After a year-long business incubation program at the University of Rwanda’s Grid Innovation and Incubation Hub, five innovators whose innovations were found promising were on May 19 funded to help implement their innovations. This is the second cohort of GIIH’s Business and Incubation Program. The Business Incubation Program (BIP) is a program run by the Grid Innovation and Incubation Hub operating at UR’s African Centre of Excellence in Energy for Sustainable Development (ACE-ESD). Its objective is to build a bridge between universities and various sectors of the economy in order to make research relevant to emerging and well-known issues that are still difficult to solve, and to support innovation and entrepreneurship through incubator and accelerator programs. The selection of five promising innovators is part of the rigorous process of identifying the most promising ventures, both in terms of impact and implementation potential, to be enrolled in GIIH venture startups. Throughout the year, incubates were paired with technical supervisors for mentorship. The innovative project which scooped the grand prize, Rwf5 million, is ‘Teaching Materials for Quality Education,’ a machine which produces teaching materials for nursery schools to ease teaching and ensure quality of education. “The funding will help me improve the capacity of my machine to be able to produce a set of materials in few seconds and make it electrical”, says Josee Ishimwe, the innovator. The Principal of the College of Science and Technology Dr. Ignace Gatare, commended all the innovators for championing solutions to existing challenges and encouraged those whose ideas were not selected to never give up. “Challenges are always seen as an opportunity. If, for each challenge, we could have an innovator, who might find it as an opportunity and find a solution, this would be much appreciated,” Gatare said, praising all partners who are consistently working with the Hub to make sure unique business concepts are developed and prepared for the market. The purpose of the Business Incubation Program is to discover, nurture, and potentially fund exceptional youths’ business ideas that are innovative, scalable, and have huge transformational potential, making them financially viable, freestanding and competitive in the open market. Grid Innovation and Incubation Hub (GIIH) is a research, innovation and entrepreneurship initiative hosted by the African Centre of Excellence in Energy and Sustainable Development (ACEESD) in the College of Science and Technology (CST) at the University of Rwanda.
