Innovate Challenges (InChallenges) program is a national invention challenge for youth in Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Africa. The InChallenges program elicits project proposals from youth around the country and offers design workshops, seed funding, and mentorship to select finalists in order for them to develop their conceptual projects into tangible solutions that positively affect their community. The InChallenges program enhances critical and creative thinking, promotes civic engagement, strengthens Science Technology Engineering Arts & Mathematics (STEAM) literacies and develops entrepreneurship and leadership skills.
How it works
- Any Senior Secondary School in sierra Leone, Kenya or South Africa can nominate teams of 2-5 students to participate in the national InChallenge.
- The teams with the best proposals will be selected as finalist by an internationally acclaimed panel of judges and receive seed-funding to test and prove their solution to a well-defined local problem over a piloting phase
- Teams will need to provide details of how the projects will be developed and why the teams are well suited to accomplish their projects
- At the end of the competition cycle, the best finalist teams may be selected as winners, if sufficient progress has been made on their project
- Each winning team will receive additional funding to further develop and scale their project.
- The award money is not meant for personal use of team members and must be used only for the project
Project Proposals must include all the Following
- Contact Information: provide each team member’s name, your school’s name, address and detailed contact information
- Introduction: A brief overview of your Project
- The problem: What is the problem that you are trying to solve through this innovation
- Problem Motivation: why is this problem important to you?
- Proposed Solution: how are you planning on fixing this problem? And is it scalable
- Detailed Budget: What would the costs be to completing yours project
- Plan of Action: What steps are you planning on taking to make this project a reality?
Deadline: June 25, 2016
To apply and for more information visit here
