The YouthMADE Festival is a global celebration of youth creativity and innovation that invites students, educators, and advocates to showcase youth-led work. Leading up to the 2026 YouthMADE Festival, we are sharing a series of stories highlighting youth creators and changemakers around the world who are putting their hands, hearts, and minds toward projects and causes they care about.
In this story, Chizoba Nzeakor shares how she designed a program to educate and advocate for clean energy adoption in Nigeria. Chizoba was the recipient of a YouthMADE Festival Amplify Grant in 2025.
The project, Clean Energy Advocacy and Education for African Children & Youth, aims to engage young people aged 3 to 35 with age-appropriate, practical, and inspiring clean energy learning experiences. The goal is to educate, advocate, and empower youth to adopt and champion renewable energy.
This is important because Africa’s youth are the continent’s largest age demographic—empowering them with climate literacy is essential for a just and sustainable energy future. We aim to increase awareness, inspire sustainable habits, and create young advocates who can influence households and communities.
Highlights from an International Education Day and World Energy Day celebration, courtesy of Chizoba Nzeakor.
We began by designing a curriculum tailored for three age bands (children, teens, and young adults) and piloting workshops in schools and youth centers. Our work now involves curriculum development, community workshops, and supporting youth-led clean energy clubs. Feedback from participants and teachers helped us add more interactive demonstrations like solar-powered model kits and wind turbine prototypes. We see that young children grasp the concept of renewable energy very quickly when taught through games and storytelling.
One of the challenges we faced in remote communities was resource limitations. We addressed this through supplying mobile workshop kits. Overall, this project has made me a more adaptive and inclusive leader, reinforcing my belief in the power of early climate education.
Last year we applied for the Amplify Grant to expand the reach and quality of our Clean Energy Advocacy and Education for African Children & Youth initiative. Our goal was to create interactive, age-appropriate learning materials, purchase demonstration kits for renewable energy workshops, and provide transportation support to reach rural and underserved communities. We saw the grant as a catalyst to turn our vision of accessible, hands-on clean energy education into a reality for more African youth.
Highlights from an International Education Day and World Energy Day celebration, courtesy of Chizoba Nzeakor.
The $500 grant enabled us to produce three sets of mobile workshop kits, each containing a small solar panel model, wind turbine demonstration set, and educational posters in both English and local languages. We delivered workshops in two schools and one community center, directly engaging over 180 children and youth. Teachers reported that students were inspired by the sessions and began initiating sustainability projects, such as energy-saving campaigns and waste-to-compost activities.
Highlights from an International Education Day and World Energy Day celebration, courtesy of Chizoba Nzeakor.
We plan to scale the program to five additional communities across Nigeria within the next year, integrate our clean energy curriculum into partner schools, and develop a free online learning hub to reach youth across Africa. We will also establish youth-led “Clean Energy Clubs” to sustain engagement beyond workshops, ensuring the knowledge and advocacy skills gained are applied in real-life community projects.
Highlights from an International Education Day and World Energy Day celebration, courtesy of Chizoba Nzeakor.
