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Once, while presenting his water-powered engine design to the director of a national research institute, Ashoka Fellow Tochukwu was met with skepticism that a Nigerian could produce such innovative work.
This response was a turning point, reinforcing his resolve to challenge the status quo.
Today, he is the founder of Clintonel Innovation Centre (CIC), Nigeria’s first engineering-focused tech hub, STEM center, and hardware startup incubator.
His work addresses what he calls Africa’s “engineering vacuum”, a structural gap that keeps the continent stuck in consumption rather than production.
“Virtually every engineering product that we consume is foreign,” he explains. “We are essentially consumers. And yet we have millions of engineering graduates in Africa.”
Systemic Problem: An Economy That Doesn’t Produce
Nigeria’s economic challenge is rooted in an absence of engineering capacity.
Without the ability to design and manufacture locally, the country imports almost everything, from machines to everyday products, losing both job opportunities and economic value.
“The economies that are powerful today are strong in engineering,” Tochukwu says.
But Nigeria’s education system rarely teaches students how to apply scientific knowledge. It is theory-heavy and exam-focused. “Science becomes boring and unproductive,” he says.
“People can pass exams but cannot apply what they’ve learned.”
This disconnect leaves companies unable to find competent engineers and young engineers unable to find meaningful work. It is, as Tochukwu puts it, “a chicken and egg situation.”
CIC’s Four-Pillar Solution
Tochukwu designed CIC to attack the problem from all angles: education, talent development, startup incubation, and ecosystem-wide advocacy.
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STEM Education for Secondary Schools
CIC has trained over 2,000 students and teachers across 60 schools, and developed six STEM kits that show students the real-life applications of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
The kits are expected to be in schools across the country, and CIC’s STEM4Girls initiative has already inspired 102 girls to pursue STEM careers.
Engineering Education for Universities
CIC provides hands-on capacity building for lecturers and students, training more than 1,000 participants across 30 tertiary institutions.
Students come to CIC for internships, while CIC teams travel to to different campuses equipping engineering students and lecturers with industry-relevant skills.
Through this, CIC bridges the skills gap between academia and industry.
Supporting Startups and Inventors
CIC has incubated 13 engineering startups, helped over 20 inventors develop their products, and supported founders to raise more than $300,000 in external funding.
These startups are building hardware products, from manufacturing equipment to energy solutions, that were previously only imported.
Building a National Engineering Ecosystem
Tochukwu has helped convene the country’s first hardware convention.
He founded Hardware Nigeria Community (HNC), the national ecosystem of inventors, innovators, engineers, startups and investors, now a nationally registered association with elected executives, and co-founded the Africa Makerspace Network.
His advocacy focuses on policy reform, STEM, engineering education, and local production.
The jewel of this effort is The Nigerian Genius, an annual national engineering competition that brings together top students from across the country for two weeks to solve real, urgent national problems.
Several participants of the Nigerian Genius program have developed groundbreaking solutions: One team designed a device that generates electricity from household water flow, powering homes as people wash their hands or take a shower.
Another prototyped robots for safe farming: In response to violent attacks on farmers, they designed remote-controlled farming robots that allow cultivation from a safe distance.
“These are technologies solving national problems,” Tochukwu says proudly.
A role for large tech companies
Tochukwu is part of the cohort of leading social entrepreneurs supported by Lenovo through its global partnership with Ashoka, bringing not just funding, but cutting-edge technology and communications expertise.
Tochukwu sees a natural alignment between global tech companies’ missions and the work being done at CIC.
For him, collaboration could take many forms: providing laptops and devices that schools currently lack, or offering funding and technical expertise to design and build more STEM learning kits, while supporting the mass production of these kits.
He also highlights the potential for multinational tech companies to invest in hardware-focused startups emerging from CIC’s incubator, helping them turn prototypes into real products.
When asked what he imagines a successful Nigeria looks like, Tochukwu’s vision is expansive:
“I see a Nigeria where we process our natural resources locally, add value, export products, and create employment. A Nigeria where people all over the world buy technologies designed and built here.”
Ashoka and Lenovo are partnering to make technology a transformative force for positive change through social innovation, working closely with Ashoka Fellows from across the world. Learn more.
The insights, ideas and messages in this article have all been extracted and developed by humans. An AI assistant supported the writing.
