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ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS AND TIMELY AT THIS TIME WHEN ADULTS ARE MISBEHAVING IN
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‘GIRL CODE
A team of Nigerian schoolgirls won a top Silicon Valley
prize for a fake-drug detector
By Kemi Lijadu3 hours ago
Five Nigerian teenagers won first place in the junior
division of the Technovation World Pitch Summit held in San Jose, California
last with an app that has the potential to save thousands of lives.
Their award was also celebrated on Twitter by Nigeria’s vice
president, Yemi Osinbajo.
Iridescent’s 2018 Technovation World Pitch Summit is
the world’s largest tech entrepreneurship program for girls. The program
invites girls from ages ten to eighteen from all over the world to identify a
problem in their community and then challenges the girls to solve it.
Team Save-a-Soul was selected from 2,000 mobile app
developers to represent Africa at the pitch competition. Their winning
mobile app, FD Detector (Fake Drug Detector), tackles the problem of
counterfeit pharmaceutical products in Nigeria. The team won ahead of rivals
from the US, Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan and China.
The girls’ app addresses a real life and death issue in
Nigeria. The regulator, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and
Control (NAFDAC), has struggled for years to close in on a rampant fake drug
market. Though the exact number of counterfeit drugs is contested, many malaria deaths in Nigeria are have been linked to the
use fake medicines. African countries are the dumping ground for 40% of
the world’s recorded counterfeit drugs. Others have addressed this problem as
well with technology, including mPedigree, a Ghanaian company founded by 2015 Quartz Africa Innovator, Bright Simons.
The girls plan to partner with NAFDAC to create a database
of certified pharmaceutical products. Once authorized by the agency, a
pharmaceutical company can upload its drugs onto the platform and be admitted
to the database. Consequently, anyone with a smartphone camera, both health
professionals and consumers, can scan the barcode of a drug and the app will
let then them know if the drug is real or fake and display its expiration date.
The app also allows users to report cases of fake drugs directly to
NAFDAC.
The team is made up of five girls from Regina Pacies
Secondary School Onitsha, Anambra State: Promise Nnalue, Jessica Osita, Nwabuka
Ossai, Adaeze Onuigbo and Vivian Okoye.
The girls were mentored by a 2017 Mandela Washington Fellow,
Uchenna Onwuaegbu-Ugwu who founded a STEM Center focused on implementing STEM education in
schools for children and youth from ages 3-18, especially girls in rural
communities in eastern Nigeria.’’
Joseph Ana
Africa Center for
Clin Gov Research & Patient Safety
@ HRI West Africa Group - HRI WA
Consultants in Clinical Governance Implementation
Publisher: Health and Medical Journals
8 Amaku Street Housing Estate, Calabar
Cross River State, Nigeria
Cross River State, Nigeria
Phone No. +234 (0) 8063600642
Joseph Ana has a cumulative continuous practice experience of over 40-years in
Nigeria, United Kingdom and Ghana as a Primary Health Care Physician, Public
Health Expert, General and Urological Surgeon, Health Policy Expert and
Implementer, Medical Educator and Trainer..
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