ICT Expert Advocates Entrepreneurial Studies

Vice Chancellor, Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Prof Barineme Fakae (right), explaining the working of the university’s Computer Hall to members of The Tide Editorial Board, during a facility visit to the university last Wednesday. Photo: Chris Monyanaga

An Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) expert, Mr Uche Okafor, last Tuesday called on the Federal Government to put more programmes in place that would encourage entrepreneurial studies at all levels of education in the country.
Okafor made the call at the formal presentation of his ICT appliance, Traffic Butter Mobile APP, in Lagos.
The application, which is currently more popular on twitter, was designed and developed in 2010, and was motivated by the need to deliver to Nigerian road users, situations on the network of roads within the Lagos metropolis, especially at rush hours.
Traffic Butter Mobile App is a community-driven mobile App, with updates being crowd-sourced by users, as well as by the Traffic Butter team.
The primary feature of the application is the precise presentation of traffic updates on the homepage and the map landing pages.
Others include geo-location, Chat, Comments with location stamp for credibility on traffic reporting and keyword search.
Users can choose to follow roads that interest them and receive notifications when there are new incidents on the roads they follow.
According to him, a lot of the upcoming entrepreneurs have most of their ideas die at the incubation stage, as a result of lack of motivation.
“I must say that the Federal Government has done a lot lately with its YouWin programme generally targeted at equipping the youth with skills. “But I still think a lot needs to be done in the area of encouraging small entrepreneurs, as well as promoting Technical and Vocational education.
“It is clear that besides our natural resources, one of our resources that is underutilised are our intellectual resources in the area of technology.
“So there is an urgent need for government to support technology entrepreneurs, as it is obtained elsewhere,” he said.
He, however, cited funding as a major challenge for technology entrepreneurs to take their ideas from the conception stage to their final product stage.