Learn foreign languages to increase opportunities, Entrepreneur tasks youths

An entrepreneur, Love Emeter, has urged Nigeria youths to deepen their knowledge in other countries' languages and cultures to benefit more from opportunities.

Emeter, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of HARU Africa, an online store, gave the advice in Lagos at the launch of her first physical store.

HARU Africa was founded in 2019 and has attracted more than 5,000 customers across Africa, with Nigeria and South Africa having the largest customer base.

According to the chief executive officer, the store deals mainly on South Korean products such as K-Pop merch (Korean cultural music), Korean snacks, beauty products and books.

She said that learning of arts, cultures and languages of other countries had not been taken serious by many youths, leading to loss of socio-economic opportunities.

"When we take time to study other countries' languages, we stand to benefit a lot, considering the fact that the world is already a global village.

"On the contrary, we stand to lose opportunities that may come up, all because of language barrier.

"Therefore, part of the reason for establishing a physical store is to further close cultural and language gaps that may be existing between South Korea, specifically, and Nigeria through sales of products, especially language books and music.

"We encourage those interested in learning Korean language, music and arts to come to our physical store, as we have a lot of educational books and other instructional materials that will facilitate the learning," she said.

Emeter added that she established the physical store following huge success she recorded with the online store.

She said that the store was also aimed to bridge retail business gap between South Korea and Africa, while promoting South Korean pop culture.

"We intend to achieve this by providing goods for our customers, largely the Korean people and fans of Korea in Nigeria and Africa at large.

"We have a large market online mainly in Nigeria, Egypt and Ghana; we want to expand it by establishing this physical one and put Africa on that map.

"This will help to create a lot more awareness, especially to the Korean government, on the level of its fan base here," she said.

She noted that HARU began with an online store, where customers from any African country could browse and purchase items which were delivered swiftly.

"HARU, dubbed the amazon of K-Pop goods in Africa, has made it easier to shop these products from the comfort of your home.

"Clients previously found it difficult to purchase these items due to issues ranging from not being able to deliver to Nigeria," she said.