12 Nov 2023

Harvest Smart are the winners of Orange Summer Challenge competition.

The four-member team  has walked away with P10 000 and a trip to France in January 2024 to represent the country in the same competition.

Orange Digital Center director, Ms Lepata Nthomola explained that Orange Summer challenge, which started three months ago was aimed at grooming students exhibiting remarkable skills in digital technology.

“We gave students from across universities in Botswana a three-month internship programme where they were trained by Orange Botswana experts in different fields of digital technology and the orange summer challenge is the cream that concludes the training,” she said.

She said participants were five groups of students of different ages and gender who were challenged to develop a prototype addressing a challenge in the community whilst commercialising the project.

A group of four named Sensabin came up with a dustbin with sensors to notify relevant personnel when the bin is full and ready for collection. The project was inspired by communities’ challenges of uncollected garbage and waste polluting the environment

The second group, Morui came up with a cellphone app tracking device for users to monitor on real time movement of their livestock.

Another group called AFras Technology came up a with SmartfeedPro prototype, a machine using ultrasonic sensors to collect and communicate levels of feed and necessity of refill in poultry farms.The solution addresses problem faced by poultry farmers that need to put in a lot of work in feeding.

To reduce response time to road accidents and impact of road  accidents on the community, SafeDrive, a group of two students came up with a technology that detects road hazards and listens for car crash noises and immediately notify emergency services and the police at the time of the accident.

The winners, Harvest Smart Technologies, a group of four came up with a prototype that is put in already existing infrastructure to sense when food is about to go bad thus notifying the relevant authorities to be able to take out the food in time to avoid selling low quality products to customers.

In position five is Sensabin who won P1 000, position four is Afras Technology who also won P1000, third position Morui bagged P6 000, fourth spot is SafeDrive who claimed P8 000. ENDS