TEF Alumni Wins Silver Medal & £10,000 Cash Prize From the UK Royal Academy
The UK Royal Academy Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, is an internationally coveted award that seeks to identify talented sub-Saharan African engineers from across disciplines who are applying their skillset to developing novel solutions to critical challenges within their communities.
This year, Ifediora Ugochukwu, an Alumni of the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme, received a silver medal and a £10,000 cash prize for his revolutionary work, Intelligence Meter (iMeter), a smart meter that allows electricity consumers and utility companies to monitor energy consumption and detect electricity theft. He now joins the ranks of fellow TEF Entrepreneur, Godwin Benson, who also won the prize last year in 2017 for his company Tuteria
Having experienced first-hand the billing nightmares suffered by his mother and other community members in his hometown of Aba, Nigeria, electrical engineer, Ifediora Ugochukwu sought out to create a disruptive electricity metering solution that would help combat against inaccurate billing estimations that result from meter tampering in Nigeria.
Working with his team at Fedironics Intelligent Metering Company they developed and launched Intelligence Meter (iMeter) in 2016. Through their smart meter technology and AMI software, users now only pay for the energy they use and can make payments and interact directly with utility providers from their mobile devices. These smart meters also feature detectors that allow energy providers to be immediately notified if there is any form of tampering with the devices.
Ifediora Ugochukwu was selected for the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme in 2017 from an application pool of over 93,000 applications from across the African continent. With the training, mentoring and first seed capital Ifediora has gone on to win many more awards, including the much-coveted UK Royal Academy Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation.
Ifediora attributes much of this success to the training and support he received from the Tony Elumelu Foundation and hopes that in the future he can continue to “bear the light of TEF” as he grows and reaches new heights with his business. We are so proud of Ifediora Ugochukwu’s success story and hope it will inspire others to apply their education, knowledge, and training to build strong businesses.