The HEART sectors include health, education, agriculture,
renewable energy and transportation. They represent the sectors where the bank
is focusing investments on in its HEART’s of Sterling strategy.
Head, Business Growth and Partnerships with Sterling Bank,
Mr. David Adebayo who disclosed this in a statement issued by the bank
recently, said recipients for the forthcoming awards includes founders who
applied through the Founder Institute application link and whose businesses
align with the Sterling HEART Fellowship guidelines.
Concerning eligibility, he added that a founder’s business
must fall within the HEART Sectors and the founder must have taken the
Entrepreneurship DNA assessment test and made it to the “Accepted” category to
be eligible for the award.
After receiving and reviewing successful applications, the
admissions team will be assigning founders to one of the following categories,
including: Accepted – these founders are invited to complete the final steps to
enrollment, and immediately get access to all course materials; Reviewing –
these are founders whose application or assessment is receiving a secondary
review, Finalist – Founders designated as Finalists are placed on the “Waiting
List” and their application will be re-reviewed at a later date, Declined –
Declined founders are not accepted to the programme as a result of low
performance across all the admissions criteria and the declined founders are
given access to free company-building materials from its programme and are
welcome to move their existing applications to future semesters for
consideration.
Adebayo said all founders who meet the preceding
requirements are ranked according to their performances and the best from each
of the sectors will be offered a Sterling Bank Fellowship to attend the Founder
Institute Lagos Virtual Spring programme.
He said the organisers of the fellowship are targeting
Nigerian start-up founders within the age bracket of 18 to 40 years of age who
are young tech founders and tech enthusiasts; especially those with ideas and
initiatives within the HEART sectors.
He said the under the Spring Program, the Founder Institute
(FI) will focus on helping tech or tech-enabled businesses at the idea and
pre-seed stages, including both solo-founders and teams, adding that this
includes established businesses that are at pre-funding, prototype and minimum
viable product stages as well as part-time founders with just ideas.
All applications to the Founder Institute program have been
human-reviewed by the admissions team, based at its Silicon Valley headquarters
with support from the team in Lagos, Nigeria. They are able to provide an
admissions decision via email within 72 hours.
On the entrepreneur DNA test which is included in the
assessment, spokesperson for the Founder Institute, Chukwuma Fred Agbata Jr
said that FI is serious about its belief that “Great Companies Start with Great
People.”
In fact, it has been working with leading social scientists
since 2009 to develop a test that identifies people with the raw skills and
personality traits conducive to entrepreneurship.
0 comments:
Post a Comment