University of Cape Coast wins Business Ideas Pitching Competition
In an exciting showcase of innovation and talent, the University of Cape Coast (UCC) team emerged winners in a Business Ideas and Technology Innovation Pitching Competition last Friday.
Advertisement
The competition involved 14 teams from various universities across Ghana.
The winning team comprising Kelvin Akyea, Amesese Kweku Boateng, Kanton Jemela Ahmed, and Pearl Sitsofe Bani received a GH 10,000 cedis prize for their outstanding creativity and innovation.
The second team, made up of students of Bagabaga Training College and University for Development Studies (UDS) received GH5000 cedis.
The winning proposal addressed the expensive nature of STEM kits in the market and emphasized the need for a more practical approach to STEM education in Ghana.
The Human Resource and Financial Lead for the team, Pearl Sitsofe Bani, highlighted the team's vision as to empower students to champion their creativity while addressing complex societal problems through practical STEM education.
The team believed that by providing affordable solutions and bridging the gap between theory and practice would help revolutionize STEM education in Ghana.
“STEM training in schools is more of a theory base unlike how we expected to be, practical. We decided to go into STEM training with our own kits by organizing robotic competition annually to help students with the practical aspect of STEM”
The pitch competition held at the formed a crucial part of the Founders Boot Camp Stage 2, a collaborative initiative between PAMEPI Women in Tech Ghana and RWTH Aachen University in Germany.
The competition aimed to offer a platform for tertiary students to showcase their innovative business ideas fostering creativity and entrepreneurship while addressing societal challenges.
The Executive Director of PAMEPI Women in Technology Ghana, Fuseini Yakubu stated that the pressing issue of unemployment in Ghana and emphasized the pivotal role of equipping students with essential skills while providing them with opportunities to connect with peers they may not have encountered before.
“Unemployment is a major issue in Ghana here and the only way we can contribute towards addressing unemployment it to initiate this program to empower the youth to acquire the necessary skills while providing them the needed resources which would help develop themselves”
One of the startup coaches from RWTH Aachen University, Germany Florian Fuchs highlighted the quality of Ghana’s educational system as compared to other African countries and the need to support students’ technical ideas in Ghana.
“Ghana is always a good partner for Germany. Germany we now have a problem but do not have enough skill labor and Ghana has a super good education system especially as compared to other African countries. So, for we coming from a technical university in Germany we want to support technical ideas in Ghana”
A professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at UCC, Professor Daniel Agyapong from the University of Cape Coast urged participants to persevere and further develop their ideas into workable pursuits.
