AFRICAN CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE HOLDS “SEED GRANTS AWARD” CEREMONY FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA NSUKKA

From Chris Ugwuja, Nsukka

The African Centre for Excellence for Sustainable Power Energy and Development (ACE-SPED), University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in its award ceremony in the Faculty of Engineering, on  2nd April 2024, honoured 12 selected UNN Students research team. These students have generated innovative entrepreneurship ideas for Sustainable energy for power development that would lead to significant commercialization and equally create scalable solutions and address energy and power problems in the Sub-region.

The ACE-SPED seed grants for Sustainable energy and power development innovation is aimed at encouraging, honouring and promoting entrepreneurship and innovation across sub-saharan Africa.

The Principal aim of the ACE/SPED Innovation Seed grants was to furnish monetary backing for research endeavours that correspond with the innovation objectives of the centre, specifically in domains like electric power system development, renewable energy, waste-to-energy conversion, energy conservation, energy management, energy resource assessment, forecasting and sustainable energy in which each student research group received one million Naira. This would be paid in three installments: 

 1) Yesterday – ₦500 thousand Naira

 2) After a report of a substantial progress – ₦300 thousand Naira

  3) Finally, when the project is completed – ₦200 thousand Naira.

Speaking during the award ceremony, the Director, Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Power and Energy Development, Prof. Emenike Chinedozi Ejiogu said that the Centre has several mandates, noting that one of the mandates concerned entrepreneurship. He said that the awardees consisted of 12 student teams adding that 5 came from the students of the centre while 7 came from the general University community. He enjoined the students to subject themselves to press enquiry, since the pressmen were here so that they could hear from the horse’s mouth on the expectations of the society on the universities. Speaking further, he added that the grant would not end in only one million Naira and encouraged them to work very hard so that the donors could still give them more assistance, stressing that at a stage, it would not be them alone that would be involved but even our industrial partners would be involved.

Prof. Ejiogu noted that the idea of the sponsorship was to make sure that their ideas see the light of the day, noting that the national economy has a problem because of the crises in the exchange rate market, revealing that there was no country that can develop without the inputs from the intellectuals, none has ever developed without their institutional inputs in the history of development.

He also noted that the Federal Government could not fund the universities alone because they also take care of Agriculture, Health, among others, adding that Government couldn’t fund universities 100% across the world and some parts of the funding comes from the Alumni through endowments and other innovative funding sources

Engr. Ejiogu, also revealed that being a student of UNN was enough identity for them to excel because of the UNN brand name, saying that the name alone was an advantage for them and that with the brand name they were good to go and further observed that the students might say, if we have funding, we would have done this and that, now you have funding, adding that the ball was now on their court and that this was the first time the university was getting this type of funding.

In her vote of thanks, one of the beneficiary, Eze, Amuche Modesta from the Dept. of Biochemistry, who was involved in the production of Bioethanol from agro wastes said that they were happy for the proposal grants and prayed God to bless the donor and to help them to actualize their dreams.

Also in his vote of thanks, Okorie,  Chibuike Innocent of the Dept. of Metallurgical and Material engineering who would be involved in Design of portable Solar generator, appreciated God for the opportunity to participate and also prayed God to help them actualize their dreams on behalf of the group.

In a press interview with Eze Modesta on the use of their project to the society, she said that it would be used for cooking, empowering generators and even motorcycles and vehicles since it was an alternative energy.