Nigeria’s Vice-President, Yemi Osinbajo on Thursday hosted a team of young girls who made the country proud by winning gold at the World Technovation Challenge held in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco, United States.

Their award-winning innovation was a mobile application called the FD-Detector which they developed to help tackle the challenge of  proliferation of fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria.

The group known as ‘Team Save-A-Soul’, met Osinbajo at the State House in Abuja where he congratulated them with both parties sharing ideas. Also present at the meeting was head of Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Ali Pantami.

Reports indicate that the girls who represented the African continent at the event, fended off stiff competitors from the United States, Turkey, Spain, Uzbekistan and China.

The girls, who are all students of a secondary school located in Onitsha, the capital of Anambra State were led by Uchenna Onwuamaegbu Ugwu. Other members of the team were Promise Nnalue, Jessica Osita, Nwabuaku Ossai, Adaeze Onuigbo and Vivian Okoye.

Under the tutelage of Uchenna Onwuamaegbu-Ugwu, the Chief Executive Officer of Edufun Technik and with support of the Anambra State government, the team spent five months researching and developing the detector which eventually emerged tops.

Technovation is a programme which offers young girls around the world the opportunity to learn the programming skills they need to emerge as tech-entrepreneurs and leaders.

Every year, girls are invited to identify a problem in their communities and then are challenged to solve it by developing Android applications that would address those problems.

A total of 115 countries participated in the qualifiers but only 12 teams from all over the world were selected as finalists for the grand finale.