Tunde Onakoya: Using chess to provide education and mentorship to children in African slums
Tunde Onakoya discusses his non-profit organization, Chess in Slums Africa, which uses chess as a tool for social intervention in impoverished communities. He explains how the game provides cognitive benefits, builds confidence, and offers children a sense of agency beyond their immediate circumstances. Tunde also shares his personal journey of how chess helped him overcome poverty and emphasizes the responsibility of society to provide equitable opportunities for disadvantaged youth.
Tunde Onakoya was a guest. Charles Cormier hosted. This is not a client result. The quotes and answers below are from the episode.
What they said
“chasing slums Africa is a non-profit organization that uses the game of chess as a tool right to help children living in impoverished communities get access to education mentorship and Technology”
“chess is the means to those ends not the end in itself because we're not training them to become Masters I mean some of them going to be exceptionally talented but the goal really is to give them a beginning education”
“the idea really was teaching them chess as a way to give them that sense of agency that identity right that they can also be thinkers that they can be intellectually inclined”
“it is important that you know at the intersection of our own privilege and in another person's oppression right another person's disadvantage that is where we find real opportunities to pay it forward”
From the episode
What is the primary goal of Chess in Slums Africa?
The organization aims to use chess as a tool to provide children in impoverished communities with access to education, mentorship, and technology. It focuses on helping children reach their full potential rather than just training them to be chess masters.
How does Tunde suggest players actually improve at chess?
Tunde believes that significant improvement comes from studying and understanding chess theory and basic principles rather than just playing obsessively or repetitively.
What are some of the cognitive benefits of playing chess mentioned by Tunde?
Chess helps improve memory, concentration, focus, and strategic thinking. It also teaches the value of delayed gratification and the power of focused thoughts.
Why does Tunde believe it is difficult for children in slums to believe in their dreams?
Children in these environments are products of their immediate surroundings, and their dreams are often confined to the limited reality they see every day. Without exposure to a bigger world, they can only aspire to what is visible within their community.
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