Praise Fowowe is an international family life strategist, advisor, life coach and crisis manager. He is driven by a vision to build the most desirable families across the globe.
He is an unconventional thinker, futurist and Premier creator and trainer of Family Systems Engineering, a body of knowledge that assists families build systems that support their happiness and assists family life coaches across the globe improve their diagnostic tools and intervention management.
Praise Fowowe has pioneered an entire sector and trained some of the finest family life coaches across the continent of Africa.
With an 18 years track record of transforming some of the most difficult families, Praise Fowowe works with HNIs across various cultures on 5 continents and consults for various governments on the family systems engineering approach to building a sustainable society. He is a member of the Family Life Coaching Association USA and International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors (IAMFC).
He is the Principal consultant of Center for Sex education and family life, and has authored several books. Praise is happily married to Oluwatosin and they are blessed with 2 lovely children.
The most sought after facilitator and multiple award winner who recently relocated to the US shares his inspiring story with Esther Ijewere in this interview.
Tell us about your childhood and how it impacted your life
My childhood prepared me for all I do because I was born as the 6th born of an Anglican Priest, so I was very much in the midst of counseling and creating solutions because as an Anglican priest my dad had to counsel a lot of people and ensure there is no excuse for not solving critical church problems.
I used to try to get involved in adult discussions which would earn me a knock to my head for not being respectful so I used to have a lot of unspoken questions in my mind about African men and how the family ran. But significant in my history was my sexual abuse from age 4-8 which totally changed my trajectory and made me into a quiet child and later someone you could call a sex addict because I just went overboard.
I could not really understand my body or relationships because my father was constantly on the move no thanks to transfers so consistently I was exposed to all forms of cultures which is why I can easily identify with every group. I would say my pains and lessons prepared me for everything I do today.
Inspiration behind center for sex education and family life
I finished my mandatory youth service in 2001 and returned to Ajegunle Apapa where my dad was working and one night while taking a walk around Baale street I noticed several teenagers at a particular hotel prostituting, so I decide to make a change by going back disguised as a customer to ‘Toast’ them out of prostitution. I became so successful at that in a way that I became a threat to the owners of brothels who literally placed a price tag on my head. But I noticed a trend that the moment I took girls back home to their parents the more others went to replace them, so we changed our approach from response to prevention. That was how we started gold in the slum where we educated several young people about their lives and provided a sense of direction. Many of those teens are now top rated with some already bagging their PHD.
I worked with young people for 8 years of my life in Ajegunle and in 2013 I decided to create a not for profit that would prevent everything responsible for child sexual abuse because there was no content in Nigeria way back as it concerns age-appropriate sexuality education. I wanted a values-based education so that was why we incorporated the center for sexuality education and family which now has a consultative status in the NGO category with the United Nations.
Somehow we successfully gave Nigeria the first ever comprehensive sexuality education which several schools and religious organizations adopted and also created a parenting education to assist parents understand their children because for every commercial sex workers we helped we noticed child sexual abuse and lack of effective parenting. I must say we have done a great job because the results speak for themselves.
You are credited as being the man that organized the family life sector in Nigeria. How did you do that and why did you do it?
While leading the center for sex education and family life I kept seeing a lot of gaps because I used to maintain a weekly article in the dailies in Nigeria and my mails were always full of people asking with their relationships. I tried to help so many while I kept looking for help for others and was shocked that the help available were basically religious leaders. My study showed that other nations had family science as courses in the University but there was no single University that had such.
I decided to solve the problem by going to research why marriages failed and succeeded. I interviewed 25 couples that had done 40years and above in their marriages to discover the framework they used only to notice that they did not document what made their marriages work so I asked for permission to observe and take notes which took me years to do after which we built a framework.
I tested the framework and saw it was quite successful but to make it acceptable I wanted to create a psychometry that spoke to the reality of Africans because many of such that existed were foreign so we created a 4 way marital assessment that we branded ‘OYELA’ which means illumination. It is 94% accurate in picking out everything that is wrong with a couple or likely problems that singles would have in their marriage ahead of time.
Once I was done, I was not sure Nigerians would pay for it so I took off to speak to my mentor hoping to get foreign affiliation, but he advised me to go back and push it with my life because he believed it would go global which was what I did. I noticed there was no regulated family life sector, so I called some of the arrow heads who were passionate about counseling but had no certifications and locked them up for 7days to teach them the model I created called Family Systems Engineering Certification Programming and it was a major hit.
You recently opened the Praise Fowowe research LLC office in Texas, what’s the reception like so far?
The reception has been good after a slow start. I wanted to export our model abroad and create a family life innovation hub because I believed the evil about Nigeria is grossly exaggerated. It was the most challenging step I took because it was like starting all over again and my first event had 9 paid clients which was tough, but people told me they were shocked people actually paid. But we have grown gradually and are now getting into the consciousness of the people that needed us.
We have innovated new solutions that have been tested and now approved and that gives me a job because there is a lot more in us as Africans beyond the negative publicity we have gotten over the years.
What is the inspiration behind the Africa family life delegate conference?
7 years ago we discovered there was a United Nations designated date for the family but it was almost as if nothing happened across Africa so we decided to start a pan African conference to sensitize people about the family as well as promote professionalism in that sector so we held the first ever Industry night for family life practitioners and later the African family life delegate conference which we hope to take around various African countries in the future.
 What are some factors that break marriages?
A: In my family systems Engineering Programming for family life coaches, we defined marriage as the coming together of a man and a woman from two different nations(families) to create a new nation(family) that will promote the best interest of all and whose culture will improve the society.
From that definition I can easily tell you that the most important factors that break marriages include;
–     Culture incompatibility – When two people whose beliefs contradict each other get married they are likely to struggle to keep a marriage because the culture of the families that produced them will clash.
    Undetected trauma – Too many people have trauma that they are yet to heal from and win their unhappy state get married hoping someone else will make them happy. It takes wholesome people to build a wholesome marriage.
–     Knowledge gap – 8 out of every 10 couples I have worked with can’t successfully answer the question, why did you marry your spouse? 9 out of every 10 on the other don’t have a uniform marital vision. With these gaps which unfortunately has not been taught intentionally you see a lot of friction showing up which eventually makes them cite irreconcilable differences.
–     Ineffective systems – The new rules of marriage are full of systems intelligence because of the new realities in our world and not proactively recognizing the imbalance which may lead to beliefs imbalance because couples not growing together can upset their marriage. That is why couples must now script their love life and be intentional about them which is the new rules of building a successful marriage.
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Esther Ijewere
