Someone you know has left or is planning to leave. 1,000 Ways to Japa speaks to real people and explores the endless reasons and paths they take to japa.
Adedamola (30) left Nigeria for the UK in 2022, eight months pregnant, because she was determined not to give birth in Nigeria. Three years later, she’s a Canadian permanent resident through the express entry pool, thanks to an Instagram comment from a stranger. Here’s how she did it.
Where do you live now, and when did you leave Nigeria?
I currently live in Calgary, Canada. I left Nigeria in August 2022 for the United Kingdom (UK).
What pushed you to leave?
Honestly, I had always wanted to leave. I’ve wanted to go to Canada since I was young. But my dad didn’t believe it was right for his single children to travel; he wanted me to marry first, before I could make such a decision. So when I was younger, I’d applied to the United States (US) and Germany before, during my service year, and I still didnt get the visas
The major push for me came on my wedding day (in 2021), when a close friend told me she was leaving for the UK with her husband within days. I remember thinking, ” What am I doing here? Everybody is leaving me.” It also helped that I had gotten married now, so my dad couldn’t ask, “Where’s your husband?” There was nothing stopping me anymore.
Add this to my fear of the Nigerian medical system as well. I didn’t want to have children in Nigeria. So had already begun researching schools in the UK on my wedding night, while we counted money.
Interesting story. How did you eventually end up in the UK?
When I was researching, I started with scholarships, but I realised that route would take too long, and I wanted something faster. So I started applying directly to self-funded schools. It’s actually very easy: you email the school, tell them your qualifications, and they go back and forth with you on fees and deposit.
I’d applied to Teesside and one other school, but it didn’t work out. Eventually, I found the University of Hull; it was cheap, the deposit was just £2,000, which was about ₦1 million at the time.
Once the deposit cleared, the school upgraded my offer from conditional to unconditional and issued me a CAS (Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies). That’s what you use to apply for the student visa online. I was the main applicant since I was the student, and my husband came as my dependent.
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How much did the entire process cost?
The fees per person were: a visa fee of around £300–400, an Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) of £888.05, and a biometrics fee of about £69. The visa itself took about two weeks to come, which was fast.
So after paying the fees and getting the visa, what happened next?
I was admitted to the school, and I was expected to resume in September of 2022. By then, I was pregnant and due that same month. I was terrified of giving birth in Nigeria, and also worried that my admission would be revoked if I missed my registration window.
We got our passports back in August, and immediately after, we booked flights to leave in less than three days.
We paid ₦2.5 million for two tickets; meanwhile, people travelling around that time who could wait a few weeks paid as little as ₦500,000 for a family of three. My doctor was nervous about even certifying me to fly at 35 weeks. I couldn’t eat or drink much on the flight, and I was so anxious. We landed in the UK with very little money, about $150 in cash.
Oh wow. Did you experience any culture shocks while settling in?
Moving to the UK, where the driver’s side is on the left, was really shocking for me. The cold was also a big shocker; it was a lot to take in, especially since we came when winter was about to start.
The biggest surprise of all was how supportive the system was. When I was anxious about the baby not moving, someone told me to just walk into the emergency department and explain how I felt. They attended to me immediately, even though I hadn’t done my registration yet.
We first stayed with a friend in Birmingham before moving to Hull, where my school helped us find accommodation. Because I was pregnant, our landlord gave us two rooms in a shared house and let us pay three months’ rent upfront.
Balancing it all was genuinely one of the darkest periods of my life. My husband worked day and night to cover us once the prepaid rent ran out. I had to bring my daughter to class most days, and my lecturers would literally carry her while teaching. It was rough, but it got better with time.
That seems like a lot. What did work and the cost of living actually look like in the UK?
I first worked in a care home with elderly residents. The company had promised to sponsor our visas through a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS), but once people’s student visas began to expire, they backed out. So I moved to a support work role with an organisation supporting people with disabilities, and stayed there until I left the UK.
There was a lot of racism in the UK, especially in healthcare workplaces, the kind of treatment that made me second-guess ever moving to the UK.
When it comes to the cost of living, rent for a two-bedroom in the city centre was £650 a month. Food was actually cheap in the UK; we’d spend around £400 a month, mostly on African groceries since my husband doesn’t eat British food.
Between rent, bills, council tax, and food, we were spending at least £1,000 a month against a salary that maxed out around £1,600–1,800. It was genuinely hard to save.
Childcare nearly broke me too; it was around £60 an hour, and I was earning about £12 an hour. That’s part of why I only had one child while in the UK.
So why did you leave the UK for Canada?
The path to actually becoming a citizen was almost impossible. After your student visa, the UK gives you two years post-study to find a job that’ll sponsor you with a CoS. You need five years on that sponsorship before you can apply for indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), basically the UK’s version of a permanent residence permit and then more time after that (not sure about the exact number of years) before citizenship.
Employers in the UK know you need that CoS, so some of them treat you badly. I wasn’t willing to lock myself into five years of that.
