It was on a cloudy morning of Saturday April 9 2016, when the gates of Makerere University School of Public Health-ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) opened as early as 8:00am EAT to participants who came to participate in the Training Of Trainers (ToT) workshop for the Technovation Challenge 2016.
This event was attended by 60 participants including; teachers from different Secondary Schools, Entrepreneurs, RAN staff, previous winners of the Technovation Challenge 2015 and well-wishers. It was another rich engaging, knowledge generation, sharing and networking opportunity for all the participants.
The workshop’s objective was to empower coaches, mentors and trainers with the 12-week Technovation Challenge 2016 curriculum that broadly emphasizes various skills application development, pitching, videography, Video editing, and business modeling among others. Participants were motivated to apply for the different roles to support implementation of the activities contribution to the success of running the challenge.
Sheila Agaba, RAN Eastern Africa Resilience Innovation Lab Technical Officer shared an overview about RAN and the role it is playing in the Technovation Challenge. She encouraged all participants to be passionate about implementing this challenge in schools so that we can all change the face of female participation in science, technology and innovation. “Just like the males actively participate in innovation, we need as many and even more females in innovation as the males. The females too add spices to all that we do and we never want to miss this value add. Let us all join efforts in attracting more females to Science, Technology and Innovation,” added Sheila.
Deborah Naatujuna, RAN Engagement Manager enlightened the participants about the different opportunities that RAN offers and encouraged them to grab those opportunities but also bring others on board. She also emphasized that Technology is not the only way to solve problems in the communities and that there are a number of local solutions that could be created in order to strengthen resilience in communities. She additionally urged participants to always think outside the box, if the box is actually there, in order to remain creative and innovative in all that we do for the benefit of those in need.
As the event concluded, coaches of the different Secondary Schools were identified, assigned a mentor and trainer who would support them throughout the Technovation challenge 2016 process.
Resolutions that were made during the ToT workshop included;
- Participants would be given 8 weeks instead of the earlier stated 6 weeks to undertake the Technovation Challenge 2016 curriculum.
- The challenge commences on Monday April 11, 2016 and final submissions will be received by Close of Business June 6 2016 at 11:59pm EAT
- The coaches will begin to recruit and register teams using the Technovation platform here. The students will need to register as a team; one of the team members (team leader) can fill in the information for the rest of the team members. The students who register as individuals will be grouped-up with others from the same institution if they are interested.
- The 12 weeks course starts on Monday April 18 2016 and will run for the next 8 weeks. Course participants will be covering 2 course units per week until May 29 2016. Participants are not restricted to these particular timelines however; all are encouraged to work within the time allocated to the Technovation Challenge 2016 activities.
- Since Technovation is a self-starter program, all Secondary Schools are requested to start the program on their own without the help of the Trainers. All coaches are expected to kick-start at least the first 4 course units on their own, and then the trainers come in to assist in clarifying the technical issues later in the course of the program.
- The Mentor-Coach-Trainer matching that had been done during the training workshop will be updated and shared out to ascertain what was actually agreed upon and captured. The RAN Technovation Challenge 2016 Team will be sharing more details of the schedule for the Secondary School visits here after.
The Technovation Challenge gives an opportunity to young ladies to develop solutions to address communities’ most pressing challenges. These ideas/innovations are solicited from different disciplines ranging from Health, Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, Education and ICT among others. All ideas are welcome!
For more information, visit: www.technovationug.wordpress.com and Technovation Uganda
“Let us further build and develop the communities with and for the girl child!”
S
