Build Nigeria 2026
How to write your Build Plan
The Build Plan is the one thing we read before you build. It is where you tell us what you are making, who has the problem, and who would pay for it. We read it, and we write back with either an approval or the specific thing that would make it stronger.
It takes about an hour. It is not a project proposal and it is not a final-year report. There is no word count and nobody is marking your grammar. Short and specific beats long and vague every time.
Deadline Sunday 18 October. Reviews run rolling from 1 October, earliest first, so a plan sent in the first week gets feedback while there is still time to act on it. That is the single biggest advantage available to you and it costs nothing.
The one thing most plans get wrong
Most plans describe a device. The ones that do well describe a person with a problem, and then the device.
Twenty-five of the hundred marks in this competition are for evidence that a real named buyer has seen what you built and responded to it. Another twenty are for your costs and margin. If you cannot name one person who would want your thing, you are not ready to write the plan yet. Go and find them first. That conversation takes an afternoon and it changes what you build.
What the plan contains
1. What you are building
Your track, the problem, and who has it. Write the problem as something that goes wrong today, not as a description of your solution. “Vendors lose a fridge of drinks when NEPA goes off overnight and nobody notices until morning” is a problem. “An IoT-based smart monitoring system” is not.
On who has it, be narrow. Barbers on a shared generator on one street in Sabon Gari is useful. Nigerians is not. A narrow answer is not a small ambition, it is the only kind you can check in six weeks.
2. Evidence of demand
Name one real prospective buyer. A person or a business, with a name, who exists and could be visited. Not a market segment, not “small businesses”, not a number from a report.
Then say how and when you will put the thing in front of them. You do not need their permission to write this and you do not need them to have agreed to anything yet. You need to have thought about who you are building for and to be planning to actually go there.
Your team runs its own commercial side. We do not find buyers for you, sell for you or negotiate for you. Whatever you agree with a buyer is yours.
3. How it works
A block diagram, a bill of materials, a budget, and who is paying.
The block diagram can be a photograph of a hand drawing. Boxes for the parts, arrows for what flows between them, a word in each box saying what it does. That is all. It is there so a reviewer can see in ten seconds whether the thing can work, not to be beautiful. You can upload the photo straight from your phone.
For the bill of materials, Forge Designwill generate one for you and price it against what we stock, which is the fastest route and means a reviewer can check availability immediately. Typing it into the form is equally fine. Either way, list the real parts you intend to buy with rough prices. A BOM with “sensors: ₦20,000” on one line tells us nothing.
Include the parts you already own. The budget is what the build costs, not what you still need to spend.
4. Timeline and team
Three lines: what exists by Sunday 8 November (Milestone 1), by Sunday 22 November (Milestone 2), and by Sunday 6 December.
Milestone 1 is first power-on. One subsystem doing something real on a bench counts, and that is deliberately a low bar because teams that wait for everything to be ready never get to Milestone 1 at all. Milestone 2 is the integrated prototype plus evidence you showed it to your buyer. Plan backwards from that, not forwards from today.
Then say who does what. “Everyone does everything” is the answer that predicts a team falling apart in week three.
5. Safety and prior work
Tick anything that applies: mains voltage, lithium cells you assemble yourself, high current or things that move under power. Ticking a box is not a problem and does not count against you. It tells a reviewer to read your plan properly and send back specific advice. Not ticking it when it applies is how people get hurt.
Declare anything that already exists. A previous project, your final-year project, code or a board you already have. Declaring it costs you nothing, and your final-year project is explicitly allowed as long as you build it during the programme. Not declaring it and being found out disqualifies the team. Judges score what was built during the programme, so telling us the starting point is how you get credit for the distance you travelled.
You may also name one part, technique or subsystem to keep out of your public posts. Judges see it. It is never published. This is optional, and separately, you never have to publish your schematic, parts list, firmware or supplier in a weekly post regardless.
What reviewers are checking
A reviewer spends about twenty minutes on your plan and asks five things.
- Can this be built in six weeks by this team?
- Are the parts actually available, in the quantities and the time you have?
- Is there a credible buyer, named?
- Can this team deliver it? A big build is fine if you show how it gets done, including what you have already built. Too small scores badly on everything except whether it works.
- Is it safe, and does the team know which part is the dangerous part?
Why plans come back
- No named buyer, or a category instead of a person. This is the most common one by far.
- No way to tell how a big build gets delivered: nothing declared as already built, and milestones of a few words each.
- Scope so small it is a weekend exercise. If you think you would finish in two weeks, say so and we will push on it before approvals close, which is much better than discovering it in November.
- A bill of materials of categories rather than parts.
- A part that cannot be got in time, which we can usually fix by suggesting one we stock.
- Mains voltage with no plan for who supervises.
The four answers you can get
| Approved | Build it. Nothing more to do. |
| Approved with steering notes | Build it, and read the notes. They are advice, and teams that act on them usually score better. Anything in them about safety is not advice. |
| Revise and resubmit | Something material is missing, or a safety question needs an answer. You get one resubmission, due Friday 23 October. |
| Not approved | Out of scope, or unsafe in a way that cannot be fixed. Rare, and we will say exactly why. |
Approvals are final on Saturday 24 October, and what you are building is locked from that point. You can go deeper on it afterwards. Changing it needs our sign-off.
A worked example
Deliberately ordinary, so that it shows the shape of an answer rather than giving you an idea. Yours should look nothing like this.
Problem. Barbers on Zaria Road run clippers off a shared generator. When it trips, the whole row of shops stops, and nobody can tell which shop overloaded it. They argue about it and they lose customers.
Who has it. The fourteen barbershops sharing three generators along one stretch of Zaria Road. We counted them.
Buyer. Musa Ibrahim, who owns Sharp Cuts and paid for one of the three generators. We have spoken to him once.
How we show him. Fit the first unit in his shop in week three and leave it with him for two weeks.
What it is.A box on each shop’s line that measures current draw and shows the total on the shared line, with a light that comes on when the line is close to tripping.
M1, 8 Nov. One current sensor reading real load on the bench, printing to serial.
M2, 22 Nov.Enclosure printed, board mounted, running in Musa’s shop, and his feedback recorded on video.
Final, 6 Dec. Two units in two shops, a fortnight of data, a landed cost and a price.
Notice what the example does not have. No novel technology, no invention, nothing that would win a science fair. It names a street, a number of shops, and a man who owns one of them. That is what a strong plan looks like.
Before you send it
- Can someone outside your department read the problem and understand who suffers from it?
- Is your buyer a name?
- Could a stranger look at your block diagram and see roughly how it works?
- Does your BOM have part names and prices in it?
- Is Milestone 1 small enough that you will definitely hit it?
- Have you said what already exists?
You can keep editing your plan until 18 October, so sending an early version costs you nothing and gets you a reviewer’s attention first.
Your Build Plan link is in the confirmation email we sent when you registered, the same link you use to edit your team. Not registered yet? Register here, it is free and takes a few minutes.