Towards the end of January, four teams which consisted of  five girls each from Nova Pioneer Girls’ High School – Tatu city campus had their inaugural meeting at Safaricom Michael Joseph Center to participate in the Global Technovation 2020 challenge. The Technovation challenge is an annual event where young women apply their skills to solve real world problems through technology.

What’s does the Technovation challenge entail?

For this year’s challenge, they were to come up with mobile applications that solve problems in the community. The Safaricom team offered mentorship sessions for each team to guide them through the process.

The girls underwent four full stages in the app development. The first stage, which was ideation, helped them explore ideas which aligned with any of the 17 United Nation Sustainable Development Goals.

Stages of App Development

This phase of the competition tasked with conducting surveys amongst their peers in order to evaluate the need. They used the feedback they got from this phase and customized their final ideas based on this. At the end of this period, the girls came up with four brilliant ideas. 

• Team Chapchap came up with an application that would help increase tree coverage around the country.
• Team Jihi came up with a health application that would help people get access to quality healthcare.
• Team Infinito came up with an application that would help improve security around the country.
• Team Paladins came up with an idea that will help people get job opportunities around them.

The girls managed to go through this phase which built their confidence as they interacted with different people through the surveys and interviews. 

The next stage was entrepreneurship. They came up with business plans that would enable their applications to earn an income. This taught them the importance of sustainable business models which would guide the entrepreneurial aspect of the business.

The third stage which was both, the most exciting and challenging involved the app development. They interacted with different coding platforms such as Thunkable, MIT App Inventor and Java which highly developed their programming skills. 

In the final stage, the girls had to make 5-minute videos selling their ideas to virtual judges. The videos were creatively curated and remarkable!  Most of the girls had not engaged in Computer science before this challenge but this opportunity opened up a new world for them. They are now more interested in STEM-related fields than ever.

For our girls, the competition has been an avenue for immense growth both intellectually and socially. Our girls put their best foot forward and pushed themselves to complete the app in the midst of a global pandemic. 

It is this resilience that made Team Chap Chap; Audrey Keta, Serena Rolloh, Ruth Ngahu, Hope Lemiso and June Mutai, make it to the Semi-final Round. They are among the five teams representing Kenya in the Technovation  Global  Challenge. They created time within their tight Remote learning schedules which paid off. We wish them the very best in the next round. The girls have modelled the principles of High expectations, Greater together and Always growing and we couldn’t be more proud of them.