Our greatest resource is our youth; we have a goal to upskill and upscale their talent—Morakinyo

Oyebola Morakinyo is the general manager/tech lead at Cavista Technologies. She led the 3rd Cavista Technologies hackathon competition that took place at the Yaba College of Technology recently, with 27 teams of over 100 participants taking part in the event. Schools represented included Yaba College of Technology, University of Lagos, Lagos State University, and Lagos State University of Science and Technology. On the sidelines of the event, Morakinyo spoke about the competition. JOHN SALAU brings the excerpts:

Q: “We want to empower them and give them opportunities to grow while we create job opportunities.”

What inspired the hackathon?

The hackathon is our flagship program, and we run it every year based on our desire to ensure that we tap into the greatest resources we have in Nigeria, which are our youths. We are passionate about empowering our youths to be able to utilise technology to solve real-life problems, catching them young, which is why we do the hackathon every year. We just had the 3rd edition.

What is your plan to extend the competition to other places aside from Lagos State?

We have considered going up north to the federal capital, Abuja, and harnessing the youth collateral in that area, but for now, we want to keep our footprint in Lagos and then maybe expand to other schools around the Lagos environs, like Ogun State. While calling for entries, we had a lot of interest from schools in Ogun State, so perhaps next year we will take them into consideration and expand our scope.

How many teams competed in this event?

We had 27 teams, averaging four persons per team, which is over 100 people who competed. We had over 400 people registered for this event, but at the end of the day, we had just three teams who won, with the first, second, and third teams winning two million naira, one million naira, and five hundred thousand naira, respectively.

What exactly is the objective of hosting the hackathon?

The driving force for Cavista Technologies is empowering youth and creating jobs. We want to transform lives and create opportunities. Our main reason is to help them grow their skills; you heard the Minister of Youth Development talking about one youth, two skills. Secondly, create job opportunities. We are also looking for top talent.

One of the things that drives Cavista Technologies is that we are always looking out for top talent to hire. So, in this engagement, we are looking out for the ones who stand out. Even after the hackathon is done, we will continue to engage them and support them to be the best they can be. Some of the students are returning participants as they had competed in previous editions but did not win. We want to empower them and give them opportunities to grow while we create job opportunities. We also want people to understand the impact that Cavista Technologies is bringing to our communities and our country.

In another five years, where do you see the hackathon happening?

I see the hackathon happening across Africa because we have an office in Botswana, and we hope to extend to Southern Africa with our colleagues in Botswana. We also hope to cover more regions in Nigeria and involve more youths not resident or located in Lagos.

Aside from identifying raw talents, how well have you guided these talents in channeling their solutions to solving identifiable problems in society, thereby using technology to our benefit?

We provide tools, mentorship, exposure, networking, and more, all of which help us harness the growing power of technology and solve real-life problems in health, agriculture, and other areas of the economy where technology will make a difference.

The problem is that results are not usually aggregated, and we do not have a database for those who have benefitted. Is Cavista Technologies looking to have a database of all these talents you have been aggregating for the past two seasons?

Numbers are our thing, and data analytics is important to us. We are tracking all those who have participated with us. We hired two participants from the winning team last year. We are in technology, so data analytics is important to us. We track all the information we gather and monitor it as we progress. In the next five years or more, we can actually show you a timeline with data, an aggregation of what has been happening, and the impact the hackathon has been having on our community as a whole.

Read also: U.S, others collaborate to upskill 400 youth, women 

I believe this is not about profit, and are you taking this event as giving back to our communities? Is there a way you can reach out to other organisations so we can have a robust ecosystem?

We are spreading the word, and people have been reaching out to us to see how we can collaborate to make it bigger and better. Working with the Ministers of Youth Development and Arts, Culture, Tourism, and The Creative Economy is going to give us enough exposure to showcase what we have been doing. There is an opportunity to collaborate with anyone who is trying to achieve the same goals as we are.

The government seems to operate in silos when it comes to collaboration and having a unified database. How can you, as a private organisation, help to curate the database?

One of the things we have done successfully is to create WhatsApp groups for the participants and keep in touch with them even after the hackathon. We also send out surveys and get feedback from them. A lot of planning that went into this year’s event was based on feedback from the last event. There is a constant connection with the engineers and the participants, so the data is readily available. To be able to galvanise support from all the government parastatals, it shows that Cavista Tech is here for the long haul, and we shall continue to innovate on how we give back to our communities. We are very passionate about what we do.