This is a special episode and credit to France24 channel with The Medley Show in Nigeria who brings you this incredible story how young kids in the biggest floating slum in the world near Lagos, Nigeria are being transformed by chess. Enter the world of poverty where Tunde Onakoya a chess master and hero to many chess children explains how he fights the poverty with chess - a low cost catalyst which can change the course of lives of many. With New York based foundation The Gift of Chess and their children ambassador Ivie Urieto (9), a chess prodigy from Nigeria, we learn how children around the world and especially in Africa can get a next hope - with chess.
A huge slum Makoko
A huge slum propped up by stilts located in the south of Lagos, the economic capital of Nigeria. Makoko is the biggest floating slum in the world. Around a quarter of a million people live here in extreme poverty, but today the local children have something to look forward to. Tunde Onakoya has come for a visit them. He grew up in a slum and he's come to teach them to play chess.
Checkout the chess story from the world so distant to you and learn there is hope for these children. Day by day, chess set by chess set provided by Gift of Chess and Chess in Slums. Incredible story How The Gift of Chess foundation is changing lives of children and how Ivie Urieto, (9) chess prodigy from Nigeria is educating young children to play chess.
Little chess champions
Every weekend they work on improving their performance. Thanks to a former chess champion Tunde Onakoya. If to teach little children from the slums how to play chess, the world's perception about them would change. Instead of looking at them as just poor kids, they would look at them as kids that could actually show high intellectual capacity for something.
It is not to make all of them chess champions, but rather to use the game as a way to give them mentorship, to give them an education. Once they've learned the basics, the children play against each other, supervised by a volunteer. One 15 year old girl says the chess has changed her life, she never heard about chess before.
"It's given me more confidence. I'm standing in front of a lot of people. I'm playing with different kinds of people. It can make my dreams come true. Tinwola had been forced to give up on her schooling due to a lack of funds and has been helping her mother to sell soap and shampoo along the canals of the slum instead of going to class."
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