ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SKILL DEVELOPMENT CENTRE (ESDC)

ACTIVITIES OF THE ENTERPRENEURSHIP AND SKILL DEVELOPMENT CENTRE

The International Open Institute has one of the creative Business Faculties in Africa established in 2019 and has produced numerous Entrepreneurs who are captains of industries in many sectors of the Nigerian economy and Africa. In ensuring the continuous development of the Nigerian economy, the International Open Institute, strategically located in the Centre of Lagos State the economic hub of Nigeria, established the Entrepreneurship and Skills Development Centre (ESDC) as a dedicated centre focusing on promoting entrepreneurship among its students, staff, alumni, and the society. This is in line with Objective 4 (Section-2: Student matters) on page 55 of the Medium Term Goals of the 3-Year Strategic Plan of the  International Open Institute which states:

“To promote Self-reliance, Entrepreneurship and Exemplary Leadership skills and Capacity in our students”

This Entrepreneurship Skills and Development Centre aim to promote the entrepreneurial spirit and will support students to set up profitable business ventures along with their chosen professions before graduation. They will be encouraged to acquire skills required to develop new ventures and start-ups, such as innovative thinking, business creativity, business planning, proposal writing, risk-taking abilities, and business management skills. This is targeted towards developing the real sector of the Nigerian economy and making our graduates potential employers of labour rather than seekers of employment.

The Institute seeks to achieve these goals by partnering with several organizations for sponsorship of programs that have the capacity to motivate and ignite the latent creativity, entrepreneurial interests as well as develop the relevant business skills in our students, alumni and staff in particular and the Nigerian society and Africa in general.

The centre has successfully run the following programmes:

  1. UNILAG-ESEFA/SAP (Systems Application & Products) Train-the Trainers’ workshop for the development of University of Lagos staff to build capacity in problems solving and entrepreneurship. (Monday, December 4 to Friday, December 8, 2017) the workshop was delivered by the Enterprise Systems Education for Africa, University of Cape Town.
  1. Women Entrepreneurship and Technological Skills Empowerment Programme jointly sponsored by Eko-Konnect and WACREN for Faculty of Engineering Staff and students (Women Lecturers and Female Students from faculty of Engineering and other Institutions in West Africa are the participants). Monday, January 22 to Saturday, January 27, 2018.
  1. The Global Management Challenge competition sponsored by Coca-Cola Nigeria Limited (Wednesday, January 31 to Friday, March 2, 2018). The programme was about managing a company without running real-world risks and taking top management decisions. The sponsored trained 80 students of this University while four (4) out of the 80 students emerged as National winner of the programme, they also represent the Country in the international contest from Monday, April 16 to Thursday, April 19, 2018 in Dubai UAE.
  1. The ReadySetWork (RSW) Project sponsored by Lagos State Government (Saturday, July 14 to  Saturday October 13, 2018), the programme is a yearly training which has been designed to train and equip final year students of various tertiary institutions in Lagos State with employability and Entrepreneurship Skills for 13 consecutive Saturdays. In addition, the initiative is believed to provide the final year students with a brighter future and make them more competitive and employable in the labour market after graduation. Some of the participants were able to get an internship with various companies after interview and conclusion of the programme in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

Also, our student Mr Ayodeji Joshua Popoola of the department of Geophysics faculty of Science, who pitched on EKO Laundry which he says is a unique laundromat that offers affordable, round the clock services while maximizing the use of technology was declared the 2nd place winner of the 3rd edition of Ready Set Work programme at the closing event in October 2018. He was offered a seed fund of 4 million Naira

  1. Raoatech IT-Electromech Limited programme on capacity building in the area of Quality Assurance and Software Testing sponsored by the company’s CEO ( Olarewaju O. Oludare) alumnae of our great University who partnered with the ESDC to train 50 students. The participants were selected from Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Science. The training was held at the ESDC from Monday, June 4 to Saturday, June 9, 2018.
  1. Endow Africa free training on a 2-day Technology Primer ProgramThe programme which was targeted at raising technology capacity among Africa’s youth in the following areas: Transport Networks (Ethernet, Optics & Microwave); Access Networks (Radio- 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, WIFI, Copper, Fibre Optics); Telecom Application Suite (Core Networks, etc.); Virtualization, Cloud, Data & analytics, IOT; Software Applications (Mobile, Web, Back-end, Front-end); Robotics Automation & Computer Hardware; The Internet, Network/Application security; Communication Systems; Software Development Framework and Business side of Software was held at the Centre from Friday, June 29 to Saturday, June 30, 2018 and 50 students from Faculties of Engineering and Science benefitted from this.
  2. Hackforgood 2018 Sponsored By Youth for Technology Foundation (from August 2-4, 2018). This was a Skills acquisition programme on Technology Design and Prototype Challenge aimed at empowering the next generation of leaders to enter the workforce with the skills they need to access employment or create their own entrepreneurial opportunities in the fourth industrial revolution. 50 students across Nigeria Universities participated in the gainful programme of which 20 slots were given to the University of Lagos being a hosting Institution. UNILAG students won different prizes ranging from Laptops to Phones among other gifts and some of them got investors among the panel of Judges to invest in their businesses.
  1. Impact Week 1.0 2017 & 2.0 2018 on Design Thinking the programme is sponsored by Lufthanza German Airlines to train the University Staff and Students in one of the hottest and highly demanding knowledge skill today in the World “Design Thinking” while the Impact Week is meant to teach young people on how to create business models out of the existing problems by giving them the tools and knowledge to be creative, innovative and to make their own living by establishing businesses that will help them become employers of labours.

The 1st edition of the programme was held in October 2017 where about 16 prototypes of different businesses were generated and the best three businesses got Two Million one hundred Thousand as start-up grants.

The 2nd Edition was in November 2018, twenty-four viable business ideas prototypes were generated, the Vice-Chancellor also promised Five Million start-up grants for the first three teams. Some of the teams have gone through the second level of pitching where the Centre invited private sector investors to invest in the businesses and we have written for approval to register the businesses to enable them to commence operation in earnest.

One Hundred and fifty-six (156) students were trained across the University in the 1st and 2nd editions of Impact Week.

  1. Africa Cinematography Festival (ACF) sponsored by TESO Solution X. The festival is an annual youth’s trainings and retraining festival on arts and crafts of filmmaking and cinematography. The programme is practically for African youths who have interest in arts and crafts filmmaking, cinematography. The programme commenced on Saturday, November 24 to Saturday, December 1, 2018 with different kind of faces from Nollywood and African Artists taking the classes. The partners were able to train 31 interested UNILAG students for free.

iois (Team TETRA) wins 2019 Global Management Challenge

Team Tetra who represented the University of Lagos won the first place position in the national finals of the second edition of the Global Management Challenge (GMC)