26 year-old Charlette N’Guessan, is the first woman to win Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize for her engineering innovation. As CEO and Co-founder of a Ghanaian-based software company called BACE Group, she discovered that many financial institution in West Africa deal with identity fraud.

She estimated that these companies spend up to $400m per annum to identify their customers. In an interview with CNN, she revealed, “We decided to make our contribution as software engineers and data scientists by building a solution that can useful for the market.”

She further revealed that her idea came whiles she was studying at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. “We talked to tech entrepreneurs. That’s when we noticed that there’s a huge problem with cyber security with online services and businesses.”

Charlette and her team won €25,000 as award for BACE API, a digital verification system that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) & facial recognition to verify the identities of Africans remotely and in real-time.

Credit: CNN Africa