Three young Rwandan entrepreneurs on Friday won the Rwanda Water and ICT Accelerator prize, worth $2000, after emerging the best in a competition that focused on coming up with innovative ways to solve water problems in communities.

The winning group came up with an early warning app to help residents of Musanze District cope with flooding and lightening.

Supporting more youths to come up with similar innovations will go a long way in addressing the high levels of unemployment as well as fast track the implementation of the country’s Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS2).

Although we have many platforms that encourage innovation among the youth, like kLab, a unique technology hub in Kigali, we need more of such to keep the momentum, especially as the country looks to create 200,000 jobs annually.

Facilitating and supporting the youth to come up with innovative solutions is the way to go.

However, one of the biggest challenges with innovation is that many a time people don’t look at the potential of the idea, until it has had a breakthrough.

But this should not discourage the youth from starting, because almost every great innovation in the world started as a small idea, which many people probably despised initially.

When the late Steve Jobs started out in a family garage few bothered to care about what he was up to. His work was not known beyond the doorway of his father’s garage, until he went on to revolutionise the way we live our lives. Yet he was not a software programmer, neither was he a hardware technician. But it was from his ingenuity and imagination, that Apple was born.

Any youth with the imagination and ingenuity to invent should be given all the support to put their imagination into reality.