University of Ghana students who participated in a virtual Global Challenge Laboratory programme, have excelled and emerged winners of the competition. The 1st prize winning team comprised Mr. Henry Duah, a first year MPhil (Accounting) student of the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), Ms. Yovaylla Awuah, studying Finance and Economics and Mr. Joseph Otoo, a PhD student at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences.
Photograph of the Winning Team
The programme was organised by the Imperial College London, Enterprise Lab and Tsinghua University. The Office of Research, Innovation and Development facilitated the participation of 185 UG students, 40 alumni and 5 mentors. The competition was aimed at engaging talented students from all disciplines across the globe to identify and solve real life challenges with practical applications.
At the heart of this initiative is the drive to bring students and alumni together to network, harness and gain new skills, develop adaptation strategies, and create new ideas to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3): Good Health and Wellbeing.
The competition was preceded by a 10-day programme of core and optional workshops, guest speakers and mentoring opportunities to enable participants initiate and develop innovative project ideas. At stake for the leading teams was the opportunity to win a share of the GBP20,000 prize fund. The significance of the SDG3 theme during a global pandemic, creates an appropriate backdrop for students to develop relevant digital based project ideas.
Team Scarlet was adjudged the best for their project, which addresses health and the wellbeing of women and children in sub- Saharan African. Branded as ‘Oba-Pa’, the project’s model addresses pertinent issues of underemployment of mid-wives, low access to technology and the absence of relevant information in various local languages. Oba-Pa intends to provide a service that connects mothers to midwives using existing cellular networks. Registration to the Oba-Pa database links mothers to midwives via free messaging service. Midwives are also linked to mothers subject to location and availability, and mothers can obtain health information, and arrange home visits with midwives as necessary.
The Oba-Pa project also intends to drastically reduce maternal deaths, while promoting overall women’s health in Africa starting from Ghana. The team is currently conducting further research with the support of their mentors to enable a successful roll-out of the project.
Industry partners in the programme include Huawei and Nestle among others.
Congratulations to the winning team.
