Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN) held its TENT workshop, the first in the series of its pre-platform workshops, in Warri, Nigeria on 13 and 14 May 2011. TENT stands for Techie. Entrepreneurial. Nigerian. Talented and is an initiative by Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN). TENT is PIN’s response to the dire need for skilled young Nigerians and is based on its team’s experience with national and global best practices spanning a period of over 10 years.
About PIN:
PIN is a social enterprise that connects Nigerian youths with ICT-enabled opportunities. Having worked with government, civil society, private institutions and international organisations, PIN’s projects build on years of combined experience and focus on socio-economic development. PIN’s projects include Ajegunle.org, ISSPIN and TENT. Through these projects, PIN seeks to connect individuals, people-groups, institutions and communities with the socio-economic opportunities that ICTs provide. PIN staff have consulted for Freedom House, Harvard University, International Telecommunications Union, Microsoft Nigeria and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, among others.
What is TENT?
TENT is not only an event, summit, forum or conference but a PLATFORM that showcases, connects, adds value and inspires. The platform seeks to fill an existing gap for a place where budding Nigerian technopreneurs can showcase their works, connect with resources, add value to market and inspire innovation.
TENT Workshops:
PIN is hosting six (6) pre-platform workshops across Nigeria from May 2011 to August 2012. The workshops hold in selected cities across Nigeria’s geo-political zones and focus on young people aged 13-25 with provision for those aged 9-12 who show promise. PIN believes that if the youths don’t start at 13, they can’t become experts and/or millionaires at 30. The main multi-day event, the annual TENT Gathering, debuts on 12.12.12 as Nigeria’s #1 Youth Technopreneurship platform.
TENT Warri Workshop:
Preparation for the TENT workshop for the South-South region (held in Warri) started in March 2011. Invitations were sent to schools in Uvwie Local Government and Warri-South Local Government requesting for the participation of 10 students from each of the 20 schools in the area. The workshop for secondary school students, on May 13, started at 10am and it had in attendance students, teachers from the participating schools, principal and administrator of Cambridge International School (venue of the workshop).
Also in attendance was Celestine Omin, winner of the Google Chrome Extension Challenge at the recently concluded g-Nigeria event in Lagos, spoke to the students about how he got involved with software development and how he positioned himself to be a competition winner. On day two of the workshop, Vikantti’s Emeka Okoye shared his experience on how he became a leading developer. He highlighted his story of sacrifice and evident passion to demonstrate soft skills needed for technology expertise.
Key highlight of the workshop was when participants were asked to break into Solution Teams based on partnerships developed during the earlier networking session. Each team was asked to come up with a problem that they feel needs urgent solution in the region. The session after was used by the different teams to come up with the strategy for the development of a mobile/web platform that will address the problem.
Project Ideas:
The teams came up with the ideas stated below and were presented to the judges after the technical training session on web/mobile programming, questions and answers with Emeka Okoye.
- Dynamic: The team finally came up with the idea of making the university/college qualifying exam (JAMB) brochure available for download so that students can make better decisions by reading the JAMB brochure on their mobile phones before selecting schools/courses.
- Zenith: The team wants to create an online platform for tertiary institutions to introduce ideas, share project topics and find support on some classroom topics. The platform will contain the database of schools and also find a way to connect past students whose project work will be used as reference for new students.
- Explorers: The Explorers team want to create a mobile application that will be used to solve food and transportation problems. They focused on food and claimed that users of the proposed product can easily place orders via their mobile phones.
- Outbox: Outbox team came up with the idea of creating a database for Nigerians, similar to a social security number system. They feel this will curtail corruption via tracing and also help with some local issues.
- Arsenal: The Arsenal team came up with the idea of helping to curb the problem of truancy in schools using a mobile app. They want to develop a mobile app that will allow teachers to send immediate attendance reports to parents.
At the end of the presentations, awards were given to the teams with top ideas. For the full story about the Warri workshop, visit the Warri Tent event page.
Image Credits: @pinigeria
