More than 1,600 university students from across Nigeria applied for the 2026 edition of the GTCO HabariPay Squad Hackathon as young developers unveiled artificial intelligence-driven solutions targeting unemployment, financial fraud, agricultural inefficiencies and workplace productivity.
The competition, organised on Saturday by HabariPay, the fintech subsidiary of Guaranty Trust Holding Company Plc, reflects the growing interest among Nigerian youths in using artificial intelligence to solve practical economic and social challenges rather than simply consumer-facing digital tasks.
According to the Managing Director of HabariPay, Eduofon Japhet, more than 1,600 applications were received from undergraduates across Nigerian universities, with over 600 participants shortlisted based on technical competence, prior projects and collaborative capability.
“We had over 1,600 submissions and selected more than 600 participants based on the quality of their teams, their technical skill sets and the projects they had previously built, including their GitHub portfolios,” Japhet said.
Slightly above 500 students eventually attended the physical event in Lagos after what organisers described as a rigorous screening process.
Japhet said this year’s edition deliberately focused on the application of artificial intelligence to real-world challenges affecting Nigeria’s economy, including insecurity, unemployment and fraud.
“Beyond using AI to write emails and do mundane tasks, we gave participants actual problems that exist in the economy and asked them to apply artificial intelligence to solving them,” she said.
She added that participation increased more than tenfold compared with previous editions, driven partly by testimonials from former participants who had become advocates of the programme within their campuses and professional networks.
Beyond the hackathon itself, Japhet disclosed that outstanding participants would be enrolled in a long-term mentorship and development programme lasting between two and three years.
Under the initiative, selected students will receive tuition support, technical training, practical work experience and potential employment opportunities within HabariPay and the wider GTCO ecosystem.
“We mentor them, pay their tuition fees, expose them to real-life work and, at the end of the programme, many of them become part of our workforce,” she said.
The Group Chief Executive Officer of Guaranty Trust Holding Company Plc, Segun Agbaje, described the shortlisted students as “the best of the best” and urged them to prioritise teamwork, resilience and integrity throughout the competition.
“You are already winners because you dared to apply and were selected from a highly competitive field,” Agbaje said. “There is no real victory in cheating. The joy of winning comes from playing by the rules and doing it properly.”
Among the participants was Victory Azuonye, a logistics and transport technology student at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, and leader of Team Code Flex.
Travelling from Kaduna State, Azuonye and his team developed SignalOS, a WhatsApp and USSD-based platform designed to help banks and formal institutions identify economically active Nigerians operating within the informal economy but excluded from formal financial systems.
“A lot of Nigerians are economically active but financially invisible because they are not recognised by the formal system,” he said. “Using signals from their daily activities, banks can know who is consistent, who is growing and who can be trusted with financing or grants.”
The solution attempts to address one of Nigeria’s longstanding economic challenges, the difficulty millions of informal workers face in accessing credit due to limited financial documentation and banking history.
Another participant, leader of Team Sapphire and a student at Ahmadu Bello University, Moses Edache, developed an AI-powered agricultural e-commerce platform designed to reduce fraud in produce transactions.
The platform integrates Squad payment APIs with escrow services that temporarily hold buyers’ funds until artificial intelligence systems confirm that delivered agricultural products match the original listing.
“Our car broke down on the way, we missed our flight, and we spent the night at the airport still building,” Edache said. “It was exhausting, but the experience built resilience, courage and confidence.”
While neither Team Code Flex nor Team Sapphire advanced into the competition’s Top 50 finalists, Sheriff Sanni, a Computer Science student at the University of Lagos and member of Team XYZ, successfully led his team into the final rounds.
Sanni presented an AI-powered workforce monitoring platform designed to help employers assess the productivity of both remote and on-site employees.
he system tracks browser activity during work hours, analyses behavioural patterns using artificial intelligence and generates productivity reports for employers while allowing employees to pause monitoring during approved breaks.
“There are many remote workers whose employers cannot verify what they do during the day,” Sanni said. “Our platform helps employers confirm that
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