This article has been supplied and will be available for a limited time only on this website. Across Africa, women engineers and entrepreneurs are developing practical technologies to address everyday challenges in healthcare, water, mobility, education and essential services. Designed around local realities, from limited infrastructure and specialist shortages to affordability constraints, their innovations focus on solving real problems for communities that cannot wait for systems to catch up.
As International Women in Engineering Day is marked this June, their work offers a timely reminder that women are not only entering engineering in greater numbers, but they are also helping define what engineering is for: practical solutions that improve lives, strengthen communities and respond to urgent local needs.
The women shortlisted for the 2026 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation are part of a growing generation of innovators using engineering to expand access to critical services across the continent.
In South Africa, Sincengile Ntshingila is rethinking how future biomedical researchers learn core laboratory skills. Her innovation, LabZero, is a low-bandwidth virtual tissue culture lab that allows students and early-career researchers to practise mammalian cell culture workflows before they enter a physical laboratory.
