Meet Monisola
Monisola Aiyekusehin is the Founder and Executive Director of Betharbel Foundation, an education in emergencies advocate, public health consultant, and creator of the Karatu Learning Hub, a solar powered offline education initiative. Her work brings together education, child protection, digital inclusion, humanitarian action, and the empowerment of women and girls.
A Life Shaped by the Possibility of Rebuilding
Monisola Aiyekusehin’s work is rooted in a question that has become deeply personal to her: what becomes possible when people are given the support, knowledge, and opportunity to rebuild? Across her professional and personal life, she has seen how circumstances can narrow a person’s choices, particularly for children, displaced families, and women who have experienced difficult circumstances.
Today, her work spans education, humanitarian support, digital learning, and women’s empowerment. Yet behind those areas is a consistent belief that people should not be permanently defined by what they have endured. She has built her career around creating pathways for people who have been excluded from opportunity and helping them move toward greater confidence, participation, and independence.
Her journey did not begin with a single career plan. Her academic background in Education and International Relations gave her an early interest in learning, leadership, and the wider social conditions that influence whether people can fulfil their potential. Professional and consulting experiences later strengthened her understanding of programme coordination, stakeholder engagement, leadership, and community focused initiatives.
Over time, however, her understanding of opportunity became more personal. Her professional direction was shaped not only by what she studied or the roles she held, but by experiences that forced her to understand vulnerability from the inside.
What Survival Taught Her About Opportunity
One of the most difficult chapters of Monisola’s life involved surviving domestic violence and rebuilding her life while caring for her five children on her own. It was a period that placed emotional, financial, and personal demands on her while requiring her to keep moving forward for the sake of her family.
Leaving that situation was not the end of the challenge. It was the beginning of another kind of work: creating stability, rebuilding confidence, caring for her children, and finding a sense of direction after a deeply difficult experience.
That period changed the way she looked at vulnerability. Problems that can appear distant when described through statistics became much more human to her. Poverty, violence, displacement, interrupted education, and limited opportunity were no longer simply social issues. They were circumstances affecting real people who were trying to find a way forward.
Rather than allowing her experience to become the definition of her identity, Monisola gradually turned it into a deeper understanding of what support can mean. She came to appreciate that rebuilding is often made possible through ordinary things that can have extraordinary consequences: education, dignity, safe spaces, encouragement, practical skills, and someone willing to create an opportunity.
She describes this transformation simply:
“My pain gave me perspective. My survival gave me resilience. But purpose gave me direction.”
That purpose eventually found a larger expression in Betharbel Foundation.
From One Response to a Wider Responsibility
In 2018, Monisola founded Betharbel Foundation in response to the educational needs of vulnerable children. What began as a focused effort gradually became a broader commitment to children affected by displacement and hardship.
Through Betharbel Free Inclusive Academy, the foundation has supported more than 550 children, providing education alongside nutrition, protection, psychosocial support, and digital learning opportunities. So far, 113 learners have transitioned into secondary education.
For Monisola, those transitions represent something more meaningful than a statistic. They show what can happen when a child receives enough continuity and support to move beyond an interrupted beginning.
Children affected by displacement can face a combination of barriers. Losing a home may also mean losing access to school. Interrupted education can affect confidence and future prospects. Financial hardship can make returning to formal education even more difficult. For children in such circumstances, simply creating a classroom is not always enough.
Monisola’s approach has therefore developed around a more complete understanding of what children need. Education sits alongside nutrition, psychosocial support, protection, and digital inclusion because each of these areas can influence a child’s ability to learn and participate.
Her work reflects an understanding that educational recovery is not only about catching up academically. It is also about helping children regain a sense of stability and possibility.
Seeing learners progress from primary education into secondary school has reinforced that belief. It has shown her the value of consistency, particularly for children whose lives have already experienced disruption.
The work has also broadened her understanding of leadership. Running a nonprofit where needs remain high and resources can be limited requires more than vision. It demands resourcefulness, partnership building, careful decision making, and a willingness to remain accountable to the people being served.
There are moments when the needs of vulnerable children do not wait for funding cycles or convenient circumstances. Programmes still have to function. Teachers still need support. Children still need meals and learning materials. Families still need assistance.
For Monisola, these realities have taught her that leadership is often less about having every answer and more about finding a responsible way forward.
When Education Meets Technology and Inclusion
As her work with children developed, Monisola began to see a wider connection between education and digital access.
Traditional education can open doors, but in an increasingly connected world, digital knowledge is becoming another important part of participation. Children and young people who are excluded from technology may face another layer of disadvantage, even when they gain access to formal schooling.
This understanding contributed to her interest in digital learning and the development of the Karatu Learning Hub, a solar powered offline education initiative designed to expand access to learning in environments where reliable internet or electricity may not be available.
The idea reflects the practical nature of her leadership. Instead of assuming that every community has access to the same infrastructure, she looks at what is actually possible within the environment where learners live.
Digital inclusion is particularly important in her work with girls. She sees technology not simply as a tool for learning but as a pathway toward greater opportunity, confidence, economic participation, and independence.
Her interest in the intersection of education, technology, gender, and opportunity has therefore become an important part of her wider mission. For her, access to education should not end with enrolment. Young people also need skills that can help them navigate the world they are entering.
Creating Space for Women to Reclaim Their Voices
The expansion of Monisola’s work into women’s empowerment was a natural development from what she had already witnessed and experienced.
She came to recognise that communities cannot become truly resilient while women and girls remain excluded from opportunities, leadership, technology, and decision making.
This led to initiatives such as the Reclaim Her Global Summit, a platform focused on the rights, safety, confidence, leadership, and digital inclusion of women and girls.
