Upnepa Nigeria, How it all began.
Taslim Salaudeen and Abdurrahman Salaudeen are both self-taught business developer and software developer respectively, while on campus, they studied during the day and improved their skills by night.
Power supply at their hostel of residence, (off campus) was known to be very unstable, so most nights they spent more time in class (on-campus) where the power supply is more stable and reliable.
According to Taslim Salaudeen, Product Lead, Upnepa Nigeria.
We usually have several activities that could only be done at home, but 70% of these activities would require the presence of power supply. Most times we try guessing and risking going home with high faith that there would be power supply at that moment, but sadly we were often wrong, time and energy used to walk down from the campus to our hostel was wasted. This can be very discouraging as it inspires laziness, procrastination and reduces productivity.
We decided to give a critical thought on how we can combine our skills to solve this problem personally. After careful brainstorming, we came up with an idea to create an application that can remotely notify us whenever power is restored or disrupted at home, with this, we can know the power status of our homes right from any location.
After we created this application, we shared the platform with close friends and surprisingly we observed over 500 students joined this platform overnight (less than 12 hours).
It was then we noticed that we were not the only one having that same issue but almost everyone staying off campus who could not afford alternative power supply.
With this, most students can now make a firm decision when to head home and also know the closest location with power supply, saving many from wrong guesses, fruitless walk-time (from campus to home) and unnecessary waste of energy made us happy and fulfilled.
Soon after our invention was announced, many email request from students of other campuses, working-class youths living in semi-urban communities, students currently serving at NYSC camps all reached out to us requesting we expand our service to help them make the most out of the little power supply duration given to their homes and communities.
At this moment our mission is to keep tracking power supply and outages across several communities in Nigeria, make our tracked and analysed information available to its citizens that rely more on public power supply and also use this data as insights to innovative start-ups and companies trying to solve the problem of power instability in Nigeria, giving them insight on how to find those areas in need of their solution and what type of solution will fit best for these areas.
We are set to scale across several communities that have youths who are facing same challenges, give these youths real-time information and prediction on power availability and also put this area/community on the map for companies having alternative power supply solution to find them.
We believe with the right information, collaboration and support, we can only do better.
Website: www.upnepa.ng
Email: info@upnepa.ng
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/upnepa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/upnepa
Twitter & IG : @upnepa_ng
