FAQS

Thanks for your interest in the TehcEIG project and I believe young people like you are the ones who are clearly going to let this project take off.

Now, your team successfully identifies a real problem and comes up with marketable technological solution to the problem, as you pointed out, you will have to develop an MVP(minimum viable product), and present it to TechEIG for evaluation and consideration for funding.

Four possibilities exist at this point:

a). Standby Fund 1 (Conditionally Committed Reserve – Return on Investment is Expected):
That your team’s submitted MVP meets Tech E.I.G’s minimum requirement for financial support. From this point onwards you are directed to complete the necessary documents for the funding process for your project to begin.
The Tech E.I.G. youth teams will have to prove themselves by financing their ideas up to a demonstrable level with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), in order to be considered for this type of fund. Once the submitted MVP meets Tech E.I.G. requirements, depending on the donor conditions the youth team may receive this fund.
This fund is an assurance to the participating youth teams that when a great and marketable idea is generated, there will be financial support to see them through from the “idea” to the implementation stage. This is not a gift from the donor; there will be a return on investment in a successful venture. Legal documents will be prepared where the donor’s stake in the startup firm will be made clear.

b). Standby Fund 2 (Pre-qualification — Direct Youth Engagement):
This fund is set aside to support ideas and concepts with great potential but did not meet the Tech E.I.G. minimum requirement and/or conditions set by donors for Standby Fund 1. This Standby Fund 2 will be used to push those deficient but with great potential ideas, to a level where they can possibly meet funding requirements for Standby Fund 1. It must be noted that, at this point, the youth team would have invested in the idea themselves by funding it up to the development of the MVP and may have to go back to the drawing board with recommendations from “Tech E.I.G” and/or financiers.

c). Non-committed Funds
It is also possible that the Tech E.I.G. organization strongly believes in your MVP but based on donors’ conditions on available resources, the youth team may not qualify for Standby Fund 1 and Standby Fund 2. Under such circumstances, the Tech E.I.G. organization will make the most effort with all its contacts to showcase the MVP and seek non-committed funds to support the startup idea.

d). “No-Go” Submissions:
That your team’s submitted MVP does not meet Tech E.I.G’s minimum requirement for financial support. Such MVPs will be returned with comments and recommendations.

I hope this answers your question.

Info@TechEIG.org

Thanks for the input and I believe this is a very good beginning; you are in the planning stage and clearly you will need some help to get the idea going.

I believe there are a number of initiatives out there that you can research and tap into but this type of business does not directly fall in the scope of startups the Tech E.I.G. project wants to get into at this moment.

To be clear, we are about job creation through innovation; and although our focus is on technological solutions, we will work with other ideas and solutions which are non-technological but great and marketable. If it is not a technological solution, it really needs to be outstanding and a novel idea.

I hope this answers your question.

Info@TechEIG.org

Thanks for attending and thanks also for the kind words.

Of course, there will be the Naysayers!

Please let them understand that I did not relocate to Ghana because of this Tech E.I.G project; but upon seeing the situation on the ground, I was disturbed and was led into starting this initiative. The unemployment situation saddens me and I plan to dive deep into this project if I see that the focus population I am interested in helping are truly “hungry” and will dive in with me.

I am not worried at all about such comments; I believe they may have good reasons to doubt the messenger. You see, I have just begun testing the waters to see the response from this focus population.

While doing this, I am also mindful of the different groups of young people out there:

Type 1: There are those who will take a shot at any new thing in hopes to succeed. This group goes after success and they seek to become the employers.

Type 2: There are also, those who naturally don’t have the drive to start things on their own and would rather become employees. This second group always hopes that success finds them.

I am therefore, not expecting everyone to jump at this idea right away, just that my team and I will probably have to work a bit harder.

You see, this Tech E.I.G project that I am embarking on may sound too abstract to others to even ponder, yet I am taking the bull by the horn to see whether the stakeholders will support the concept and put in the necessary resources behind it. I am taking a shot at something new in Ghana in hopes to succeed and that is what I hope to see in our youth. Will a large number of the focus population give it a shot? Time will tell because I believe there are sleeping innovators in Ghana that I want to wake up.

I want to put the youth in this focus population on a path to form exploratory working teams to become Tech Entrepreneurs; and even if your team is unsuccessful to make a break, you would have learned techniques and processes to carry you forward to build startup firms in any field you want. So, I am interested in you becoming innovators, setting up firms and eventually hiring others and NO, this is not a “sham”.

The plan is to bring any willing participants in the focus population to be part of the collaborative experimentation of ideas, with a strong possibility to lead to serious business ventures.

I hope this answers your question.

Info@TechEIG.org

Yes, you are right, there are very interesting things going on in Africa but I believe it could be better. There are many sleeping innovators that I want to wake up.

The difference is that the Tech E.I.G. project seeks to provide our youth an environment to foster innovation!

We are not waiting for someone to innovate by chance to discover him or her. We seek to challenge and redirect the educated Ghanaian youth, especially the unemployed and underemployed, to refocus their interest in emerging technologies into becoming technology entrepreneurs.
We seek to achieve this by bringing the youths with complementary skills together to form exploratory tech start-up teams to at least try the processes and techniques Tech E.I.G. is advocating. The youth will leverage the skills of each other and in consultation with subject matter experts; they will seek marketable solutions to societal problems. The underlining understanding is that innovation leads to job creation and it will help address the unemployment challenge in Ghana.

If I understood your question well, then you were comparing this project to one which basically identifies successful innovators, right?
I hope this answers your question.

Info@TechEIG.org

You probably have had great ideas in the past but have never had the drive to move them forward, why don’t you just give this a shot?
I feel bad when not much in terms of innovation is being spoken of about Africans. I am simply looking for a way to stir up talents in the youth. You see, at the core of this project is innovation; not innovation to go into archives but to provide the focus population with the right framework and guidance; and also with the “Let’s do it” attitude to stir up the talents in the youth, with the underlining understanding that innovation leads to job creation and it will help address the unemployment challenge in Ghana.

Now, to be specific on your question, No, I am not here to “simply collect ideas from the youth and use them for some other purposes”
In fact, one of the workshops, which I will be conducting later on in the process is “Protection of the ideas, to ensure no one is exploited”
I hope after this workshop, you will feel secured sharing your ideas.

So don’t keep your ideas to yourself, they mean nothing when they remain in your head.
Do remember what Les Brown said?

“The graveyard is the richest place on earth”
He said this not because people were buried with gold but because many people go to their graves with “great ideas” since they don’t make the most effort to turn the ideas into reality.
Would you rather contribute to society while you can or take your ideas to the graveyard?

I hope this answers your question.

Info@TechEIG.org