Moving beyond concentrated urban startup hubs like Lagos and Abuja, the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) has partnered with AfriLabs to launch InnovateNaija. The ₦250 million national campaign is explicitly designed to discover, fund, and scale homegrown deep-tech inventions engineered by grassroots innovators across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The campaign is driven by a simple but urgent realization: breakthrough innovation in engineering, manufacturing, and clean energy is happening every day in informal markets, rural farms, and local classrooms, but these solutions routinely lack visibility, structured support, and capital. By combining NASENI’s mandate for indigenous industrialization with AfriLabs’ pan-African innovation network, the initiative aims to transition informal, localized brilliance into commercially viable, market-ready products.
To achieve complete subnational inclusivity and bypass traditional top-down development bottlenecks, the program has introduced a unique catalytic state grant mechanism. Rather than running purely as a federal intervention, AfriLabs and NASENI are engaging state governors directly to co-invest by providing matching or supplementary funds for their local inventors.
This model has already gained immediate subnational traction. The state governments of Abia, Kaduna, Plateau, and Enugu have actively signed on to the co-investment framework, establishing localized ownership and ensuring that structural support successfully cascades down to underserved regional inventors.
