Arthur Blaxall High School scooped the top award in the techno-girl programme for 2015, coming tops out of 12 participating schools in KwaZulu-Natal this year.

Each school was represented by 10 learners. Deputy Minister of Small Business Development, Elizabeth Thabethe, hosted the programme in April this year where the girls were required to come up with an innovation that has the potential to capture the market and lead to job creation.

“The girls from Arthur Blaxall won the 2015 techno-girl competition after presenting a revolutionary coffee machine idea that uses handprint-memory technology to provide the user with custom-made coffee all the time. The coffee machine caters for blind people because it has Braille codes,” says Thabethe.

She further announced that one of the department’s agencies, the Small Enterprise Development Agency (SEDA), will be working with the girls to look at issues of their intellectual property and the development of the prototype.

“The techno-girl programme seeks to encourage girl learners to pursue careers in the STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) but also to make them realise that they can be job creators rather than job seekers. We encourage them to view entrepreneurship as an alternative career path rather than a last option when all else has failed,” says Thabethe

As part of their prizes, two of the girls from the winning school participated in the global summit of women in Brazil in May this year and all 10 of them were also special guests of Thabethe in parliament during her budget vote speech.