UNICAL Student To Represent Nigeria At Global Start-Up Contest

Janet Obey, a 23-year-old front-end developer and a radiography student of the University of Calabar, will represent Nigeria at the next year’s University Startup World Cup in Denmark whose prize is tagged at $15,000.

She qualified for the global contest after winning this year’s Nigerian Students Ventures contest held in Calabar.
Janet, Odey who hails from Cross River State was one out of the 19 Nigerian university students selected from 10,000 from across the country to pitch their business ideas before a panel of international business jurists and entrepreneurs in an event organized by an educational consultancy firm, Edugist, based in Lagos.

“I feel really excited to be announced as the winner of this competition.” Odey said.

Describing her idea she said: “What we do is to connect small holders farmers to the ready market, in order to sell their food at a subsidized rate and make quick returns”.

She was also selected alongside four other best performing to enjoy a postgraduate scholarship.

She pitched her ideas on what she described as Virtual Mart, which is a digital agricultural market for food fit for human consumption.

The second prize of N1m went to Iheanacho Chihazie of Babcock University in Osun State while the third prize of N500,000.00 went to Daniel Balmun from National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Jos Study campus.

Along the line, the sponsors decided to create another category called Social Impact for the business idea from Comfort Omiyale of Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu-Ode Ogun state as she ended up going with N1m for the social impact category.