Donatus Njoroge posing with his award and certificate.

The winner of the recent global innovation awards, Donatus Njoroge paid a courtesy call to Research Beeline offices in Thika yesterday. Njoroge is a Kenyan Researcher and a lecturer at Mount Kenya University where he has been developing his impacting project.

In his maiden visit, revealed that following his winning of the coveted prize he was keen to see what the future held for him.

Speaking to Beeline, Njoroge said that his project mainly focused on developing a novel bio-pesticide to manage post-harvest losses in grains.

According to him about 20,000 deaths occur each year and are related to unintentional pesticide poisoning, blamed on chemical pesticides to preserve grains.

His innovative project, zeal and ambition has made him scale heights receiving numerous awards and prizes namely 2018/2019 National Innovation award organised by the Kenya National Innovation Agency (KENIA), the  East Africa Post-Harvest Technologies 2017 award in a competition by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and most recently the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (Gist Tech-1) 2019 Award, where he beat 23 other finalists.

According to him the latter was the most exciting in that it gave him the confidence to even do more and pursue other projects that he has in mind.

He was feted during the Global Entrepreneurship Congress held in Bahrain on April 17, winning $15,000 cash in seed capital and $50,000 as Amazon web services credit.

He will also benefit from a specialised mentoring by David Hamod, President and CEO of the National US-Arab Chamber of Commerce.

The lecturer says that he funded the project at its initial stages until in 2017 when USAID, agriculture multinational Syngenta, and Inter Region Economic Network (IREN) came along and helped refine the product. He says that he gets to know about the opportunities through a set of networks, funding platforms and random searches from the internet.

The don attributes his success to the university’s support, good pitching, vast knowledge, good timing and a comprehensive business model with an elaborate structure of the market, competitors and financial projections.

His next maiden step is to commercialise and launch the product after proper patenting both in Africa and in the United States.

As a parting shot, he urges upcoming scientists to “think differently and the results will be different as well”, saying that innovation is the other way of utilizing “scarce resources in a simplified way”.

Photo courtesy of Google

Story by Carolyne Nyokabi