A team of three girls from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) – Team Wabuni – has won the Technovation Challenge award in Kenya.
Team Wabuni are the creators of the Quit Mosquito App, which is a mosquito repellent app which uses an inbuilt music player to repel mosquitoes with 15Khz frequency ultrasound.
The sound emitted by the app causes stress to the nervous system of the insects, thereby immobilising them and forcing them away from their cause of distress.
“We as the judges were simply looking at three main things – relevance to the community, if it was working and user friendliness – and the Quit Mosquito app won our hearts. Though all the innovations were great and very creatively done,” said Joseph Sevilla, director at iLabAfrica.
One of the developers, Caroline Kimathi, said the main inspiration for the app was the increasing number of malaria-related deaths, with Team Wabuni planning to launch on app stores where it can be downloaded by people who need it.
Second position was taken by Team Blue with The Donor app, which encourages people to donate blood by showing different centres, and third position by the Kinywaji app, developed by a team from the Technical University of Kenya, which helps a user manage the amount of alcohol consumed with the option of calling a cab once they have exceeded a set amount.
The event was sponsored by Safaricom Women in Tech together with Akilada Technovation and was exclusively for girls to inspire more females to embark on science, technology, engineering and mathematics related careers.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
