All 60 Nigerian innovators pitch live for 5m prize at NASENI’s FutureMakers Week

THE NASENI Innovation Hub (NIH) commenced FutureMakers Week on Monday August 24, as all 60 shortlisted innovators from last week’s regional Virtual Hackathon move into the programme’s live Pitch Sessions where they’ve begun presenting solutions built over four days of intensive prototyping to a\panel of judges and industry leaders.

The Pitch Sessions. which runs from August 24 through August 27, 2026, will be streamed live and open to the public on YouTube, X, Instagram, and Facebook. Innovators from all six geopolitical zones.

North West, North Central, North East, South West, South South and South East will present the prototypes they built during the Virtual Hackathon, which ran from August 17 to 20. Winners from each zone will receive N1.5 million, N1 million and N500,000 prizes respectively.

The top six zonal winners will then progress to pitch at the NASENI Invention Fest, competing for a N5 million grand prize, a fully funded study tour abroad, and scholarships to two leading Nigerian universities.

“Today, the ideas our FutureMakers have spent four days building will move from prototype to public
stage,” said Executive Vice Chairman/CEO of NASENI, Khalil Suleiman Halilu.

READ ALSO: Sixty young innovators begin FutureMakers by NASENI Hackathon

Hub Manager, NASENI Innovation Hub, Busola Beckley Perez- Folayan, said this is the moment that matters most watching young Nigerians defend solutions to problems their own communities face.”
“Today, these ideas stop being confined to a whiteboard or a pitch deck, In the South West, a child is presenting an AI-powered
learning platform that closes the education access gap for underserved communities.

“In the North East, a young girl is presenting a life-saving emergency alert device connecting vulnerable communities directly
to the authorities. In the North Central region, a child is presenting a platform built to ensure vulnerable populations gain reliable access to nutritious food. These are three of the sixty ideas our FutureMakers built entirely from the safety of their homes and today, Nigeria gets to see them.”

Beyond the prize money, winners gain access to NASENI’s SparkLab prototyping facility, a study tour abroad with the EVC/CEO of NASENI, structured technical training, and personalised mentorship reinforcing
FutureMakers’ positioning as a talent pipeline rather than a one-off competition.

The programme is delivered in collaboration with academic and ecosystem partners including MIVA Open University and the African University of Science and Technology (AUST), Abuja. The NASENI Innovation Hub is a member of the
AfriLabs network.