3 Unilorites secure multimillion naira grant
By Muizdeen Adewole
Three undergraduates of the University of Ilorin have secured a combined grant of N150 million in the just-concluded Federal Government Students Venture Grant (FG-SVCG) competition.
This was disclosed last Thursday (July 16, 2026) in a statement by the Director of the Technical and Entrepreneurship Centre(TEC), University of Ilorin, Prof. Usman Adebimpe Raheem.
According to the statement, the winners are Abdullahi Usman Babatunde of the Department of Information Technology; Abdulrasaq Abdulrasaq Alatare, also of Information Technology, and Shehu Abdulrahman Magobon of Optometry and Vision Science. Each student won N50 million for their separate project proposal.
According to the Director, a total of 36,000 students across the country participated in the keenly contested grant, out of which only 45 ventures were selected based on quality of proposal, scalability, and potential for national impact.
Prof. Raheem noted that the University of Ilorin recorded the second highest number of winners nationwide.
Giving details of the winning projects, he said “OmiChain,” a decentralised service marketplace described as the “Uber” for clean water access was initiated by Mr Babatunde. The platform connects communities, local drillers, and donors directly, eliminating middlemen and empowering communities to source, fund, and build verifiable water infrastructure.
He added that Mr Alatare presented “FaceTrust AI,” an advanced decentralised digital identity and biometric verification platform. The enterprise-grade system replaces physical cards and paper-based IDs with a secure 3-second face scan. It uses liveness detection and extracts over 68 geometric facial landmarks to create a unique cryptographic “Faceprint” vector.
The Director said that Mr Magobon, a final-year student, proposed “Vecta,” a contactless payment infrastructure for campus transit with offline capability. Vecta is designed to replace cash on campus shuttles with contactless card payments that work without a network, thereby removing “change wahala” for students and ensuring faster and safer transactions for drivers.
Following the outstanding performance, Prof. Raheem has also been listed among the National Mentors for the FG-SVCG programme. The FG-SVCG project office stated that the University, through TEC, would continue to mentor the students in project management, scalability, and sustainability.
Reacting, Prof. Raheem appreciated the University of Ilorin management, under the leadership of the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Wahab Olasupo Egbewole, SAN, for creating an enabling environment and providing the necessary support that has allowed TEC to thrive and live up to its mandate.
In his reaction, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Wahab Olasupo Egbewole, SAN, expressed immense joy and pride in the achievement.
The Vice Chancellor encouraged the TEC to put robust monitoring structures in place to ensure the successful execution and sustainability of the three projects.
