The Mekatilili fellowship was one of the defining moments of my 2019. Having been selected from a pool of over 300 applicants across Africa, it was an honor to be one of the 30 fellows. The fellowship took place in January 2019, over a span of three days. There were three tracks to the fellowship, i.e.: Manufacturing, Accessibility and Agriculture. The goal of the fellowship was to cultivate design thinking in the fellows. Because of my interest in the field, I went with the accessibility track, where I led my team to design and develop a project dubbed 'Kijiko Kali', which was a self-stabilizing spoon to help people with neurological disorders feed themselves. Part of the workshops was for professional growth where the fellows were taught skills such as CV writing, elevator pitches and presentation skills.
Team Kijiko Kali
Three weeks after the fellowship, I participated in the annual JKUAT Tech Expo. My project, 'Walking Buddy', is a smart white cane to aid visually impaired people in navigation. Its features include: obstacle detection and warnings using appropriate audio cues and tactile feedback, turn to turn navigation directions from the user's location to their desired destination, and an SOS feature to immediately contact pre-saved emergency contacts, sending them the user's location. With this project, I won the Tech Expo , becoming the youngest person to ever win at JKUAT Tech Expo. This innovation was featured in national newspapers and TV stations. Some of the skills I learnt during the Mekatilili fellowship, such as project pitching, came in handy during this expo, and played a part in my subsequent success.
I then participated in the first Techfugees Hackathon in Africa, which was held in Nairobi in July of last year. I was team leader of the team that developed a solution for prompt communication between the health providers and the refugees. The solution also enabled the provision of emergency health services to refugees, and an early detection and warning system in case of a disease breakout. My team won the Hackathon, and is currently working with the Kenya Red Cross to further develop this solution with the goal of eventually deploying it in refugee camps such as Kakuma refugee camp.
Receiving Innovator of the Year Award
My innovation journey has been quite interesting, and it has been a humbling yet motivating experience to be recognized for my work. One such award was during Nairobi Tech Week, an annual technology gathering for sub-Saharan Africa, 2019. I was awarded Innovator of the Year, for my work developing projects around assistive technology.
After completing my third year in campus, I landed an internship at Africa's Talking Ltd, where I worked as an IoT backend engineer. This internship gave me a lot of exposure to modern software development and deployment tools and techniques. I was also part of the team of educators who organized the first Scratch Conference in Africa, which took place in Brookhouse School, Nairobi in October of last year. This project was especially close to my heart, as an educator who is passionate about creative learning and opening up coding to the general populace.
2019 Scratch Africa Conference
I am now a fourth year student at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology taking Electronic and Computer Engineering, and the chair of the JKUAT Society of Engineering Students. I'm currently working on Natural Language Processing projects aimed at machine translation for underrepresented African languages, in an effort to put Africa on the NLP map. I am also involved in various community projects, working on open source projects, and continuing with my work as an educator. My aim is to see Africa move from being consumers to becoming producers of technology, where people can leverage the power of technology to solve their day to day problems.
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LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/freshia-sackey