The Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF) says it is collaborating with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to support 10 startups to increase the adoption of eNaira in the country.

The head of AFF, Daniel Awe, said this on Saturday in Lagos. He spoke on the sideline of the Semi-Final Pitching of the eNaira Hackathon 2022. Mr Awe said the top 10 startups, innovators, and entrepreneurs were part of the over 5,000 startups that registered for the eNaira hackathon.

He also mentioned a need to increase the adoption of eNaira in Nigeria.

“eNaira was introduced by CBN in 2021 as a digital currency, and a lot of people have asked the question, what is actually the usefulness of this eNaira? A lot of people have also criticised eNaira, that they prefer cryptocurrency, but the truth is that eNaira is going to be a successful product when there are use cases when people are able to see problems it is going to be solving,” he said.

Awe said that AFF and CBN were collaborating on the hackathon to increase the adoption of eNaira.

“So the hackathon is a platform where innovators, developers, entrepreneurs, coders come together, to solve problems, to create innovative ideas. When we layer that on eNaira, it means we brought in different players within the ecosystem – developers, coders, innovators, entrepreneurs, to come up with different ideas and different use cases that they can leverage eNaira,” he added.

”This is so that the consumers of eNaira will now see the benefit of eNaira. They will have the opportunity to see the problem that eNaira will solve,” he added.

Awe said about 5,000 players within the fintech ecosystem applied for the hackathon and that they were reduced to 70 for the quarter-final pitching. The semi-final would see 20 teams selected for the finals, of which the top 10 would be assisted in boosting eNaira adoption in the country.

(NAN)