The initiative reflects a shift in the way she thinks about empowerment. Women and girls should not only be protected from harm. They should also be equipped with knowledge, skills, confidence, and platforms that allow them to influence the environments around them.
For Monisola, creating space matters. A platform where women can speak, learn, connect, and participate can become a starting point for changes that extend well beyond an individual event.
Her personal experience informs this work without limiting it. She understands what it means to rebuild, but she does not want women to be defined by the difficult experiences they have survived. Instead, she wants them to have opportunities to determine what comes next.
That philosophy extends to girls learning digital skills. Giving a girl access to technology can mean giving her another way to learn, communicate, create, work, and imagine a future that may previously have felt inaccessible.
Leadership Without the Need for Heroics
Monisola’s approach to leadership is grounded in several principles: purpose, integrity, human dignity, resilience, inclusion, learning, and collaboration.
She does not view leadership as a finished state. Instead, she sees it as something that requires continued learning and a willingness to listen, question assumptions, and improve.
That perspective is especially important in humanitarian and community work, where no single person can understand every experience or solve every problem.
She values collaboration over individual heroism because sustainable change requires shared ownership. The strongest initiatives are not those that depend entirely on one person. They are those that create the conditions for others to participate and eventually lead.
Her understanding of leadership also comes from the people she serves. A displaced child is more than a statistic. A woman who has experienced violence is more than her experience. Circumstances may shape a person’s starting point, but they do not have to determine the destination.
This belief sits at the centre of her professional identity.
Measuring Success by What Becomes Possible
For Monisola, success is not primarily about recognition, visibility, accumulation, or titles. It is measured through the opportunities that exist because someone chose to create them.
A child entering a classroom after an interrupted education represents progress. A learner moving into secondary school represents continuity. A girl acquiring digital skills represents a new set of possibilities. A woman finding greater confidence and becoming more active in decisions affecting her life represents another form of change.
The numbers connected to Betharbel Foundation matter because they provide evidence of reach and progress. More than 550 children have been supported, while 113 learners have moved into secondary education. But Monisola sees the people behind those numbers.
She is also conscious that meaningful leadership should eventually become bigger than its founder. If programmes, systems, partnerships, and emerging leaders can continue creating value without depending entirely on her presence, then the work has achieved a deeper form of sustainability.
That is why her ambitions are not limited to expanding the size of an organisation. She wants to build models that can be replicated, adapted, and shared with other communities facing displacement and educational disruption.
Building What Can Outlive Her
The next stage of Monisola’s journey is focused on taking community level work toward models that can be sustained and replicated.
She wants Betharbel Foundation and Betharbel Free Inclusive Academy to reach more vulnerable and displaced children with quality education, nutrition, psychosocial support, protection, and digital learning. She is particularly interested in developing an approach to education in displacement that helps children recover foundational literacy and numeracy while also building confidence and future ready skills.
The expansion of technology and digital learning is another priority, especially for girls. Her vision is to ensure that children affected by displacement have access not only to basic learning but also to the digital capabilities increasingly required for participation in the wider economy.
She also hopes to grow Reclaim Her into a stronger regional platform focused on girls’ empowerment, leadership, digital safety, and economic opportunity. Her ambition is to move beyond programmes where women and girls are simply recipients of support and toward environments where they become leaders and creators of solutions.
Partnerships will be central to this next phase. Monisola sees opportunities for government, academia, philanthropy, humanitarian organisations, and the private sector to work together around community based solutions.
She also hopes to pursue doctoral research in educational leadership and education in displacement. For her, academic work would not exist separately from practice. She wants research to inform real interventions and for lessons from communities to contribute to stronger evidence and better approaches.
In the longer term, she imagines Betharbel becoming a recognised centre for education in emergencies, foundational learning recovery, digital inclusion, and humanitarian innovation.
The ambition is substantial, but the underlying motivation remains remarkably simple. She wants to build something that can continue helping people even when she is no longer the person carrying it forward.
From Rebuilding Her Own Life to Helping Others Rebuild
Monisola Aiyekusehin’s story is not one of a difficult past neatly transformed into an uncomplicated success story. Her journey has involved uncertainty, responsibility, hard decisions, and the ongoing work of rebuilding.
What distinguishes her path is what she chose to do with those experiences.
She could have allowed survival to become the endpoint. Instead, she turned it into a deeper understanding of vulnerability. She could have treated her own experience as something separate from her professional life. Instead, it helped shape the way she thinks about dignity, opportunity, education, and leadership.
Today, her work reaches across children’s education, humanitarian response, digital inclusion, public health, and women’s empowerment. These areas may appear different at first, but they are connected by the same underlying purpose.
She wants people to have room to become more than their circumstances suggest.
Her work with children asks what might happen if displacement does not permanently interrupt a child’s education. Her work with girls asks what might happen when technology becomes a source of opportunity rather than another barrier. Her work with women asks what becomes possible when safety and empowerment are accompanied by voice, confidence, skills, and meaningful participation.
Perhaps the clearest measure of her journey is that she now creates for others some of the possibilities she once needed herself.
She has learned that rebuilding rarely happens all at once. Sometimes it begins with one decision, one classroom, one opportunity, one supportive person, or one reason to keep going.
Her leadership is built around making those beginnings possible.
As she looks ahead, her guiding philosophy remains clear:
“Empower Lives. Unlock Dreams. Rebuild Futures.”
For Monisola, these words are not simply an organisational message. They describe the direction her life has taken. She survived, rebuilt, learned, and chose to serve. Now she is working to ensure that children, girls, women, and communities facing difficult circumstances have the opportunity to do the same.
Her story ultimately points to a quiet but powerful idea: a person’s beginning does not have to dictate their future. With education, dignity, support, and the chance to lead, even a difficult beginning can become the starting point for something different.
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