Some students of Regina Pacis Secondary School, Anambra State, southeast Nigeria, have invented ‘smart sticks’ that can detect obstacles not less than 120 centimetres away from a visually impaired person.
Development Diaries reports that students of the school had in 2018 won the Junior Gold Awards in the World Technovation Challenge in the United States.
They had developed a mobile application called the Fake Drug detector to help tackle fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria.
The smart sticks, it is understood, can sense objects from an angle of elevation and an angle of depression.
It is also understood that this development is in line with the Anambra State government’s mandate to support innovations among young people.
This innovation has shown that girls, if given the required support, can thrive in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field.
In Africa, women and girls’ underrepresentation in STEM education is a major barrier to their participation in tech design and governance.
According to UN Women, African girls are disadvantaged when it comes to digital adoption, have lower levels of access to and use of digital technology than boys, and often they are not benefitting from digital technology as boys are.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that women make up on average just 22 percent of the total number of engineering and technology university graduates each year.
It further shows that women make up roughly a fifth of the total number of people working in the information and communication technology sector.
A survey by ONE Campaign shows that the participation of women in the Nigerian tech sector is low. In a survey of 93 technology firms, only about 30 percent were owned by women, mostly concentrated in e-commerce and enterprise solutions.
If Nigeria continues in this trajectory, it will be difficult to achieve Goal Five of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to achieve gender equality for all by 2030.
Development Diaries calls on state governments to improve the teaching and learning of STEM, especially for the girl-child in Nigeria.
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