Client / Partner: MTN Nigeria × TechQuest STEM Academy
Scope: 700+ secondary school students · Fully virtual · Nationwide
Our Role: Programme Manager, end-to-end delivery
Before large-scale virtual programmes became common, the MTN mPulse Hackathon was a live test of whether a national youth innovation competition could work entirely online, with secondary school students, not developers, as the audience. MTN engaged TechQuest to design and prove the model. Kelvin Umechukwu led the implementation.
The challenge was not just logistical. Secondary school students are a fundamentally different audience from adult developers. The challenge framework had to be accessible without being trivial, the facilitation had to hold attention across a virtual environment, and the onboarding process had to work for participants with varying levels of digital familiarity. Kelvin and the consonance programs team structured the challenge architecture with this in mind, managed onboarding for over 700 registered students, coordinated the facilitation and judging across the competition, and oversaw the award of 15 laptops to winning participants.
The programme delivered its proof of concept. It demonstrated that large-scale, rigorous innovation challenges could be run entirely virtually for young Nigerians, without a physical venue, without a Lagos-only footprint, and at a scale that would have been logistically impossible in person.
Key Outcomes
- 700+ secondary school students engaged nationally in a fully virtual format
- 15 students awarded laptops for top-ranked solutions
- Successful proof-of-concept for large-scale virtual youth innovation programmes in Nigeria
