JAN visits The Guardian, presents national competition winners

Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN) recently visited The Guardian Newspapers with the winning school of its national competition, Caro Favoured College, Ajegunle. They will be representing Nigeria at the international JAN competition in Zimbabwe in December 7th, 2016.

The senior secondary students; Dikko Bright, Virginia Anthaesuis, Ogechi Amadi and Ifediora who presented their winning project, a dot matrix energy display to staff of The Guardian present said the technological tool was borne out of a need in their environment. They added that following the need for shop owners in Ajegunle to advertise their products, as prospective buyers find it difficult identifying what they sell, its ability to function at night even without electricity to attract buyers led to working of the project.

Speaking on the activities of JAN, its Marketing and Communications Manager, Tobe Ifeanyi noted that the organisation is run on three pillars of success; entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy. “The students here today are under the entrepreneurship pillar called the company programme which teaches secondary school students to start up a company from raising capital, create annual report, selling shares, paying dividends and they have to come up with a viable product and sell.

“The company programme runs for a period of one school year with the support of a mentor volunteer which supports them with project ideas, concepts and implementations but they do not execute the projects for them. A lot of students who have gone through this programme and are in the university and still maintaining their businesses following the JAN model.”

She said that JAN is involved in regional and national competitions; while the regional competition following the regions in Nigeria competes with about 18-24 schools, the top three regional winners proceeds to the national competition level, where the winner will compete with about 20 other JA nations.