Some Nigerian road youngsters’s lives have been reworked after video displaying them dancing went viral and caught the eye of singer Rihanna and supermodel Naomi Campbell.
“The Dream Catchers dance group is a collective of underprivileged children from Ikorodu ñ a suburb in Lagos, Nigeria and have caught the attention of superstars like Rihanna and Naomi Campbell” Seyi Oluyole, the dance crew organiser
The “Dream Catchers” had been seen in a video earlier this yr dancing like double-jointed puppets in entrance of a battered pink bus on waste floor.
“Not way back, the six boys and 6 women aged six to 16 had no thought about choreography, now they’re dancing within the video of Nigerian singer Amada’s hommage to the nation’s Super Eagles, who're enjoying within the World Cup soccer finals in Russia”.
“What we’ve done this year is huge. We have gone very, very far,” mentioned Seyi Oluyole, 26, the group’s dance instructor and tutor.
In early March, she posted the most recent video of her smiling prodigies on the Dream Catchers’ Instagram web page, wiggling alongside to an Afrobeat tune from popstar Wizkid.
The web was shocked when Rihanna, then US producer P. Diddy, shared the clip on their very own accounts and it was seen greater than 2.8 million instances.
Several weeks later, Naomi Campbell, in Lagos for the annual trend week in April, visited the younger dancers in Ikorodu, a poor suburb on the outskirts of the megacity.
In a public relations triumph, the kids jumped into her arms earlier than a horde of cameras.
The governor of Lagos, Akinwunmi Ambode, invited a few of them on stage for world youngsters’s day on May 27.
Oluyole based the dance troupe 4 years in the past to assist road youngsters in Lagos dream of a higher future and to seek out their approach again into college.
At the time, she was main a group of dancers from her church and each Sunday seen there have been massive numbers of poor youngsters from the realm eager to take their thoughts off starvation and tedium.
“They used to come to church in numbers, they always wanted to come and dance,” she mentioned.
“After a while, I realised that most of them were not in school. They didn’t even speak good English.”
As acknowledged by the UN youngsters’s company Unicef, presently, Nigeria has 10.5 million out-of-school youngsters which makes it the nation with the best out-of-school youngsters on this planet.