Students From Ashesi University Make Ghana And Africa Proud At The Just Ended IGEM Competition

The International Genetically  Engineered Machines (IGEM) Competition, which aims at bringing people from all over the world together to identify problems specific to their environment, country or continent and using synthetic biology to solve these problems came to a successful end last week.

And for the first time Ghana participated, we made mother Africa proud. The team from Ashesi University who represented Ghana and West Africa as a whole, picked the overall award, 'The Chairman's Award' and came second place for the 'Overgrad students' award.

The grand prize awards were in three sections - the Overgrad students, Undergrad and High School.

For the over grad section, of which Ghana came second in this section, the grand prize winner was Vilnius Lithuania a team from Lithuania whiles TU-Delft from Netherlands won the grand prize for the undergrad section and TAS Taipei from Taiwan won from the high school section.

The chairman’s award which was a generalized award not sectioned out of all the 300 teams was given to 2 teams, with which the most acknowledged was the the Ashesi team from Ghana and the second was the Georgia state team.

The program was a 5 day event, and the members from Ghana who participated were Abdul-Ghaffar Adam Appiah, Nana Oye Djan, David Sasu, Stephan Ofosuhene, Miquilina Anagbah, Justice Essuman and Claude-Noel Tamakloe, and the team lead was David Sasu. And most importantly the PI who made this whole project a success, Dr Elena Rosca

The project they presented involved using synthetic biology to create a means of solving the negative effect of galamsey, and I must say, I am very glad that this project came out perfect enough to receive that much recognition to win them these awards. Congrats to the students, we couldn't be more proud at you.

This was the first time Ghana was participating and also the first time West Africa showed up at this program. But there were only two representatives for Africa at this year's event thus, Ghana and Egypt.

The students from Ghana and Egypt who represented Africa at the event

The Ashesi students didn't only represent West Africa, but also represented the tAdLiFe as they were seen wearing the movement's branded t-shirt. tAdLiFe is a movement created to make the African dream a lifestyle. And according to them, the African dream is simply the dream of every African home and abroad, the aspiration of each and every African across the globe, to build your dream.

But importantly, remember to put the tag #Africa on it so the world knows you doing it for Africa and through that all true Africans can relate to it and know that the realization of your dream is the realization of Africa's dream. 

According to the founder of the movement, Cecil Tsatsu Tamakloe,"supporting this young talents is both a necessity and responsibility of every African and lover of African in order to motivate them to do more and inspire others to refocus their attention on positive things of this kind in order to make possible the development and total liberation of Africans and the continent of Africa itself in order to command the needed respect Africa deserves from the rest of the world".

He also shared his frustration over how "the media especially in Ghana and for that matter Africa puts in no effort or very little effort in telling such stories and edges all stakeholders to do more in getting such stories to be told if indeed they have Africa and her future at heart"