In line with the Programos Foundation’s #ReInnovateNigeria Initiative pilot process on UN ICT4SIDS, its President and World Summit Awards Eminent National Expert for Nigeria, Mr Amos Emmanuel, announces the flagging off of the preliminary WSA National Innovation product submission from the 6 geopolitical zones of Nigeria.
The application is free! Submitted products that qualify in any of the following 8 economic sectors and already offering high social innovation benefits to the Nigerian society using competitive technologies of AI, ML, Blockchain, Natural language processing, Computer Vision, Virtual Reality etc will be selected and recommended as submissions from Nigeria into the UN World Summit Awards 2019/20 global competition database post-congress come April, 2019.
“Application is hereby open to Nigerian individuals, groups, private organizations as well as government and NGOs within or in diaspora to submit own innovation at this link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScNBGQONItHfC4FGaoRNiOXTGB5tuPAQo1EHvr3sbabYCAzpw/viewform,” said Amos in a statemnt in Lagos.
The 8 categories are Government & Citizens Engagement, Learning & Education category,. Smart Settlement and urbanization, Business & Commerce, Health & Well-Being, Environment & Green Energy, Culture & Tourism and Inclusion & Empowerment.
Nigeria’s winning product among the world best 40 rated innovation of the year 2018 carrot.ng by Mr Lukman Balogun will be flying Nigeria’s colours in a few weeks’ time at the UN WSA Winners’ Congress hosted by the Portuguese Association for the Development of Communications in Cascais, Portugal under the special invitation of the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.
Programos Foundation who associates with a huge network of country experts across Africa is remodeling stronger alliances under the Innovationbed Africa dream (an ICT4SIDS Africa vision) to ensure we boost the currently inactive and low continental participation and rating of many African countries in the global innovation ecosystem. Nigeria’s pilot is currently underway as #ReInnovateNigeria initiative and have numerous youth interns plus mentors and ecosystem researchers studying from the project pilot administration in the country.
“We seize this opportunity to express sincere gratitude from Nigeria to Prof Amjad Umar, of Harrisburg University and UN ICT4SIDS Lead Consultant and Core Partner on #ReInnovateNigeria Initiative, to the WSA Chairman Board of Directors, Prof Peter Bruck, his WSA team, key continental Directors of the Global Digital Foundation policy think tank, and the body of global experts, for the wonderful work they are doing across the globe and particularly encouraging that Africa can assume the Next Level of future Innovation development regimes especially in countries where governments heed to development of innovation ecosystem as priority for National planning rather than a mere political activity.
“At Programos, we impact the society, narrowing the digital divide by conducting this diverse, democratic, inclusive and highly competitive national pre-selection awards system following the UN WSA model. The overall experience will be fun to our teaming stakeholder collaborators and partners,” it added.
Nigeria has a high mobile coverage and internet penetration rate compared to regional peers, but the Programos Foundation’s research is focused on fostering efforts at improving this low rate of innovation around available digital infrastructure by encouraging the ecosystem to innovate more and globally competitive to reduce the high poverty and increased insecurity challenges in our society.