Entrepreneurship Day

The whole point was that they ran it.

Anyone can put a table outside and sell something somebody else made and priced. That is not enterprise; that is errand-running. So on Wednesday, the work started long before the first parent arrived at the gate.

It started with the fish. Live catfish, held in basins in the yard, sold by weight on a proper scale under an umbrella — the kind of stall you would find in any Abuja market, except that the people running it were children. Weighing is a lesson all of its own: the price is not a number you invent because you like the customer. It is a number the scale gives you, and it is the same number for everybody.

Then the soap. Mixed by hand in basins, stirred until it went from water and powder into something thick and coloured and real. Then bottled. Then labelled — a proper label, printed and stuck on straight: BHS Home Maker’s Club Liquid Soap, ₦500. Elsewhere, scrunchies were being sewn by hand, stitch by stitch. Beads were threaded onto string and counted into bracelets and necklaces. Body sprays were decanted. Snacks were bagged, and zobo was bottled and chilled and priced.

Then the stalls went up, with signs written out in marker pen by the children who would stand behind them: LIQUID SOAP. SNACKS. BEADS. No printing shop, no parent doing it for them the night before. Their handwriting, their spelling, their tables.

And then the parents came, and did the thing that turns a school exercise into a lesson a child never forgets: they bought. From their own children. With their own money. Notes changed hands. Change was counted back — sometimes correctly the first time, sometimes not, which is its own arithmetic lesson and a far better one than a worksheet. Stock ran down. Some things sold out early. Some things did not sell at all, and the children behind those tables learned something about pricing that no one had to explain to them.

That is the arc, and it is the whole curriculum of the day: make it, package it, price it, sell it. Four steps, and a child who has walked all four of them once understands something about work and value that most adults are still hazy on. They did not learn that a business is an idea. They learned that a business is a basin, a bottle, a label, a price, and a person willing to pay it.

This is not a one-day novelty at Baybos. It is the same instinct that runs through BET — Baybos Emerging Tech, our own flagship subject, where children build and ship real things rather than read about people who do. Entrepreneurship Day is simply that ethos, carried out into the yard, in soap and beads and thread, where everyone can see it.