Had she known that the illness that made her nauseous and reject food and so sick she could not attend classes was the easily preventable malaria, Shantelle Nyambura would have taken action earlier.
Malaria, a common and dangerous disease in Kenya, came upon Shantelle while she was at school at Booker Academy. She is a boarder, and the experience left her shaken.
Shantelle is now in a group of five girls at the school who have developed the appropriately named Malarax, an app to help raise awareness about malaria and educate people on preventive measures.
Kenya is one of many countries globally that are making huge investments to bring mortality rates down.
Malarax has been built as an educational gaming app, where users learn by taking quizzes, playing games, reading articles and other interactive learning modules that cover various aspects of malaria.
“If I discovered Malarax before I was sick, I think I would take sleeping with a net more seriously,” Shantelle says.
The application was submitted to the Technovation World Summit, which took place in San Francisco on October 17th, 2024.
At the summit, young innovators pitched their technology solutions, which ranged from agriculture apps that connect farmers to training apps for kids with cochlear implants. The girls, or Team Mars, as they named their group, were among five finalists in the junior category.
Team Mars’ journey to San Francisco started with participation in the Technovation Challenge, which is one of the pillars supported by Safaricom’s Women in Tech program.
During the 12-week Challenge, young girls who registered for the program were paired with mentors from the Women in Technology program who guided and coached them as they created Artificial Intelligence and app-based technologies that addressed real-world problems.
The Technovation Challenge requires students to identify problems affecting their communities and devise tech-based solutions to solve them. The girls’ Computer Studies teacher, Mr. Aggrey Sakwa Rapando, helped them identify three challenges: safe riding for boda boda riders, malaria, and PWDs. They eventually settled on malaria.
In addition to helping them identify the problem, Mr Rapando also ensured the girls had adequate time to work on their app and the necessary resources to succeed in their research and coding.
“That app is actually very good, and it is going to help people at the grassroots. You know, in interior places, people are not well-versed. They don’t have information about what causes malaria. They actually do not know how to control it or how to prevent it,” he says.
Since the challenge was established in 2014, 4500 girls have participated, including 427 who took part this season.
Velma Ngoni, a Change Management Engineer at Safaricom and the Chapter Ambassador for Technovation in Kenya, hopes to see the girls participate in more tech challenges and take up tech courses later in life.
“If their solution could come to life, because this was a prototype that was built, it would be a great win for the team, for them to see their application being used in the real market by residents of Kakamega County,” Velma says.
Velma’s biggest desire for the program within Kenya is for solutions to go all the way to development and use in the country because it has been a while since the program started in Kenya.
“It’s about time that you get to see these young girls coming up with real-life solutions that are used out there because when we look back, the first team that ever participated in Kenya has now graduated university,” she says.
Watch the video below to learn about how the girls created the app.
