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By Omodele Adigun
Sterling Bank Plc has said it will organise an award, known as the Sterling Heart Fellowship Award, for young tech founders whose businesses employ innovative solutions to tackle challenges in the HEART sectors. The award is targeted at tech founders within the age bracket of 14 and 16 and will hold in February under the Founder Institute Lagos Virtual Spring programme. The HEART sectors include health, education, agriculture, renewable energy and transportation. They represent the sectors where the bank is focusing investments on under its HEART’s of Sterling strategy. Head, Business Group and Partnerships with Sterling Bank, Mr. David Adebayo, who disclosed this in a statement issued by the bank recently, said guidelines for selecting founders whose businesses fall within the Sterling HEART Fellowship category include founders who applied through either the customised Sterling HEARTs Fellowship application link or the direct FI Lagos application link. He added that a founder’s business must fall within the HEART Sectors and the founder must have taken the assessment test and made it to the “Accepted” category to be eligible for the award.
Adebayo said all founders who meet the preceding requirements will be rank-ordered according to their performances and the best from each of the sectors will be offered a Sterling Bank Fellowship to attend the Founder Institute Lagos Virtual Spring programme. He advised prospective applicants to apply through https:fi.co,join/sterling and to prepare for an entrepreneur DNA test that is focused on ascertaining the entrepreneurship qualities and capabilities of the founders. He said the organisers of the fellowship are targeting Nigerian start-up founders within the age bracket of 14 and 16. The applicants must be young tech founders and tech enthusiasts, especially those with ideas and initiatives within the HEART sectors. He said the under the selection process, the Founder Institute (FI) will focus on helping tech or tech-enabled businesses at the idea and pre-seed stages, including both solo-founders and teams, adding th at this includes established businesses that are pre-funding and traction, MVP and prototype-stage projects as well as part-time founders with just ideas.
He said prospective applicants should meet the listed criteria to be eligible for admission into the Founder Institute Accelarator’s programme for founders. These are bio data, the state of the business (idea, product and service), highest level of education, years of professional experience, years of start-up experience, years of experience working on the idea, years of experience working on the idea, how many hours of work is expected on the idea on a weekly basis, primary skillset and key area of expertise and a short paragraph describing the idea.
