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By Oluwaseun Ajayi
Programos Foundation is creating more innovators across Africa as the continent eases into the age of digital transformation. The not-for-profit, non-governmental organisation (NGO) is the promoter of Nigeria’s National Smartcity Innovation Upskilling and InnovationbedCampus, a digital ecosystem initiative designed to upskill graduate youths from the 36 states including Abuja.
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Amos Emmanuel, Founder of Programos Foundation, says the intervention to upskill underscores the hefty skill gaps across the continent and the need to make Africa not just a consumer of technology products but an active player in the creation of innovations, technology services and products.
Emmanuel says Programos intervention to create more innovators in Nigeria and Africa will come through the InnovationBed Africa platform, a digital ecosystem of local and global innovation experts aimed at nurturing future change agents with positive social impact focusing on upskilling and innovation incubation.
The InnovationBed is focused to reposition Africa away from the bottom of the global value-chain and also to improve the poor competitive ranking of the continent at the World Summit Awards (WSA).
The WSA is an awards system, selecting and promoting local digital innovation to improve society. Africa’s WSA’s ranking for innovation is at a lowly 6% compared to Europe’s 45%. The InnovationBed by the Programos Foundation is targeting to increase the number of innovators in Africa and improve the continent’s WSA ranking.
The InnovationBed Africa platform accepts applications from university and polytechnic students looking forward to increase their knowledge in blockchain, virtual reality (VR), robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (MI) systems design for front-end, back-office, APls, industry software exposure into how machine learning uses Natural Language Processing (NLP).
It is a requirement that the applicant is either a junior or senior and has achieved a pass level in Math, English, with some degree course works.
“The InnovationBed Africa has been in the research pipeline for about ten years now and is actually taking a new dimension in this decade of 2020. The foundation directly involves the social impact of trying to see how Nigeria can see more of innovations, perhaps deliver more innovations to grow the Nigerian economy and Africa at large,” Amos tells IT Edge News.
The Chief Software Architect of Programos adds: “InnovationBed is in existence to further enhance our youths skills, we call it digital citizens, innovation, capacity development, incubation. So, they need to realize themselves, they need to take what they are doing more serious than an institutional examination because by the time they adopt an examination, the exam path ways and leaves them on their own, but if they don’t read or practice what they study in school beyond examination, they could end up being a job seeker in the end in place of a job creator.
“Programos is currently researching into new areas of adopting ICTs for good of mankind both in its profit and non-for-profit organisations leveraging on quality access to ‘innovation bed’ across the globe.”
