Some of Nigeria’s burgeoning young talents are being given the chance to showcase their gifts through the IdeasLagos competition, created to provide secondary school students with a platform on which they can express their innovative ideas. Solomon Elusoji writes
Oyigbo Liberty could not hide his excitement. His lean boyish face was suffused with unspeakable joy, and his body quietly shook beneath his slick uniform. He, and two of his colleagues, Seun Agboola and Ajala Rukayat, had just been announced the winners of the IdeasLagos Competition Grand Finale, which was held at the Lagos State Chambers of Commerce and Industry, recently. And it was a really well deserved win, after they took on one of Nigeria’s fiercest monsters – inadequate power supply.
Their idea was to build an infinity free energy power generator, which did not require fuel to work, which was cheap to assemble, and didn’t pose any threat to the sanity of the environment. Working with established laws of physics like the principles of electromagnetic induction (Faraday’s Law, Fleming’s Left Hand Rule, and Maxwell Corkscrew Rule) and the principle of over-unity, continuous and perpetual motion, the team built a prototype that, before the judges, was sparked by a battery, but was left on its own to work and generate enough wattage to light a bulb. The team was able to demonstrate that the generator could produce power, without depending on fuel or battery, or sunlight, or any external source of energy.
However, the idea would need a lot of fine-tuning, if it is to be produced on a large scale and marketed to the general public as a safe and more efficient means of generating power. Still, it is a worthy proof of the quality imagination of Nigerian students. It is a reason to once again, harbour hope.
InnovateLagos, an initiative launched by the Lagos State Government with the slogan Made in Lagos and coordinated by the Deputy Chief of Staff, Lagos State, Moji Rhodes, is behind the IdeaLagos Competition. The competition seeks to raise the level of collaboration, creativity, and solutions amongst students in Lagos schools. Students are expected to work in groups. These groups would contain no less than three students. As a group the students are expected to identify a problem in their community, and brainstorm on ways to solve the identified problem. They would be free to pick a problem from the following sectors: education, health, technology, water, agriculture, transportation, electricity, environment, and housing.
The competition would involve every secondary school in Lagos State, but to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness, it would be done local government by local government. The just concluded edition was for schools, both public and primary, in Lagos Island.
Submissions from all 22 schools in Lagos Island were screened by the InnovateLagos team and the top 25 ideas were opened to a public vote on the InnovateLagos website (innovatelagos.com). The final winners were selected by a jury made up of sponsors and members of the Lagos Innovation Council. The top groups won various gifts ranging from laptops, mobile phones, Ipads and a foreign trip to an innovation centre.
“The IdeaLagos team came to our school and brought the forms for the competition. So, we registered and decided on solving the problem of power in our community. We tried to invent a generator that would not pollute the environment and also produce electricity for eternity,” a delighted Liberty told THISDAY. “We were just testing a lot of things. We did so many tests before we could get the final results.
“Despite that we used to sleep around midnight most times, we never got discouraged because we knew what we wanted to do. We knew what we wanted to present. We had that idea and we believed it would be possible. So we kept researching and trying, until we got the final result.”
Commissioner for Science and Technology and one of the judges of the Competition, Adebiyi Mabadeje, told THISDAY that the first phase of the exercise was satisfyingly successful. He said: “The whole idea of this exercise is to get young kids at an early age to start expressing themselves, seeing how they can solve the problems of the setting they live in. The ideas we’ve seen here today are from the areas where they’ve seen we have problems. It wasn’t all technology related, some of them were tourism related, others were environmental issues, and others were issues on power generation. So these are just the last five shortlisted, out of 743 ideas that were submitted. So, it was a huge initiative open to all the schools, both public and private, on Lagos Island.
“What we did at the end was that we got them to build, where possible, working prototypes, to show practical possibility. We also assigned mentors to the last five shortlisted from the last 25. The mentors worked with them on their area of focus. We taught them how to make presentations, how to speak in public, and how to build and develop their ideas. We also gave them some resources to work with, to take off the financial burden of their various projects.”
The commissioner also pointed out that the competition had a holistic impact on the students. “What we have decided to do is to assign mentors at an earlier stage, so that it’s not just the last five that benefits from its holistic advantages. When they first came, a lot of them were scared to talk to us, and facing the camera was a challenge. But now they are much more confident in expressing their ideas and bold enough to give presentation in the full glare of intimidating cameras. So it’s not just about winning the prize itself, but it is education and exposure for these students,” he said.
For Rhodes, it was a pleasant experience to see young people showcase their talents. She told THISDAY that “The key thing for me is seeing these kids literally blossom – that’s what made it so worthwhile for us as a team. It is for them to realise that if they have ideas, they can go far. Now we are thinking of how to patent these ideas and prototypes, and even implementing them within the state government development plan. We saw the drainage system – very innovative. You look at the infinity power generator and think of the power of creativity. These are the solutions that we actually need, because they are linked to our local problems.”
On how the design of the competition could be improved upon, she said: “the critical thing is that this one has been a success story. We’ve seen how these kids have literally developed in all spheres. They are much more confident than they were when we first met them. As we go on, definitely there are some aspects we need to improve on, especially the strengthening of the mentoring program. I think mentorship is so important. We need to get more mentors that are vaster in certain areas.
“I want to say a big thank you to the people behind InnovateLagos, for everything they’ve been doing,” Oyigbo Liberty said. “This has changed my life. And I just want to tell Nigerians that this is the beginning. Nigerians would start to experience new things, new innovations. That of course, has been the message in recent times to the young people in Africa from the American President, Barack Obama.
At the a town-hall gathering of 500 young African leaders who attended the inaugural Nelson Mandel Fellowship in Washington last month, Obama said Africans should to stop looking somewhere else for solutions and start looking for solutions internally.
“We didn’t get a good deal then, but let’s make sure we’re not making excuses for going forward,” he said.
For now, it’s expected that Lagos State will keep pushing to the front the example of IdeasLagos as a model for other states in the country
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