Nigerian Engineering Academy’s Cool Innovation Competition
The Nigerian Academy of Engineering has set up a cool competition platform to boost the creativity of engineers, both in the formal and informal sectors. The president, Peter Onwualu, spilled the beans about this at a briefing in Lagos yesterday. He said the national innovative competition, a big deal event happening on November 27, 2023, is still open to receive submissions of cool and innovative works from Nigerians across the 36 states and in Diaspora. The works cover a wide range of stuff like ICT/telecommunications; agriculture & food processing; energy & energy transition renewables; infrastructure development; health; transportation; mining; Artificial Intelligence, AI, and robotics; climate change, and manufacturing, among others.
Onwualu said: “What we want to achieve in this competition is very simple. We all know the challenges we have in Nigeria.
“We have numerous problems which ordinarily would have improved the challenges and opportunities for young engineers to be able to make contributions towards solving the challenges facing our economy in all sectors, from agriculture to IT.
“One of the things we see that politicians are talking about is how to move from a consumption economy to a production-oriented economy, so we can go to the global table with something.
“This has also been identified because we don’t produce or we produce little. So this is one of our humble contribution towards making Nigeria a productive economy and so we know that among many Nigerians in the informal, or those who have the formal settings, there are quite a number of ideas you see there on the streets that have gone through proof of concept. We will need to take these ideas to the next level and that is what the academy is trying to do now.
