By Hillary Asemota
The award ceremony of the 2021 Federal Civil Service Innovation Challenge excitedly came to a close on Friday, 17th December, 2021 in Abuja with N11, 500, 000.00 (eleven million, five hundred thousand naira awarded to the 16 winners who emerged from the different ministries.
The duo of Dorothy Ukemezia and Chinedu Ijeomah of the Federal Ministry of Environment, won first prize of N5,000,000.00 (five million naira).
The second prize of N3,000,000 (three million naira) was won by Ibrahim Haliru and Linda Absalom of the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, while Babawande Owolabi and Salami Omolola of Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy carted home the third prize of N1,000,000 (one million naira) only.
Ten top performers were each rewarded with N250,000. 00 (two hundred and fifty naira) as consolation prizes.
The Director of Public Relations and Communications at the Office of the Head of Service (HoS), Mr. AbdulGaniyu Aminu, in a statement made available to the media, quoted the Head of Service of the Federation, Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, as stressing that innovation is essential for effective service management in every ramification of life especially in the public service.
According to her, the competition was conceived and launched with a view to evolving a technology driven civil service that is capable of providing more efficient driven, effective and responsible citizen friendly services.
On FCSSIP25, Dr. Yemi-Esan, averred that it is set to create and sustain an enabling environment to promote competitiveness, innovation, performance-based system and meritocracy in the service.
While acknowledging the need to institutionalise healthy competition in every sphere of life, she added that the Service will continue to leverage more on technology to make better decisions on how public servants are hired, trained and retained.
Yemi-Esan, intoned in persuasive logic, that the Service will creatively monitor performance and deliver services in an effective and efficient manner to reduce wastage and sustain trust in government.
The Head of Service assured that solutions emerging from the competition would be utilised to address specific challenges in the Civil Service with a view to providing cheaper, quality, and accessible services to Nigerians.
Some of the ideas developed from the first edition of the competition, she added are currently being implemented. One of these, she explained, is the Anonymous Reporting System (ARS) which had gone live with a lot of reports received and being treated.
“Similarly, the solution for the introduction of computer-based Examination for the timely conduct and marking of the Confirmation and Promotion (COMPRO) Examination in the Federal Civil Service is to be deployed for the conduct of Senior COMPRO Exam in 2022”
