26-year-old Charlette N’Guessan from Ivory Coast has won the 2020 Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation.
This makes also makes her the first woman to win the award.
N’Guessan and her team won the £25,000 award (about $33,000) for BACE API, a digital verification system that uses Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition to verify the identities of Africans remotely and in real-time.
BACE API works by matching the live photo of a user to the image on their documents such as passports or ID cards, N’Guessan said.
For websites and online applications that have BACE API integrated into them, users will be verified via their webcam to establish their identity.
“For the person trying to submit their application, we ask them to switch on their camera to make sure the person behind the camera is real, and not a robot.
“We are able to capture the face of the person live and match their image with the one on the existing document the person submitted,” she explained.
BACE API can be integrated into already existing applications and systems for identity verification and is targeted at most financial institutions on the continent, N’Guessan told CNN.
N’Guessan and her team won the Africa Prize for Innovation in a virtual award ceremony on September 3 where the Africa Prize judges and a live audience voted in their favor, the Royal Academy of Engineering said in a statement.
A Nigerian, Aisha Raheem also made it to the list and was a runner-up.
Raheem developed Farmz2U, a digital platform that helps farmers and families prevent food waste and enhance nutrition. With this, she won a prize of £10,000.