In a bid towards enhancing an enabling environment for Nigerians leveraging technology, winners have emerged from the Lagos State Government EKO Youth Hackathon Challenge.

The grand finale, which held on the 26th of August, 2021, at the EbonyLife Place, Victoria Island, recently saw winners going home with N300,000, N400,000 and N500,000 for the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st Prize respectively.

The Honourable Commissioner of Arts, Culture and Tourism, Mrs Umazat Akinbile-Yusuf, who represented the Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu stated that nurturing young people and their ideas is crucial to the development of Lagos State and the Eko Hackathon seeks to reward innovations leveraging technology.

“Lagos State benefits significantly from the innovation and enterprise of youths across a range of industries, but particularly in the technology sector. Young people bring fresh ideas and create new ways of solving problems and we should look for new ways to support them”, she said.

Umazat pointed out at the event which saw winners emerge after developing various software, that the initiative would make access to financial technology for consumers and institutional customers easy and seamless.

The focus according to her, is on authentication, identification, and validation with chatbots, IOT and fingerprints due to global adoption of these technologies.

Furthermore, she said that the use of these technologies will bring about a friendly system, ease, convenience and versatility in the sector.

Umazat maintained that the objective is to address unemployment and promote entrepreneurship through the discovery of local talents who will develop software or Apps that would reach more locals in the state while also identifying and implementing different fingerprint authentication and validation applications. It is also to promote valuable collaboration with banks, insurance firms, fintechs, and other stakeholders.

“This laudable initiative which was opened to software developers of all ages and gender without restrictions would help to grow talents,” she said.

The programme was organized by the Lagos State Government in partnership with The Future Project Africa. At the final pitch which saw different teams competing for the coveted prize, Team Qiqi, Team Botsurance, and Team Scoreprint won first, second and third positions respectively out of the fifty-seven groups that participated in the challenge.