While bagging a degree, and getting a job is one of the ways to making money, another way, which is often neglected, is getting a vocational skill, and meeting people’s everyday needs in exchange for money.

Our this week Lynda Omerekpe-Ori is helping people acquire these vocational skills and consequently, monetise them. She’s the founder of Cash Your Passion, a virtual skills acquisition hub (e-learning platform specifically for vocational skills).

Cash Your Passion make skills acquisition and mentoring easily accessible to African youths from any location, helping them create jobs for themselves through skills acquisition, capacity development an mentoring, directly from their mobile phones, or any internet device.

Lynda started her career in banking and then had a stint in the professional services industry in London before going back to banking after she returned to Nigeria, working in customer services and corporate communications (digital and multimedia).

She founded Cash Your Passion while working in the bank after she launched a book with the same title. She then got into the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme in 2019, where she received a $5000 as one of the entrepreneurs whose business is solving a problem in Africa.

Lynda is also the Executive Director of Operations at The VolunteerNG, a social enterprise with the vision of bridging the gap in education by ensuring as many kids as possible have access to quality education both within and outside the four corners of a classroom.

Lynda currently works as a Senior Marketing and Communications Specialist in one of The Big Four.

She holds a bachelors degree in Microbiology from Igbinedion University, Okada and a masters degree in International Business & Management from University of Westminster.

In 2020, Lynda won the Top Pitch Performance among 10 finalists in the virtual summit for the Forbes and Global Startup Ecosystem’s first Resilience Digital Startup Accelerator in Nigeria – an intensive 4 weeks of digital training to help build and scale the companies for the future.

We celebrate Lynda for helping fight unemployment and poverty with Cash Your Passion and we’re rooting for her!