10 students battle for 5000 dollars seeds fund in Ogun

Mariam Sanni, Abuja

Ten students drawn from both private and public tertiary institutions in Ogun State are battling for $5,000 dollars grants in a “Tech Challenge Ogun” competition.
Already, ideas from the competing students have been selected “for show and tell” challenge slated for September where the best five ICT-based ideas would be rigorously interrogated and examined for feasibility, innovation and viability before whichever emerges best in the incubation hub wins the $5,000seed fund.
The ideas include Intelligent Cloud Based Customer Care Software, aimed at replacing human agents with artificial intelligent bots that would be able to attend to unlimited customers; ‘Linkcity’, a web based platform which provides an easy way for locals to connect with reliable places, platforms and services around the city; Farmer Pride, which is aimed at providing online platform and application where farmers interact with the society to increase productivity; Tour and Market, aimed at creating platform with full details of all cool hangout spots in the state and also provide business network and Views Ways, which provides proper, accurate and reliable access route across the country, centralised diagnoses index database management system among others.
The ideas were developed by Akinsanya Adeoluwa of Babcock University, Okala Charles also of Babcock University, Godsstar Ezeamuzie of Covenant University, Akinwande Mayowa of the Federal University of Agriculture (FUNAAB), Ojekunle Olusegun of DS Adegbenro ICT Polytechnic and Abdullahi Monsuru of FUNNAB.
Organiser of the Challenge and CEO of VerveTree Hub, Niyi Ayoola , while showcasing the ideas and the student – developers at the Youth Development arm of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), said the competition began with 60 ideas but was pruned to 10 at the preliminary stage.
Ayoola said the second best idea will get $3500, while the third attracts $2500 grants.
“Tech Challenge Ogun is a follow up to the Tech Summit Ogun that was held in January. Within this period, two town hall meetings, involving all higher institutions in the state, we were held where we interacted with idea owners. We got well over 60 ideas from owners who partook in the challenge, out of which 10 best ideas were picked at random.
“We’ve never met any of the idea owners before, it was a level playing ground involving senior partners in the industry and one of the first questions was that ‘does it solve a problem?’ and it has to be saleable right from the conception stage to graduation stage.”