My name is Ese Akpiroroh. I am an analyst with Sydani group, and a part of the Preventing Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Assault in Nigeria (PISAN) project team.

The Sydani Fellowship Program didn’t begin two years ago as many have come to think. I dare say that the program is almost as old as the firm itself. Why this bold assertion you may want to ask. Well, let’s not get into details just yet.

Even against a backdrop of great uncertainty, our work at Sydani Group continues to position us as active allies of the national effort to push back the advance of the COVID-19 virus, drive vaccine uptake, and reach herd immunity as fast as possible.

What started as an outbreak in distant Wuhan, China, is now what the average Nigerian is very familiar with – the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) disease. It would be strange to meet anyone who has never heard about COVID-19. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease as a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, and since then, country leaders have striven to prevent the entry of the virus into their countries and/or its spread within their borders.

It was 1981 in Los Angeles, USA and five young previously healthy gay men had come down with a rare lung infection called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). At the same time in New York and California there were reports of a similar group of men succumbing to an unusually aggressive cancer named Kaposi’s Sarcoma.