The just concluded Global Entrepreneurship Summit featured many innovators and entrepreneurs. As the curtain fell on the GES on Sunday, some young entrepreneurs were smiling all the way to the bank.

The GES brought together many passionate and enthusiastic entrepreneurs, tenderpreneurs and techpreneurs from all over the world. However, on the final day, Africa was in the spotlight as it produced winners of the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST), which attracted 792 contestants.

The overall winner of GIST was Esther Majisola Ojebode, a Nigeria techpreneur, followed by Kenya’s Taita Ngetich who runs greenhouses.

Mr Taita Ngetich (pictured above), a fifth-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Nairobi (UoN, won $15000 (Ksh1.5 million) for his Illiminum Greenhouse project. The greenhouses offer a controlled and regulated environment, manned by sensor technology.

“Wherever you are, you can know what is happening in your farm,” he says. A farmer can open and close the irrigation system, as well as query and get alerts on current greenhouse status on such things as temperature, humidity and soil moisture by simply sending an SMS. The system is powered by a 14-watt solar panel and can work in rural areas, where electricity is a challenge.

The farmer also gets warning text messages on irregular parameters, such as high temperatures inside the greenhouse and, in turn, the system opens the flaps to correct the situation and immediately sends an SMS to the farmer informing about the correction carried out.

Mr Ng’etich says he teamed with a colleague to create a project to raise pocket money as they studied in campus, which later turned into a winner.

Chemical analyst wins for killing pests

Majisola Ojebode is a Nigerian applied biochemistry graduate from the Federal university of technology, Akure. The chemical analyst runs Bioresource Company, which offers solutions to killing weevils to reduce post-harvest losses. Ms Ojebode took home $15,000 (Ksh1.5 million) for the overall prize plus another $5,000 (Ksh500,000) for emerging the best in agriculture.

She says was an inquisitive child and remembers wondering how food expiry dates were determined. “I have always loved anything to do with science, and I studied it in the hope that it would enable me to combat environmental issues in my community, such as the pest problem on farms,” she says.

Ms Ojebode’s area of research is metalobomics, the scientific study of chemical processes involving metabolites, which are extracted from plants. “Metabolomics entails using a robust approach to discover what pesticides are doing, and to ensure that they work on the pest and not on the humans applying them,” she explains. “In other words, they need to be bio-selective.”

The process involves taking a model plant that has already been sequenced through genetic coding. Next, they take compounds whose bioactivities are already known. “We apply these to the model plant, to get their metabolic ‘fingerprints’ via gas chromatography instrumentation,” says Ojebode. “This will show us the effect that the applied compounds have on the plant. We do that on several plants using several compounds so we have a large range to examine.”

Ojebode has conducted such tests on lemongrass and dongoyaro (Azadirachta indica), a medicinal plant that people sow around their houses to deter insects. She now has enough information to contribute to the databases of scientific bodies, such as the International Metabolomics Society. “My intention is to figure out the exact properties of these plants and extract them for direct use,” she said.