First-year students of the Lagos Business School Full-time MBA (MBA 19) have taken the lead at the 2020 Africa Business Ethics Conference pitch awards by emerging in the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th positions.
The Africa Business Ethics Conference (ABEC) is a business-community-led global forum for convening a broad stakeholder group that for the first time includes the private sector in Africa to address the complex and peculiar challenges posed by corruption in the host country and in the region.
Themed “Tackling Corruption to Reduce Poverty, Unemployment and Insecurity in Africa: A Necessity for Building Resilience”, the 2020 edition of the conference held in Lagos, Nigeria from December 7 – 9.
The pitch awards of the conference required participants to pitch innovative ideas to mitigate corruption in Nigeria. The 3-minute visual pitch was to articulate the problem, discuss the proposed solution, and analyse the anticipated results. Out of the 84 entries received, the Lagos Business School MBA students clinched the leading positions.
Chukwuemeka Anyiam-Osigwe, who landed the first position, proposed an innovative game that would keep ethics at the top of human consciousness especially when they have to make decisions. He suggested that the game is incorporated in primary and secondary school curricula across Africa to ensure early awareness of ethics and its implications.
For the second position, Chiamaka Ibeh proposed a solution to tackle corruption in Nigeria’s public sector by eliminating the human element in government transactions and replacing with Artificial Intelligence and automation. She suggested a website that will employ cloud and blockchain technology to store information across government MDAs and agencies. According to Ibeh, this would not only cure the scourge of corruption but would improve operational efficiency.
The first and second place winners were presented with a token of N400,000 and will, alongside others on the top six, attend a boot camp to refine their ideas into implementable proposals. The first place will also have an opportunity to pitch to donors for seed funding or further assistance and will be sponsored to participate in ABEC 2021, which is set to hold in Ethiopia.
Lagos Business School is committed to developing responsible business leaders with an ethical mindset and thus emphasises on ethics in its curricula across programmes. The School also has an initiative, the Christopher Kolade Centre for Research in Leadership and Ethics (CKCRLE), that is dedicated towards research and information dissemination in the areas of leadership and ethics.
Commenting on the wins, LBS Business Ethics Faculty and Director of the Centre, Dr Kemi Ogunyemi says, “Ethics is very relevant in the development of managers and business leaders because they hold the responsibility for making decisions that affect many lives (within and outside corporations) and impact the planet. So the ABEC call was a good opportunity for our MBAs to apply what they had learned in the classroom to an important, practical question”.
