First-year students of Serwaa Nyarko Girls’ Senior High School in the Ashanti Region have developed a device that easily detects intruders and sends SMS alerts to security personnel. The students aim for various schools, households, agencies, and institutions to adopt this device to improve security.
Aside from addressing security concerns, the students have come up with several inventions aimed at tackling various societal and environmental problems.
At various senior high schools across Ghana, it is very common to hear of intruders entering school compounds to engage in nefarious activities. Many students are also often reported to have scaled school walls and bolted away from school premises, which has several implications.
With this background, first-year students of Serwaa Nyarko Senior High School have come up with an innovation to address this long-standing problem in senior high schools. This unique invention, which uses a solar-powered detection alarm system, alerts school authorities or security officials whenever anyone forcefully exits or enters the school premises or whenever there is any attack on students by outsiders.
These young ladies hope their invention will be adopted not only by schools but also by households, agencies, and institutions.
Lynette Ahenkorah, the leader of the security innovators group at the school, explained how the innovation operates:
“When we came to school, we noticed that intruders were often coming into the school. It caused a lot of chaos and panic, especially during prep time. You would hear that a town boy has jumped into the school, and then everybody would start running helter-skelter. Some even ended up getting hurt, and prep was interrupted.
At first, we decided to put in a sound, like an alarm. When the intruder comes in and it detects the intruder, it would make a very loud sound. But then we also thought of the students—that it would disturb their sleep. If they hear the sound, they would not stay in their dormitories; they would all start running out, and people would get hurt. It would cause chaos.”
She added, “So we decided to take the sound out. Instead, we just made a small bazaar inside. We also connected it to the security men’s phones so that when an intruder comes into the school, it would send an SMS message to the security men. This would alert them, and they would know that intruders are in the school.”
This innovation is part of efforts by students to embrace the STEM agenda being championed by the government and other stakeholders. Apart from coming up with various inventions, the students have organized themselves into several groups where they have specialized in addressing many challenges confronting society.
Other groups concerned about climate change and its impact have invented a waste management and segregation system. They convert organic waste collected into biogas for cooking in the school’s kitchen and use plastic waste to make desks, addressing furniture deficits.
The girls have also developed an eco-friendly method of burning used sanitary pads to address concerns among their colleagues, who fear janitors might misuse them for rituals.
These innovations are influenced and made possible by Stephen Boakye Frimpong, CEO of Tek-Devisal, who has collaborated with authorities in the school to discover and enhance the innovative potentials of students by addressing common problems in society through the use of technology.
Stephen Boakye Frimpong highlighted the essence of training young girls in the tech space and pledged his commitment to training and grooming more females, especially young girls, in the sector.
He also indicated, “This is the training program. We are also going to introduce the venture program where we convert most of what they do into businesses. Because, as we speak, there are a few companies in Ghana that are actually Ghanaian-owned and actually making a lot of revenue to sustain our economy. So, going forward, we are going to breed these companies through our special design venture program. So that we create a lot of companies in Ghana that are going to solve our problems, make money, and create the Googles and Apples for our country.”
These students want relevant authorities to give them the needed support to help address problems affecting Ghanaians and the world at large while creating jobs for themselves.
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