Rowan Rodgers, a fourth year Software Engineering student at Kirinyaga University led a team of three students including himself, Ridan Hawi a fourth year B.Sc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering student from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) and Robert Odhiambo a fourth year B.Sc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering student from University of Nairobi to achieve a historic milestone defeating more than 29,000 global submissions to win the 2025 Call for Code Global Challenge. Their team, DuniAfrika, won the Global Grand Prize, becoming the first team from the Africa and Middle East region to claim the competition’s top award since its launch in 2018.
The team’s award-winning innovation, called LINDA, derived from the Swahili word for ‘protect’, is an AI-driven safety assistant created to safeguard Jua Kali workers in Kenya’s expansive informal sector. These workers among them artisans, mechanics, and labourers, often work in dangerous environments without formal safety equipment.
Workers can take and send photographs of their work environment or ask questions about potential hazards directly by uploading images or questions regarding their work environment on a whatsapp platform. Using IBM Granite AI models, LINDA assesses the information, detects risks such as exposed electrical wiring, missing personal protective equipment, or structural threats, and provides prompt, practical safety guidance in both English and Swahili.
As recipients of the Global Grand Prize, Team DuniAfrika was awarded USD 50,000 to advance development and deployment of LINDA. In addition, their universities will collectively receive a further USD 30,000 grant (USD 10,000 each) in recognition of the team’s top ranking among university participants globally.
The prize was revealed on December 10, 2025, at Geneva’s Palais Wilson. The Call for Code Global Challenge, an annual initiative led by IBM in partnership with the United Nations Human Rights Office and the Linux Foundation, invites developers around the world to build open-source technology solutions for urgent social and humanitarian challenges. That the team Duni Africa emerged victorious by outperforming more than 29,000 global submissions is evidence that Kirinyaga University is a major player in global innovation platform.
Kirinyaga University proudly celebrates this outstanding milestone, reflecting our continued commitment to nurturing innovation, creativity, and real-world problem solving. As we congratulate Team DuniAfrika on their historic achievement, we remain steadfast in empowering our students to develop transformative innovations that address societal challenges and place Kirinyaga University on the global innovation map.
