What Happened to the South Sudanese Teens Who Invented a Robot to Clean Plastic from Oceans?
The story of the four teenagers from South Sudan and their invention, the Ramceil Botics, is a powerful example of African innovation.
After their initial success at the 2019 FIRST Global Challenge in Dubai, the team gained international recognition for developing a robot designed to combat plastic pollution in water bodies. Their invention was proved that young minds can leverage technology to address global challenges.
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However, a follow-up on their journey, specifically regarding the team’s collective progress and the commercialization of their robot, is difficult to track. Publicly available information doesn’t provide a direct, comprehensive update on what happened to the Ramceil Botics project as a whole. While the invention received significant media attention at the time, there are no widespread reports from the past five years detailing the team securing a major funding deal or commercializing the robot on a large scale.
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Instead, the updates focus more on the individual members and their subsequent academic and professional paths. For example, one of the team members, Kuena James Dak, has continued his work in innovation but has shifted his focus to agritech. He participated in a UNITAR program on entrepreneurship and innovation, where he developed an app to help small-scale farmers rent farm tools. His journey highlights a common reality for many young innovators: brilliant prototypes from competitions often face a significant funding gap and institutional challenges, leading the inventors to pursue other projects and opportunities.
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While many African inventors they have the talent and drive to create groundbreaking solutions, the lack of a robust financial and institutional support system often prevents their ideas from moving beyond a competition prototype to a deployed, real-world solution.
What Happened to the South Sudanese Teens Who Invented a Robot to Clean Plastic from Oceans?
