During the 2020 pandemic lockdown. My 6 year-old son sent me a WhatsApp message one evening.
“Daddy, do you know your purpose?”
I stared at the screen for a moment. Not because the question was hard. Because I could not understand where a 6-year-old found it.
When I stopped wondering about that, I started wondering about the answer.
I am building Caturity, a platform built to verify and make visible the organisations doing development work across Nigeria. I have spent years building things while working in communications, some with serious commercial potential, and each time, something pulled me back toward a different kind of work. Not charity. Not activism. A social enterprise. Something that earned its own survival and served a real gap.
I had known this since I was younger. Not what it would look like. Just that it was coming.
A mentorship session helped me name it. That conversation is the reason caturity.com exists.
But when that message arrived, I still could not answer immediately. Because the honest answer comes in versions. And I was not sure, sitting there with my phone, which one was most true.
The 3 versions most non profit founders carry
Ask any NGO director why they started and they give you the answer they have given many times before: the community needed it. Children were walking 14 kilometres to reach a functioning clinic. They saw it. They could not unsee it.
That is the passion version.
Ask them again, differently, and another answer comes. Something personal. A loss. A moment they could not undo. A gap that had their name on it before the organisation did.
That is the grief version.
Ask them one more time, at the end of a long meeting, and something quieter surfaces. A sense that was there before the cause had a name. Before the registration. Before the first program. Before they had the words for it.
That is the purpose version.
Three answers. One person. All of them true.
Where purpose actually starts
Most conversations about NGO motivation begin with the external problem. The community needed it. The sector had a gap. The government failed to show up.
But for Seyi Oluyole, who started Dream Catchers Academy after missing art school because her family could not afford the fees, the external cause came second. The motivation already existed. The organisation became its container. She did not start because she read a sector gap report. He started it because she knew exactly what it felt like to learn everything the hard way, alone. The cause found her. She decided to answer it.
Research on purpose-driven leadership distinguishes between two directions of purpose formation.
The first begins outside: a leader sees a societal need and builds an identity around responding to it.
The second begins inside: purpose emerges from who you already are, shaped by lived experience, before it encounters the external world.
The organisations built from the inside out behave differently under pressure, sustain commitment differently, and align personal and institutional identity in ways that externally-derived purpose rarely achieves.
The Nigerian NGO sector is full of it.
The uncomfortable thing nobody says
Here is what nobody says at NGO sector conferences:
Most founders cannot clearly separate the 3 versions.
And most funders have never thought to ask.
Corporate CSR teams spend weeks vetting an organisation’s CAC documents, site visit reports, financial statements. They review staff lists and beneficiary counts. They almost never ask the question a child asked his father on WhatsApp: Why did you start this?
Not the mission statement version. The real version.
This matters more than it seems.
An NGO founded from grief tends to work hardest in the specific gap that caused it. It is precise. It is stubborn. It is sometimes narrow, in ways that look like a limitation but are actually clarity.
An NGO founded from passion tends to be broader, more responsive to community demand, more likely to pivot when the landscape shifts. It is energetic. It is sometimes scattered.
An NGO founded from purpose, the kind that existed before the cause had a name, tends to outlast both. It survives funding droughts, leadership transitions, political turbulence. The founder is not attached to the method, only the direction.
None of these is better. But they are different. They attract different funders. They sustain different programs. They break down under different pressures.
What a mission statement cannot tell you
The Nigerian NGO sector grew by over 1,000% between 2004 and 2024. Most of that growth carried genuine motivation. Some of it carried the appearance of motivation.
A ₦30,000 CAC registration is not a purpose. A mission statement is not a covenant.
Jeff Kuraun made a personal promise to set aside part of his earnings every day for others. Justice Taiwo walked into the Ijora community after watching a woman sell groundnuts for ₦1,000 at a time to feed her children. These are not brand stories. They are origin events.
The sector has no systematic way to tell the difference between an organisation built on an origin event and one built on the funding cycle. That gap is not small. It is structural.
The due diligence question yet to be named
The grief version tells you what they will not abandon when the funding letter says no.
The passion version tells you how they respond when the need shifts.
The purpose version tells you whether they will still be there in year 3 of your partnership.
These are not philosophical questions. They are due diligence questions. They just have not been named as such.
I wrote my own 3 versions down after that WhatsApp message arrived. Grief is not the right word for mine. But there is a specific gap I watched for years across a career in communications: real organisations doing real work, invisible to the people with the budget to support them. That gap kept pulling me back regardless of what else I was building.
Purpose, I think, is what kept returning even when I was not looking for it.
The notebook is on my desk. Next to a map of 17 LGAs in Abia State, fewer than 2 verified health NGOs in most of them.
Six years between the question and the answer.
Caturity is a verified registry and intelligence platform for development coordination across Africa. Phase 1 is live in Nigeria. Organisations can register free at caturity.com.