Three out of six teams won seed funding to further develop their ideas that were pitched on Sunday 19 February at the ‘Tech in Education’ hackaton. This was the second edition of Co-Creation Hub’s ‘Tech in‘ series, focusing on developing technological solutions to social problems In Nigeria.
At the just concluded edition, Efiko, a mobile app that enables students to interact with courses they want to learn more about, won 3,000 US dollars in seed funding. Asa, an app for learning Nigerian indigenous languages, came 2nd with 2,000 US dollars in prize money to work with while TWIK (Teach What I Know), a peer-to-peer platform for students to share knowledge in a multimedia environment, came 3rd with 1,500 US dollars.
The leader of the winning team, Abiodun Thorpe (third from right on the picture above), says a massive team effort made the Efiko app come tops at the pitching session where they showed a prototype of the app to the judging panel. “People had to work into the middle of the night to make sure that they delivered,” says Abiodun. He told VC4Africa that the 3,000 US dollars prize money will be used to further develop the app for the market and “not for the team to share and put in their pockets”
The Hackaton brought educationists, tech and business experts who formed the panel of judges to scrutinize the ideas and offer valuable suggestions to the hackers. Speaking with VC4 Africa, one of the judges, Mrs. Abolaji Osime of Global Int’l College Lagos, encouraged more initiatives like the ‘Tech in Education’ and adds that, when properly applied, technology could greatly improve access to education on a wider scale.
Launched last year, Tech-in Series periodically brings stakeholders and developers who lock themselves in a living lab to create competing ideas that would solve problems in a specific sector of the Nigerian society.
CEO of the CcHub, Bosun Tijani, said the ideas from its ‘Tech in Education’ would all be tweaked and fine-tuned. In no time some of them will have products people will start to use,” says Bosun. On the experience from the Hub’s ‘Tech in’ series, he says: “We have more people who are now interested in coming together to build more solutions and helping one another out. We have good talents in Nigeria really and what they lack is the support. With proper support structure the sky is the limit. If we continue this way [supporting them] I won’t be surprised if we start seeing start-ups that are worth millions of dollars from Nigeria.”