Tiwa Savage announced that her foundation has awarded 18 emerging Nigerian singers, songwriters, producers and music professionals a three-year, fully funded scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, United States.
The award follows a successful training programme and, Savage said in a recent interview with TVC, reflects lessons she learned when she returned to Nigeria and signed with Mavin Records in 2012. "It was difficult for me to transition from R&B to street sounds. But when I was at Mavin Records, Don Jazzy opened my mind to so many different things. He made me believe that talent was not limited, that I could do anything if I really focused on it," she told the station.
Numbers underline the scale: 18 recipients will each receive three years of study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, United States. Savage has framed the scholarships as the logical next step after the training programme that prepared the cohort for international study, and she used the announcement to reflect on the influence of her former label boss.
Savage, who began her career abroad as a backup singer for artists such as George Michael and Mary J., returned to Nigeria in 2012 and signed with Mavin Records, the label founded by Don Jazzy. She remained with Mavin through 2019. The years there, she said during an appearance on Arise TV, pushed her beyond the R&B niche she had occupied overseas: "He took me out of that R&B bubble and introduced me to other sounds" and "He pushed me to try different things, singing in Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin. He even pushed me to do 'Eminado,' which I didn’t like at first."
The contrast between Savage's early resistance and later success frames the awkward lesson at the heart of her announcement. She recounted that she initially thought, "This isn’t me." Yet the record she resisted, she told audiences, "became one of my biggest Pan-African records. I learned to trust the process." That tension — between the artist’s instincts and the mentor’s push — is the through line linking her time at Mavin to the new scholarship programme.
Context matters here: Savage’s shift from a background as a backing vocalist in international R&B to a leading role in Nigeria’s mainstream scene required linguistic and stylistic risk. Don Jazzy’s role as the founder of Mavin Records and as a creative guide during Savage’s 2012–2019 stint at the label is the single thread she returns to when explaining why the scholarships are more than charity — they are an investment in the kind of genre-bending, multilingual musicality she was encouraged to adopt.
Those 18 students will head to Berklee College of Music in Boston under three-year, fully funded awards. The immediate consequence is concrete: a small group of Nigerian music professionals will spend formative years in one of the world’s leading contemporary music schools. The longer-term consequence, Savage argued through example, is cultural: training artists who can move between R&B, street sounds and the many languages and rhythms that define contemporary Pan-African pop.
This initiative answers a question many asked when she left Mavin: why the change in direction mattered. By turning the lesson she credits to Don Jazzy into a formal scholarship — and by sending 18 Nigerians to study at Berklee — Tiwa Savage has institutionalized the very idea she says transformed her career: that talent is not limited and that pushing artists beyond their comfort zones can create records with Pan-African reach.
