This year’s Technovation winners will share a prize of more than $50,000 for seed funding and scholarships for further research.

Nigerian Teens Win Top Prize at Silicon Valley Tech Summit for Designing Fake Drug Detector

The girls, who were mentored by STEM education advocate and 2017 Mandela Washington Fellow Uchenna Onwuaegbu-Ugwu, took home the top prize at the summit with their “FD Detector” (fake drug detector) mobile app. Experts say the app has the potential to save lives, as the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has long struggled to quell fake pharmaceuticals coming into the country.

Speaking to Nigeria’s Daily Trust, the girls said they were motivated to launch the app after seeing the rising number of deaths in Nigeria due to imitation drugs. African nations are the dumping ground for roughly 40 percent of the world’s fake drugs and several malaria deaths in Nigeria have been attributed to the use of counterfeit drugs, Quartz reported.

To address the issue, the girls will team up with NAFDAC to create a database of certified pharmaceutical drugs on which drug companies can upload their products once approved by the agency. Anyone with a smartphone, health professionals included, can then scan the barcode of a drug and the app will determine if it’s real or fake and display its expiration date.

Users can also use the app to report fake drugs to NAFDAC directly, according to the news site.

Nigeria’s vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, celebrated the girls’ victory in a Twitter post earlier this month.

“Congratulations! We are very proud of you,” he wrote, followed by a photo of the teens receiving their awards on stage at the competition.

This year’s Technovation winners will share a prize of more than $50,000 for seed funding and scholarships for further research.

 

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