The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF) are collaborating to promote 10 startups in order to broaden the use of the eNaira currency throughout the nation.
In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Saturday in Lagos, the AFF’s leader, Daniel Awe, made this statement.
He spoke during the eNaira Hackathon 2022’s Semi-Final Pitching on the sidelines.
Mr. Awe, noted that the top 10 startups, entrepreneurs, and innovators, were among the approximately 5,000 startups that enrolled for the eNaira Hackathon.
He claimed that the country needed to embrace eNaira more widely since it benefited economic activities, helped the digital economy, and increased financial inclusion.
“eNaira was introduced by CBN in 2021 as a digital currency and a lot of people have asked the question, what is actually the usefulness of this eNaira?
”A lot of people have also criticised eNaira, that they prefer cryptocurrency, but the truth is that eNaira is going to be a successful product when there are use cases when people are able to see problems it is going to be solving,” he said.
”So the hackathon is a platform where innovators, developers, entrepreneurs, coders come together, to solve problems, to create innovative ideas.
“When we layer that on eNaira, it means we brought in different players within the ecosystem – developers, coders, innovators, entrepreneurs, to come up with different ideas, different use cases, that they can leverage on eNaira.
”This is so that the consumers of eNaira will now see the benefit of eNaira, they will have the opportunity to see the problem that eNaira will solve,” he said.
According to Mr. Awe, the CBN’s duty is to simply establish a platform for fintech startups, and the entrepreneurs’ role is to establish an ecosystem in order to produce ideas that will be advantageous to the entire financial services industry.
He claimed that the hackathon received applications from roughly 5,000 fintech ecosystem participants.
According to Mr. Awe, there were initially roughly 175 teams left, and 70 were left for the quarterfinal pitching.
He stated that following the semi-final, 20 teams will be chosen for the finals, of which the top 10 would receive support to increase eNaira adoption in the country.
”Now, these top 10 potential businesses when they come out of the final of the hackathon, there is a cash prize for them.
”I think number one is going to get 5 million eNaira. Number two is getting 3 million eNaira. Number three, 2 million and the remaining, the next ten will get 1 million eNaira.
“Afterwards, those top 10 will resume in the AFF accelerator programme, whereby some of them will get some funding to start up their businesses on their ideas,” he said.
Mr Awe said that they would be guided by CBN and AFF.
He claimed that as they developed successful business models using their innovations, jobs would be produced and the use of the eNaira would rise.
According to Mr. Awe, it was possible that these individuals might generate revenue.
