Over 14 mock companies formed by students in secondary schools in Rivers State contested last weekend to the only slot to represent Rivers State in the national company pitch for 2022.
After a keen competition, Octagram Achievers Company from Redeemer’s International Secondary School in the Garden City stood head and shoulders ahead of the others.
Gifted Hands Achievers Company from Community Comprehensive School in Port Harcourt took the second position while Ambitional Achievers Company Bonny Island who thrilled the audience with their presentation bother on seafood and lighting gadgets took the third position.
Octagram produced a gas smoke detector which seemed to impress the judges. They also produced a honey candy as another product. They did a corporate social responsibility project that targeted 10,000 plastic waste disposal that could fetch N468,000 in 52 weeks with extended estimate of N9.3m in 20 years.
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The president of the mock company, Wowoe Tega, led five vice presidents to the contest which held at the event hall of the Corpus Christi Catholic Church on Kaduna Street in Port Harcourt.
The 40-member firm said it sold 44 shares to raise the capital with which they operated between October 2021 and July 2022. The president said the gas smoke detector was a good product that has sold well in the school due to ability to detect smoke around gas and save lives.
The panel of judges led by an engineer, Toba Oyedele, including Chioma Ukonu (PhD), Kenneth Oforji, Benson Abu and Chijioke Oji, seemed to have no difficulty picking on Octogram.
The coordinator of the contest and head of JAN in the region, Emma Oturu, said JAN was founded in 1990 abroad, but took off in Nigeria in 1999. He said the theme for 2022 is ‘Fueling Change Makers’ with the aim of making citizens go away from complaining to solving problems.
He said the money is in solving problems of the society. Sponsors of the event were mentioned as Citi Bank, First Bank, and NLNG Cooperative Society Limited.
The judges almost turned to lecturers as they drilled the students and showed them every single trick in the books on how to build annual company reports.
Those who made speeches urged the students to take entrepreneurship very seriously so as to find alternative sources of income as they grow. Others revealed how some students now train themselves through legitimate income sources they discovered in school.
The successful company (Octogram) was asked to go for deeper training that would stand the test of time in the national contest.
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