Charlette N’Guessan is the first woman to win the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation award, which could revolutionize cybersecurity and help curb identity fraud on the continent, According to CNN Africa.
Charlette N’Guessan and her team won the £25,000 award (about $33,000) for BACE API, a digital verification system that uses Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition to verify the identities of Africans remotely and in real-time. BACE API works by matching the live photo of a user to the image on their documents such as passports or ID cards, N’Guessan shared. For websites and online applications that have BACE API integrated into them, users will be verified via their webcam to establish their identity.
BACE API can be integrated into already existing applications and systems for identity verification and is targeted at most financial institutions on the continent.
N’Guessan told CNN.
N’Guessan and her team won the Africa Prize for Innovation in a virtual award ceremony on September 3 where the Africa Prize judges and a live audience voted in their favor, the Royal Academy of Engineering said in a statement.
N’Guessan said their research found that many financial institutions in the west African country deal with identity fraud, estimating that they spend up to $400 million dollars yearly to identify their customers.
“We are very proud to have Charlette N’Guessan and her team win this award. It is essential to have technologies like facial recognition based on African communities, and we are confident their innovative technology will have far reaching benefits for the continent.”
said Rebecca Enonchong, an entrepreneur from Cameroon entrepreneur and Africa Prize judge in the statement.
The software has been developed specifically to identify Africans. Most of the existing facial recognition technology available struggle to recognise black faces. A United States government study revealed that the current systems misidentify black people at a rate of five to ten times higher than for white people.
Who Is Charlette N’Guessan?
N’Guessan is the CEO and co-founder of a Ghana-based software company, BACE Group. She was studied at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana’s capital city.
N’Guessan’s interest in technology started at a young age. Growing up in Ivory Coast, west Africa, she was encouraged to focus on science and technology subjects by her father, a mathematics professor.
“My father inspired my choice for studying STEM. I was actually really good in science-related courses. After high school, I went on to study software engineering at university. I will be happy if people are inspired by my story, being the first woman to win the Africa Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, and by my work as a woman in tech.
She says about her journey to creating her own tech start-up.
