Nigeria’s female engineer, others shortlisted for 2022 Africa innovators prize

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

Innovators from nine African countries have been shortlisted for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2022 Africa prize.

This year half of the shortlist of 16 are women, and for the first time it includes Togolese and Congolese inventors.

The entrepreneurs will undergo eight months of business training and mentoring before a winner is chosen, who will receive £25,000, and three runners-up, who win £10,000 each.

All the projects are sustainable solutions to issues such as access to healthcare, farming resilience, reducing waste, and energy efficiency. The Guardian spoke to three of the shortlisted candidates.

Virtue Oboro, a female innovator from Nigeria, co-founded Tiny Hearts Technology and developed Crib A’Glow, a solar-powered crib that treats jaundiced newborns with phototherapy.

Oboro who is one of the women that made it to the shortlist, narrated that her son, Tonbra, was the motivation for her innovation.

Tonbra was born in 2015, Virtue Oboro’s mother noticed the baby’s eyes and skin looked yellow and they rushed him to hospital in Yenagoa, Bayelsa. But three of the hospital’s five phototherapy units for jaundiced babies were faulty and the other two were in use.

Tonbra was eventually found a place in a phototherapy unit but, when there was a power cut, he developed severe jaundice.

“He had to have an emergency blood transfusion, which was traumatising. We had to buy blood from an external source, which made us nervous. It was really tough.”

Her boy recovered, but the experience inspired Oboro and her husband to form Tiny Hearts Technology, the creators of Crib A’Glow, a solar-powered portable phototherapy crib that treats and monitors jaundiced newborns.

So far, about 300,000 babies have been treated directly with the cribs in hospitals and homes in Nigeria and Ghana.

Today, the Tiny Hearts team comprises engineers, designers and paediatricians, and also educates health workers and pregnant women about jaundice, which Oboro believes has saved many more babies.

Divin Kouebatouka, from Republic of the Congo is another shortlisted innovator who is the first Congolese innovator on the shortlist.

Kouebatouka, a Colorado State University graduate who says he is motivated by protecting the environment after being struck by the impact of the climate crisis on the Congo at a young age, began to think about possible benefits of the water hyacinth plant, which is native to the Amazon basin but now found across the world and whose rapid spread has been intensified by global heating.

“We studied the properties of hyacinth and found it is rich in nitrate, which is good for compost; rich in protein, which is good for animal feed; and it has a high absorbency,” he said.

“It could also solve another environmental problem: the leakage of oil – the main cause of marine pollution in the Congo. So we decided to create a ‘bridge’ between two environmental problems – each one should be a solution to the other,” he added.

His team at Green Tech Africa developed a way to turn the plant’s stems into highly absorbent fibre that can suck up oil from the ground or water, or plug an oil leak in a container.

Today more than 10 companies buy the product, called Kukia, which can hold up to 17 times its weight in hydrocarbons, the compounds that form the basis of crude oil.

In 2018 the idea was nominated for the African entrepreneurship award.

The project has also provided employment for local people who collect the plant and produce the fibre, earning more than the average agricultural wage. There are almost 900 collectors, 80% of whom are women.

In Kenya, the pandemic highlighted the lack of “cold-chain” infrastructure for storing vaccines, which 33-year-old Norah Magero, a shortlisted innovator experienced.

“Soon after I had my child in 2018, I moved from Nairobi to a rural area. I realised it was really hard to get her vaccinated. There were so many blackouts and ice-packs melted, so vaccines were no longer viable.

“Digging deeper, I realised the problem was not just the lack of reliable power, but also that women who had gone once or twice to get the vaccines might not go back a third time. It might be expensive or difficult to travel and so they just gave up. I might have had the same thought myself – this is just too difficult.

“I am an engineer and an energy manager and so I asked myself: why isn’t there an engineering solution to this problem. I am passionate about bringing up technology because it plays a huge role in closing the gaps. But it has to be affordable.”

The organisation Magero founded, Drop Access, which hopes to close the gap with VacciBox, a mobile solar-powered fridge that safely stores and delivers temperature-sensitive vaccines to communities and hospitals where there is a lack of cold-chain infrastructure.

“Hospitals are in a race against time with vaccines and that is the case in most rural communities,” she says. “We need a solution to stop thousands of people missing out on life-saving vaccines.”