Igbaja Team Wins Big as Kwara Excels at 2025 National Kids Innovation Challenge

By Tunde Akanbi, Ilorin

Students from the Kwara Coding and Digital Literacy Programme have excelled at the 2025 National Kids Innovation Challenge organised by The Destiny Trust in Lagos.

Kwara State was represented by two teams — Agritech Mini Dashboard from Igbaja Centre and VBOT Innovators from Queen Elizabeth School, Ilorin.

The Agritech Mini Dashboard team emerged among the top three winners with a solution designed to support farmers through market price updates, weather forecasts, planting insights, and real-time security reporting.

The competition featured 10 finalist teams from across Nigeria, showcasing innovative solutions in agriculture, health, education, and connectivity.

Out of the 10 national finalists, the Igbaja Agritech Mini Dashboard team emerged among the top three winners with a solution designed to empower farmers with curated market prices, weather forecasts, planting insights, and real-time security incident reporting.

Their project, developed with data from the Igbaja community, emphasises localisation, scalability, and food security. Notably, it was the only non-hardware-based project to break into the top three a testament to the depth of innovation coming from Kwara students.

VBOT Innovators also impressed with their health-focused chatbot, designed to analyse symptoms, provide recommendations, and guide patients to nearby medical facilities with emergency contact integration.

This year’s challenge attracted nine project entries from Kwara, with four advancing to the pre-demo stage and two making it to the finals, underscoring the state’s growing reputation as a hub for youth-driven innovation.

Special Assistant to the Governor on Digital Innovation, Kayode Ishola, described the success as ”a reflection of Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq’s investment in digital literacy and human capital development.”

He noted that, for the first time, government school students from Kwara are competing and winning on the national innovation stage.

The Kwara Coding and Digital Literacy Programme, implemented by the State Government with support from Kidstech Africa, continues to nurture creativity, problem-solving, and technical skills among young people.

The winning projects will also feature at the upcoming Kwara Coding & Digital Literacy Exhibition in October 2025.