According to its website Enspire is amongst the major initiatives of Abuja Technology Village Free Zone Company (ATV). It seeks to stimulate economic growth and sustainable job creation in Nigeria through innovation, entrepreneurship, enterprise development and technology commercialization by providing training, mentoring, networking opportunities, infrastructure and access to finance among others. Enspire started as a program in 2009 and re-launched into a full hub in 2013. Their aim is to foster the growth of businesses and guarantee the success of innovative solutions by providing complete business support services to companies or individuals under its program. To fulfill its vision of becoming the major contributor in encouraging entrepreneurship in Nigeria and of becoming Africa’s leading technology business incubator. Enspire has lined up series of activities;
Business Clinics: Monthly sessions for entrepreneurs and startups. Here a trivial challenge in the startup world is picked and a seasoned facilitator from the hubs database is called upon to address it with the startups, providing practical approaches to tackling these challenges. This event usually falls within the time lapse of April, May, June, July, August, and September every year.
Hive: This is a meet up sessions of a dynamic blend of tech lovers, freethinker’s startups. Here societal problems are evaluated and solution models are created to tackle them. It holds on every Friday from April to September each year.
Next Economy Acceleration Program: This is a four (4) Months acceleration program funded under the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry LEADs program to train and equip Ten (10) Small businesses to become revenue vibrant. Its time lapse fall between May to September annually.
Incubation Program: A Series of classes and coaching lectures for startups run by the hub. Startups are incubated from their idea stage to create minimum viable product (MVP). It starts every April and runs till August each year.
Abuja Developers Meet up: Monthly meet-up session of Abuja developers and players in the Abuja tech ecosystem.
Enspire Incubator Abuja partnered with other tech centered organizations and companies to host some successful meet ups and hackathons which have proved to produce practical results. Some of the result was the Ignition Week which was a series of weeklong activities geared towards rekindling the entrepreneurship zeal amongst members of the Ecosystem. There is also the Code workout classes organized in conjunction with ISPAYA to teach programmers skills and techniques in getting placed in topnotch IT firms by sorting, identifying and solving problems reeled out by such firms. For Loop is also a meet-up session that saw Lagos developers and Abuja developers sharing about their technology stacks, product managements and resources. The hub also hosted developers within the Abuja ecosystem on the 18th and 19th May, 2016 to the annual Google IO extended event. Enspire in conjunction with Hackers.IO also held sessions to facilitate the development of Hardware developers. This session seeks to create awareness as regarding embedded systems and micro units.
Enspire has incubated startups like surplai.me, Food-i-like.com, Hello Tractor, Mexoom Healthcare City, Learn Code Lab amongst others. The Founder of Enspire Mr Bankole Oloruntoba who is also the Co-founder of The Networks of Innovators and Incubators of Nigeria(NINE) will in partnership with Emerge Tech Africa host the first Startup Arewa events which is scheduled to hold in early November. No doubt the role of Enspire Incubator Abuja in the development of the Northern Tech ecosystem and the nation at large is unquestionable.
This was originally posted on www.thenortherner.com.ng