The Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN) in line with their mission and vision statements under the administration of Engr. Dr Felicia Agubata organized the maiden edition of the APWEN Invent it / Innovate Challenge in 2019 from which Three (3) winning teams emerged – Team Alpha, Team Gold, and Team Oxygen, all made-up of undergraduates students. These students were awarded their prizes during the Investiture of the 16th President of APWEN in Lagos, recently.
During the award of their cash prizes the president of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Engr. Babagana Mohammed donated the sum of 2 million naira to the committee in charge of the initiative and the winners. Speaking to him directly, he explained his motive for such a gesture, stating that “I want to encourage innovation and as I said in my inaugural speech, it does not matter to me where you are coming from, you can be an engineer or anybody, once you have an innovative skill, I will support you, and I do not mean supporting you with 100,000 naira (hundred thousand naira), no, that is not money. If I am going to give a person money for their skill, I will give them good money, because once I give the person money and they hold the check, it gives the person the feeling of knowing that yes, they have done something. That is how to go about it and that is why I gave them two million naira”. He went on to say that he would be giving them more funds in addition to the two million in an attempt to “deliberately encourage them in other to get the best out of them”.
Furthermore, speaking to a representative of the winning team, Team Alpha, Ukeme Umana from Covenant University, she shed light on the project they proposed and the solution it provides. Based on the premise of plastic waste and the challenges it poses to the environment, the team of three, along with their academic supervisor, came up with a blueprint to convert plastic waste to fuel, to be used in automobiles. Speaking, she stated that “we came up with a pilot plant that converts plastics to fuel to be used in vehicles and even generators with special modifications”. To show appreciation, she thanked the association for the opportunity to be part of such an initiative as the innovation holds several benefits to the world and one that would be appreciated in years to come.
The second runner-up team and the only team with a male member – Team Oxygen, from Rivers State University, also emerged as winners for their innovative solution to plastic pollution. Speaking to one of the team members Nze Roi, she stated that their project had to do with “the utilization of plastic waste in the manufacturing of bricks and pavement blocks” and highlighted the procedures for the production which simply had to do with gathering the plastics, cleaning and sun-drying, melting, and finally putting the mixture in molds to form the bricks”. She stated that the finished product can be used for flooring. Subsequently, she stated that the money they have just received will be “used to carry out further tests on the product which they have obtained to determine the strength and capacity it can carry”. She also appreciated APWEN and the NSE for the opportunity and the efforts.
