Two Ghanaian innovators shortlisted for 2021 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation

Two Ghanaian innovators, Eyram Amedzor and George Boateng have been shortlisted among 14 other African innovators for the 2021 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation.

The 16 innovators have been selected from Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, The Gambia.

The Africa Prize, run every year by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, awards crucial commercialisation support to ambitious African innovators who are transforming their communities through scalable engineering solutions.

Eyram Amedzor (Jumeni)

Eyram Amedzor, a Software Engineer, is the founder of Jumeni – a field service software that assists service-based businesses by providing a three-part cloud-based application to help increase the productivity of their field teams, engage customers and collect payments seamlessly.

The field service software is divided into three applications:

1. Back office web app – it helps the Jumeni team assign job orders to field workers, track their progress and gain insights into general field performance.

2. Agent app – it is used by the mobile workforce to update the team on assigned job orders, navigate between sites, and write reports.

3. Customer app – it is used to help businesses engage their customers and collect payments efficiently. USSD-based versions of the agent and customer apps make it accessible for users

without the internet or smartphones.

Eyram Amedzor and his team developed the Jumeni software in 2018 after their research revealed waste management companies in Ghana face serious service delivery challenges. This includes a loss of up to 40% of monthly revenue because of oversights and leakages in managing field-based operations.

The team aims to impact over 50,000 service-based companies in Africa in the next three to five years. Future product development includes developing an Application Programming Interface, a software intermediary allowing other applications to the interface. This will allow e-commerce businesses, and other delivery-based businesses, to offer deliveries without having to contract external service providers.

George Boateng (SuaCode.ai)

George Boateng, is an Engineer and PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich, is the founder of SuaCode.ai – a smartphone application that uses artificial intelligence to teach coding remotely.

The software includes course materials in English and French, quizzes and coding assignments, an automated grading system and an artificial intelligence teaching assistant called Kwame (named after Ghana’s first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah).

The app hosts monthly online coding courses for individuals and is also offered to schools and organisations that wish to enrol their students or employees in their own ‘SuaCode Classroom’.

SuaCode.ai undertook four pilot studies between 2018 and 2020, receiving more than 3,000 applications for its introductory course from 69 countries across five continents, with 42 of them in Africa. As the company continues to grow, their goal is to enrol more than 10,000 students per month across all 54 African countries in 2021.

SuaCode.ai’s courses are structured in a cohort-based format, meeting the students’ needs for support and interaction. Their course completion rate is 76%, compared to the industry standard of 10%.