Five female students from the Regina Pacis Secondary School, Onitsha, who represented Nigeria at the World Technovation Challenge, which was held in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, USA, have clinched gold.
Technovation is a programme that offers girls ages 10-18, around the world, the opportunity to learn the programming skills they need to emerge as tech entrepreneurs and leaders. The challenge is held in two categories: the Senior Division and the Junior Division.
The girls are invited to identify a problem in their communities and then challenged to solve it by developing Android applications that would address those problems.
115 countries participated in the qualifiers, but only 12 teams from all over the world were selected as finalists for the pitch in Silicon Valley.
The Nigerian team, led by Uchenna Onwuamaegbu Ugwu, defeated representatives of other technology giants, including the USA, Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China, to clinch the gold medal.
The girls, who have now become Africa’s Golden Girls, are made up of five brilliant girls, including Promise Nnalue, Jessica Osita, Nwabuaku Ossai, Adaeze Onuigbo, and Vivian Okoye.
ALSO READ – This 17-Year Old Nigerian Just Got Accepted Into 19 Top World Universities
The world champions 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.
Honored to announce Junior Gold Scholarship winning team Save A Soul, whose app FD-Detector will prevent countless lives in Nigeria from being lost to fake pharmaceutical drugs. #WorldPitch ? pic.twitter.com/ayqg190Ms4
— Technovation (@technovation) August 10, 2018
Under the tutelage of Uchenna Onwuamaegbu-Ugwu, the CEO of Edufun Technik STEM, the Golden Girls spent five months researching and developing the FD-Detector, which swept through over 2000 competing applications to get to the finals in San Francisco.
