycling organizations to be properly recycled.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 with the resultant restrictions to physical gatherings which spilled into 2021, we could not visit schools for LightOut editions. To navigate this challenge and still reach students in various schools, we authored an animated book – ANOMALY – a book of short stories that creatively illustrates the essence of the core values of LightOut.
ANOMALY; The life of Divergents is about four unconnected fictional characters – Hauwa, Jude, Bisola and Bryan, and their short but striking experiences that most teenagers and pre-teens can relate with.
Hauwa learns that no season lasts forever as she navigates adolescence.
Jude is a young boy on holiday with his uncle’s family in Port-Harcourt. On a road trip with the family, he disposes of a carbonated drink can through the car window and this leads to a lesson on blocked drainages, floods and other environmental hazards.
Bisola is facing a dilemma – go hang out with her girlfriends for a fun night out or stay back home to complete a report she has to present at work the following day.
Bryan is 17 but he has unique responsibilities for a boy his age. He got his girlfriend pregnant, and now has to work and earn to support her and the child.