A team representing Nigeria in the 2018 Technovation World Pitch junior division in San Francisco emerged winners of the competition.
The girls’ team, dubbed Team Save-A-Soul, comprised of Promise Nnalue, Jessica Osita, Nwabuaku Ossai, Adaeze Onuigbo and Vivian Okoye. They are all from Regina Abachi secondary school.
Technovation is a global programme that invites girls to identify a problem in their local communities and then challenge them to solve them by developing apps.
Save-A-Soul developed a mobile application called ‘FD Detector’ to deal with the problem of fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria.
The app leverages a drug’s barcode to verify its authenticity and expiration date.
This was in no way an easy win. The young girls were among 2,000 mobile app developers to represent Africa at the world pitch. They competed and beat teams from the United States of America, Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China.
Several Kenyan teams had also been listed in this challenge and even managed to proceed to the semi-finals.
According to the girls, the win is not the end of it, they aim to partner the National Agency for Food & Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), an agency responsible for regulating drugs in Nigeria, to push the app and ensure it goes mainstream.
Team Save-A-Soul was quoted saying that the innovation will help to solve the high death rate caused by fake drugs.
Nigeria’s fake drug problem
Nigeria’s fake drug problem has been incessant for several years now. This problem is a threat to lives and remains a serious public health challenge.
In 2008, 84 children passed away after taking teething medicine to ease pain. It was soon announced that the deaths had resulted from engine coolant found in a medicine called ‘My Pikin Baby Teething Mixture’. This tragic event led to rigorous investigation and policy amendments in Nigeria. The result? the levels of counterfeit drugs in Nigeria decreased from 19.6 percent in 2012 to 3.2 percent in 2015.
In 2017, Andrew Nevin, an Economist and Financial Services Advisory Leader of Project Blue PWc Nigeria in a keynote address at a conference by Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria said that 70 percent of drugs in Nigeria are fake.
NAFDAC, however, termed this report as misleading and proceeded to quote a WHO report that showed that the prevalence of counterfeit drugs in circulation was 16.7 percent for all categories of drugs.
Whatever the case, it is evident that the problem of fake drugs is quite prevalent in Nigeria.
The use of fake drugs in treatment is associated with a myriad of health problems. These include drug resistance, poisoning, and persistence of untreated diseases which may have detrimental effects.
To date, the drug anti-counterfeit laws have not yielded desired fruits, perhaps the FD Detector will help solve this problem.
About the challenge
The Technovation Challenge is an annual competition organized by Iridescent, a global non-profit organization that empowers underrepresented young people. It, however, largely focused on the girl-child.
Iridescent empowers young people through engineering and technology, and the Technovation Challenge is one way it does this.
The challenge invites girls aged between 10 to 18 to identify and develop innovative solutions to practical problems in their local communities.
The challenge is held in two categories the Senior Division and the Junior Division.
This year, over 19,000 girls from 115 countries participated. At the finals, over 121 girls from over 50 countries took part in the challenge.
The World Pitch Summit is the final event following several months of hard work, innovation, and problem-solving by participating teams and their mentors.
Each of the winning teams will receive a $1,000 scholarship.
To learn more about winners in other categories, click here.
Congratulations to the winners!
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