Grace Akpoiroro, Sonam Kumar, Praise David-Oku, Charlotte Takem and Nmesoma Ogbonna are smart young ladies who have done Nigeria and Africa as a whole proud. These five young ladies made up the Charis team that represented Nigeria in the just concluded Global Technovation challenge, 2015 which took place in San Francisco U.S.A
The Global Technovation Challenge is a program that has greatly enriched the lives of young girls and women all around the world. Over the span of six years, It has planted the seed of technological entrepreneurship in the hearts of young women the world over, gotten them interested in I.T related careers, and greatly increased their technical skills.
The program follows a 12 week timeline were students are engaged in team work, taught the rudiments of entrepreneurship, comprehensive programming and design skills, and given the platform to pitch a mobile app solution to a panel made up of venture capitalists.
The young ladies were required to identify a social problem in their community and ultimately create an app that addressed such community issue. The pitch for the app was to include the app source code, a 4-minute video pitch, 2 min app demo, team photo, 100 word description of the app, a comprehensive business plan and the completion of a post survey. These were the challenges that team Charis had to overcome to beat participants from 64 countries and emerged victorious with an app named Discardious.
Discardious is an app that will help tackle health related problems in Nigeria that stem from inappropriate waste disposal methods. When asked what the program has done for them, David Oku a team member says “It has given our team a platform to use technology to solve problems in our community. It has also motivated us to think outside the box. It has boosted my self-confidence and helped me build new relationships and networking skills. I have met new people from different parts of the world and shared ideas. It has also made me realize that I am not too young to start achieving my goals.”
image source:/twitter.com/technovation
