Anambra School Girls Win Gold In World Technovation Challenge In USA
A Nigerian team of five girls has just been announced the winner of the $10,000 Junior Gold Awards at the 2018 Technovation World Challenge
The girls from Regina Pacis Secondary School, Onitsha, Anambra State Nigeria who represented Nigeria and Africa at the World Technovation Challenge in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco, USA won the Gold Medal in the contest.
The girls include:
• Jessica Osita
• Promise Nnalue
• Nwabuaku Ossai
• Adaeze Onuigbo
• Vivian Okoye
The team, led by Uchenna Onwuamaegbu Ugwu defeated representatives of other technological giants including the USA, Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan and China to clinch the gold medal.
They won the Challenge with a mobile application called the FD-Detector which they developed to help tackle the Challenge of fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria.
Technovation is a programme that offers girls around the world the opportunity to learn the programming skills they need to emerge as tech-entrepreneurs and leaders.
Every year, girls are invited to identify a problem in their communities, and then challenge them to solve them by developing Android applications that would address those problems.
Out of 115 countries that participated in the qualifiers, only 12 teams from all over the world were selected as finalists for the pitch in Silicon Valley.
This goes to show that Nigeria can compete globally in education if the education sector receives adequate funding from the relevant authorities.
Called Team Save-A-Soul, the group explained the reason for the problem they chose to solve: “Leveraging technology to save lives is our utmost priority; that is why we have decided to maximize this opportunity to solve the incessant rate of death caused by fake drug.” Coming from the part of the world notorious for the circulation of fake, expired and sub-standard drugs, with attendant damage to lives and health of innocent citizens, the team could not have made a better choice.
