At Buea culture, creatives, & innovation confab: Stakeholders urge young techies to prioritise creating value to attract funds.

Engineer Ayuk Etta, Chief Executive Officer, CEO, of Mountain Hub alongside others made the call in Buea on Saturday August 31. This was at the close of the Buea Innovation Week. It featured a special programme dubbed: “Buea Culture, Creatives, and Innovation Conference”.

The weeklong programme started on Sunday August 25, 2024, with a 48-hour Hackathon on the theme: “Empowering the creative economy with innovative technology to boost cultural exports”. 

It featured masterclasses on hackathon hacks, how to win-Research Mindsets when designing digital products.

Participants, most of them university students, were trained on how to pitch start-ups or small businesses to rally supporters or raise funding. Hacking, creating tech solutions, developing the solutions into viable businesses and sustainability amongst others, were also tackled.

The programme also featured different panel discussions on "Innovative Design and Fashion for Cultural Exports" with a focus on Art, Design, Fashion, and Painting. 

It brought together stakeholders such as designers, artists, and technologists to explore how innovation can elevate design and fashion to a global audience. 

Addressing participants during the programme, Engineer Ayuk Etta, told them that technology has made it easy for young people who dream of going out of the country to be able to do it with their keyboards.

The Buea Innovation Week was thus an opportunity to teach young people to do things rather than talk about things. The motivation behind the innovation week, which started with a 48-hour hackathon involving young people forming teams and working together to propose solutions to particular challenges. 

On his part, the Deputy Resident Representative of UNDP in Cameroon, Martin Hart Hansen, said supporting such an initiative was part of their drive to offer young people an opportunity a chance to excel.

He promised continuous support and coaching to the young techies to ensure that their solutions develop into viable businesses. The programme in Buea enabled young techies to pitch technology solutions to empower the creative industry in Cameroon and export culture. 

Speaking to the press after the closing ceremony, Engineer Etta said participants were able to develop interesting platforms to help people in the creative industry.

They developed web and mobile applications for digital arts, fashion, cuisine, folklore, and film and music distribution. 

“We had a platform to help in developing folklore music, poetry to enable artists produce and project their works for people around the world to be able to look at them and be able to support them and another one promoting Cameroonian cuisine,” Engineer Etta explained.

Given the reach and possible impact of the projects developed and presented by the participants, the organiser Engineer Etta said working with the United Nations Development Programme with support the solutions created by the young people to develop them into viable businesses.

“We want to have 70 new start-ups that will emerge from this journey so that we can support them for one year to enable them to become viable businesses,” he explained

The 125 participants were divided into 25 groups to develop solutions to various problems. The three best groups received cash prizes with the best group taking home 1.2 million FCFA and 800,000 FCFA and 600,000 FCFA for the second and third respectively. A fourth prize was given to the best female team worth 250,000 FCFA

This story was first published in The Guardian Post issue N0:3217 of Monday September 02, 2024