On top of that, the UK kept floating policies to extend the timeline to ten years because so many immigrants had arrived during that period. I’d always wanted Canada anyway; I’d only gone to the UK first because I needed to leave Nigeria immediately.
How did the move to Canada happen?
I had been in Canada’s Express Entry pool since 2020, even before I married my husband. But I never received an invitation because my banking and customer service experience from Nigeria wasn’t in an occupation Canada was actively prioritising.
Then one day on Instagram, I saw someone comment that she was leaving the UK for Canada, her exact words were, “thank God for healthcare.” I went straight to her DMs to ask what she meant because I had experience working in healthcare.
She told me Canada had started category-based draws, with healthcare as one of the targeted categories, and that support workers and care home staff were counted as healthcare workers, not just doctors and nurses. I had no idea.
That same night, I updated my Express Entry profile with my UK healthcare work experience. I had a score of 475; the draw cutoff was around 465–468. I got my invitation to apply within a month.
That’s so awesome. Can you break down how the Express Entry scoring works?
Two people can have identical scores and get completely different outcomes because Canada runs category-based draws — they announce which professions or skills they need at a given time: French speakers, healthcare workers, welders, and electricians are currently preferred over other professions. If your score is high but you’re not in the category they’re pulling from, you won’t get picked.
To enter the pool, you need a degree evaluation and a language test like IELTS. Your score is also shaped by your age, points drop by 5 at each birthday after 30, and your education level.
If you have a master’s or postgraduate degree, you’ll have more points than someone with just a bachelor’s. I already had a master’s degree from Nigeria, so that helped me.
For work experience, the maximum is three years of foreign experience, and you can combine different jobs to reach it. For me, that meant one year in UK healthcare plus two years from my banking job in Nigeria. There’s a Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) calculator you can use to estimate your score before you’re even in the pool.
What were your next steps after getting your visa, and how did you secure housing?
Once the visa was sorted, we started preparing for the move. I actually found an apartment online before landing, but my cousin, who lives here in Calgary, was an incredible help. They went to view the property in person for me to make sure everything was legit, and they helped pay the deposit and the first month’s rent. Having family on the ground to verify things took a massive weight off my shoulders before I even boarded the flight.
Did you experience anything that was different from the UK when you first arrived?
One of the biggest differences was childcare. In Canada, my second daughter got a daycare spot at six months old; I didn’t have postpartum depression partly because of that support. Childcare is cheaper and a whole lot easier to afford now.
How did the job hunt go once you got there?
I was honestly terrified. Everything I saw online about the Canadian job market scared me. A friend who’d been in Canada for years told me the trick was applying in volume: like about 10–15 jobs every single day. I treated it like a job itself, sometimes hitting 20 applications a day. Referrals didn’t work for me.
I also stopped using a generic CV. I tailored each CV to match the specific job description, using ChatGPT to help align my experience with each role’s requirements.
The interview process here is intense; I went through four or five stages for a single role. I eventually landed a customer advisor job at an insurance company in Calgary within three months of arriving, with no industry-specific experience required. They trained me for over a month before I started speaking to customers.
How does the cost of living actually compare between the two countries?
It’s high in Canada, too, but the earning power makes a difference. In the UK, I was earning around £1,600–1,800 a month, and my expenses alone were eating over £1,000 of that.
In Canada, I was earning about $1,515 biweekly, roughly $3,000 a month, while paying $1,300 for rent and about $150 for electricity. Even when my husband was between jobs, and I was the only one earning, I was still saving close to $1,000–$1,200 a month.
With both of us working, household income would be closer to $6,000, against maybe $2,000 in fixed costs.
Groceries are expensive here too, but it still feels more manageable overall than the UK, where bills, council tax, and childcare left almost nothing behind.
What’s your favourite thing about Canada so far?
I love how family-oriented it is. The childcare support alone changed everything for me, and so far, I haven’t experienced the kind of racism I dealt with constantly in UK workplaces. I feel respected as a human being here, and genuinely at peace.
Any advice for someone considering this route?
Do better research. I see people who’ve followed me online for years still asking me questions I’ve already answered publicly, instead of looking things up themselves.
I’ve never used an agent for any visa, be it mine, my husband’s, or even my parents’. Agents aren’t doing anything special; if you’d qualify, you’d qualify either way. People get scammed because they refuse to do their own homework.
Any mistakes you’d want others to avoid?
I wish I’d researched the UK more before picking a school. If I’d gone somewhere bigger, say Birmingham, Manchester, or London, instead of Hull, I might have had more opportunities outside healthcare.
I also didn’t realise until after I’d already spent the money that some people were coming from Nigeria with a CoS already arranged, sponsored directly, with visa and accommodation covered. If I’d known that route existed, I could have skipped a lot of the financial stress.
On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your life in Canada right now?
Ten over ten. I feel relieved, at peace, and respected. I don’t have any complaints so far.
Want to share your japa story? Please reach out to me here.
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