Five teenage girls from Regina Pacis Secondary School Onitsha, Anambra State have won the Gold Medal in the at the World Technovation Challenge in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco, US.
The team, named Save A Soul, comprises of five brilliant girls: Jessica Osita, Promise Nnalue, Adaeze Onuigbo, Nwabuaku Ossai, and Vivian Okoye who represented Nigeria and Africa in the contest. The girls developed the “FD-Detector”, an app that combats the menace of fake drugs in Nigeria. The app can ascertain the genuineness of a drug by just scanning the barcode.
Led by Uchenna Onwuamaegbu-Ugwu, CEO of Edufun Technik STEM, Save A Soul clinched the gold medal ahead of 2,000 competing applications from representatives of countries including the USA, China, Spain, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.
Having won, the girls, who were personally sent off by the Governor of Anambra State, Chief Willie Obiano, will also be attending field trips, workshops including a networking session during their one week stay in the US.
Technovation is a program that offers girls around the world the opportunity to learn the programming skills they need to emerge as tech-entrepreneurs and leaders. Each year, girls are invited to identify a problem in their communities, and then challenge them to solve them by developing Andriod applications that would address those problems.
In this year’s Challenge, only 12 teams were selected as finalists out of the 115 countries that participated in the qualifiers from all over the world.