As we came back to London from our first joint trip to Nigeria, we had a lot of things to get going with to be able to come back to Nigeria soon and build a school.

First out was the critical UK charity registration with HMRC.

You would think this is an easy process, to encourage more charities, but it is rather the opposite. It is highly bureaucratic and slow and sometimes you wonder if they even want people to start new charities at all. As it turns out, there are already so many existing charities that, in general, they prefer that you join forces with an existing one and work on their cause instead.

We tried to get our charity registration through submission ourselves but realised that it was too legally complicated for us to solve in a short time – so we decided we need to find help.

We first spoke to a few organisations specialising in charity law. Although they seemed very knowledgeable, their pricing of thousands upon thousands of pounds in fees for their work was not something we were interested in. We had allocated a smaller budget to legal fees, but our ethos was always to make sure as much of our donated money goes straight to the cause and not to local administration, we needed another solution.

Enter, Dr. Robert Meaking. I stumbled upon him when I was researching charity law. He seemed to be one of the most reputable charity lawyers in UK – although semi-retired today after a long successful career. I reached out to him and asked if I could have a short meeting telling him about our project. He accepted and after hearing about us and our vision he agreed to help us get registered for a very small, nominal fee. A few weeks later, in September 2023, we were finally a registered UK charity: The Infinity Branch CIO. Largely thanks to Dr. Meaking.

Next up we established bank relationships and setup our first bank account. We opted for CAF Bank, given its sole focus on charity banking. The application process with them was relatively straight forward, and within a few weeks we were up and running and ready to start our charity business.

Further meetings followed where we assigned a local accountant and a local lawyer for our administrative needs.

As our UK operations started to emerge, we had now set target on establishing local Nigerian charity, where we could undertake the work locally.

This prove to be easier said than done.

The main benefit with having a relatively deregulated system is that things can be setup very quickly. The main draw back? That everyone has a different opinion what needs to be done and how.

We had calls with five different Nigerian lawyers specialising in charity law and every time we came out from a meeting, that lawyer had contradicted something the previous lawyer had told us. It was highly frustrating. But we finally found one lawyer that communicated better and, on aggregate, made the most sense in what she recommended us to do.

Eventually a charity was setup in Nigeria where one of our founders, Chuks, would be a minority director to oversee the work quality in Nigeria.

We were now ready to start putting some of our own money in as donations, but we had also had some generous colleagues that had fundraised for us whilst running a marathon – which gave us a very solid foundation for getting the project on the way.

It had now become high time for us to plan for our next trip to Nigeria.