*Winning Projects That’ll Create Jobs
They bring education to young Nigerians, ensure that babies are vaccinated on time and last but not least break down Federal and State budgets for everyone to see. Four teams of young Nigerian content developers, medical doctors and financial analysts have emerged the Internet for Jobs (I4J) Initiative of the Nigeria Internet Group 2012 grant winners, carting away N1million each to make their applications commercially viable.
Their digital ventures are focused on the implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and creating jobs for young Nigerians using the Internet.
The four digital revolutionary projects were chosen from approximately 40 submissions in five categories by a panel of six renowned judges during this year’s I4J initiative. In the Mobile Web Solutions & Apps category, Efiko (http://apps.varsoftng.com /genius_quiz/mobileweb) emerged tops. The team led by Olusola Ajayi and includes Abiodun Thorpe, Aderemi Okeowo, Sunday Akinsete, Desiree Craig, Adebayo Adebayo and Abdulrahman Adeshina developed Efiko, a social mobile quiz platform designed primarily for secondary school students to enhance their learning experience by engaging students in topical quiz related to their school’s curriculum.
It promotes healthy competition by providing student rankings by demography and provides a social learning platform where students can learn from one another and adult mentors. This project was born at the Co-Creation Hub Nigeria during the popular TechInEd event. Against the odds, the team highly motivated, put a great deal of effort and in just 48 hours were able to create an Efiko’s platform API, which powers Efiko for Mobile Web (mobile phones and tablets).
Efiko was unanimously declared the winner of the event and since then the team has been working hard to make it available on WAP enabled phones, feature phones, Facebook, etc. The team believes that Efiko has the potential to revolutionize the way students learn. Olusola Ajayi, team leader, says they see the potential of creating derivative products for higher education, human resource management and more.
“We believe once implemented successfully the social impact of Efiko will be felt nationally and will promote rapid development’’, Ajayi enthused. In the Cloud Solutions/Software as a Service category, Tutorial Click (www.tutorialclick.com) won. The team led by Adedoyin Talabi comprises Miss Mojisola Lawal, Emmanuel Celestine, Onayemi Samuel, Tunji Adebakin and Dr. Ranti Adedayo developed Tutorial Click as an online examinations preparation and tutorial services business for UTME, Post UTME and SSCE as well as in the future for other examinations like ICAN, ATS, CIS, etc. Tutorial Click provides thousands of past questions for the past 10 years on all UTME & SSCE subjects so that students can practice and gain admission at first attempt. In the Social Entrepreneurship Solutions, BudgIT (www.yourbudgit.com) was developed by Joseph Agunbiade, Maryam Edun and Ogochukwu Junaid. BudgIT’s innovation within the public circles comes with a creative use of government public data mostly the budget by either presenting them in simple tweets, interactive format or infographic displays. This is about building participatory governance and arming the citizens with relevant content for societal growth.
VACCAlert (http://vaccalert.org/) also emerged winners in the Social Enterprise Solutions category developed by Salami Joseph A.(M.D) and Anyianuka Orji. VACCAlert is a project that aims to eradicate or reduce to the barest minimum death from vaccine preventable diseases in Nigeria by ensuring that every Nigerian child is fully vaccinated.
VACCAlert is currently in pilot phase at the Central Immunisation Clinic of the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. The applications which is also a finalist for the Rolex Award for Enterprise, 2012 identifies, educates, monitors and reminds mothers of the next vaccination appointments of their infants throughout the period of the immunization according to National Programme on Immunization (NPI) schedule. The service will also offer a dedicated and publicly accessible web application for real-time access to data on vaccination and immunization programmes in the country.
The I4J judges scored each project based on the following criteria: Innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, proof of concept, versatility, implemented solutions, sustainable concepts, business models and solutions, collaboration and teamwork and presentation skills.
According to Engr. Bayo Banjo, president of Nigeria Internet Group, the N1million each will help all the grant recipients enhance and grow their projects with the view of employing more young Nigerians as they grow as well as having a socioeconomic impact. NIG said it will play a mentoring and monitoring role to ensure that the grant is applied in the best way possible with the core focus of making sure these projects all succeed.
The internet for Jobs (I4J) Initiative is a programme designed by the Nigeria Internet Group to explore the potential of the Internet to create jobs for the people and transform the nation into a knowledge society, where business and government services are available on-line and the citizens are positively engaged in knowledge driven activities. Every year the NIG gives out grants to young and innovative IT entrepreneurs, who have built web-based solutions that have the potential of creating thousands of jobs.