The CVC-AEIS Innovation Challenge is in line with the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU) innovation direction to deepen and amplify technology solutions, to create employment through bankable cohorts of businesses who are from the university system. Innovators will be from the university system in Nigeria and provide unique impact solutions to the focus challenge areas of this competition.
Focus Areas
- Agriculture: Priorities yield improvement, storage, processing, and cut down post-harvest losses. Target crop value chains are – maize, rice, cowpea, soya bean, and aquaculture.
- Environment: Your solutions should deploy renewable energy, creatively impacting a large market in Nigeria & climate action in delivery.
- ICT (emerging tech & IoT): To be considered, your submission must solve a Nigerian or African problem leveraging on emerging technologies and the IoT massive complex of solutions.
- Security: Nigeria faces a myriad of security challenges relating to different sectors. Pick one and work on a viable solution.
Benefits
- The Challenge shall recognise top 20 innovators from across the country and the top three (3) winners shall get cash prize from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU).
- All participants with viable innovation shall gain 100% scholarship to product-lab and enterprise-lab training as well as full access to tech events, innovation acceleration and global investors.
Eligibility
- Your solution must come from any of these four areas or a hybrid of them, namely: Agriculture, Environment, ICT (emerging tech & IoT); and Security.
- Individual applications will be disqualified. Application must be as a team (not less than 2 founding members). Student-staff innovation collaboration is allowed. Any team that is applying must comprise students and university staff. The team must also contain at least one female founder or co-founder. Ideal Team = Univ staff + University (undergraduate or postgraduate) where one of the core team leaders is female.
- Application will consider equal representation from the six (6) geo-political zones of Nigeria.
- Solutions in MVP and Post-MVP stage will be considered. Early stage innovation solutions with a clear pathway to profit will also be considered. However, MVP and Post-MVP solutions stand the highest chance of scaling through to the top. Get creative! Get Innovative.
- All solutions must be an inclusive business that puts women and youths (18-35) at the forefront and must have the core team comprising up to 40% women.
Application
- Only the Top 300 most innovative solutions from across Nigeria will get into the program. If your application into the challenge is successful, you will receive an email from the organisers.
- If you do not get an email, it means your application didn’t meet the requirements to join this challenge. However, you will be part of the CVC Ecosystem Tech Conference so watch out for that email.
