On Sunday, January 23, 2022, Techpoint Africa will be hosting Techpoint Awards 2021, the second edition of the Awards. This edition, like the first, focuses on the Nigerian technology space.
After covering the African innovation and technology space for the past six years, Techpoint Africa started its Awards to honour and acknowledge players (companies and individuals alike) in the Nigerian startup and technology space.
Before highlighting and breaking down the Awards processes, let’s highlight the three categories:
Nomination-only: Awards in this category are judged by an independent team of external judges.
Editorial Choice: Awards in this category are judged by the Techpoint editorial team.
Audience Choice: Awards in this category are exclusively decided by audience nominations.
Here’s the procedure
Determine categories
The first stage, an in-house procedure carried out by the Techpoint editorial team, is determining the award categories, the industries, and what will be judged by the audience, the group of external judges, or the Techpoint editorial team.
Four external judges — a tech entrepreneur and one person each from tech media, a venture capital firm, and the ecosystem — are also chosen at this stage.
Preliminary nominations
We call upon the general public at this stage to nominate companies and individuals across various categories. The nomination phase usually lasts between six to eight weeks.
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The Techpoint Hall of Fame is a no-nomination category.
Side note: induction into the Techpoint Hall of Fame will happen every five years.
Screen valid entries
After closing the preliminary nominations, an in-house committee screens the nominations for spam and invalid entries. At the end of this exercise, the committee arrives at the top five companies or individuals in each category which are then announced in an article on our platform.
Request for figures from finalists
Finalists in each category are requested to share their figures and statistics covering the period under review. However, this doesn't apply to finalists in the Audience Choice categories.
At this stage, we sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) stipulating that any revelation by the finalists would only be used for the Awards. The editorial team is involved in most of the process and is bound by this NDA, which the independent external judges also sign.
Screening by external judges and the Techpoint editorial team
We collate the responses from the company finalists and share them with the external judges who grade companies based on what was shared.
Companies that don’t share the requested details are disqualified as there’s nothing for the external judges to score.
The external judges only grade startups in the nomination-only categories, while the Techpoint editorial team grades the Editorial Choice categories.
Announce external judges
The announcement of external judges happens after the judging process to ensure third parties do not influence their decisions.
Collate results
The results for all categories are collated, and the company with the highest score in each category is declared the winner. Each member of the editorial team votes if there is a tie between two or more finalists in a category to get a winner.
Announce winners
The final stage of the Awards process is announcing the winners, which usually happens as part of Techpoint Africa’s flagship event, Techpoint Build.
