INTERCULTURAL

LEADERS

Jonah Obajeun

Youth Solidarity Fund (YSF)

Jonah Ayodele Obajeun is the Curator of Tolerance Academy, the flagship project of Youth Tolerance for Peace Development Initiative. He holds a BSc in Chemical Engineering and an MBA, also trained in Multicultural Communications at the University of Aveiro, Portugal and in Business Development at the Pan African University, Lagos. Since past years after founding Tolerance Academy which is a mobile boot-camp Academy, Jonah has nurtured well rounded young people, grooming them through a dynamic curriculum that touches on: intercultural dialogue, social integration, religious tolerance, forgiveness, democratic value development, human rights education etc. Jonah has served as a screening committee member for United Nations Alliance of Civilisations (UNAoC) and he was also a recipient of Youth Solidarity Fund by UNAoC. He joined Hedayah – an international centre for countering violent extremism based in UAE, to develop a compendium of best practices in the use of education as a tool for CVE. He was one of the experts that presented research outcome in CVE at the Hedayah conference in Abu Dhabi New York University Institute. Jonah is a venture capitalist and he also sits on the board of some civil societies as an advisor. An Associate Fellow of Nigeria Leadership Initiative and Finalist Fellow of Echoing Green, Jonah was recently appointed as a Kofi Annan Scholar for an Extremely Together project which enjoys support from European Commission and One Young World. Known for his engaging views on governance in his home country, Nigeria, he has written extensively on subjects spanning: politics, education, democracy, and human rights. He blogs at www.obajeun.com and he is currently working on his first book of fiction.