Two South African innovators have been shortlisted for the UK Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation 2026. This is the continent’s richest award aimed at promoting engineering innovation and entrepreneurship that makes an impact, across sub-Saharan Africa. The first prize is £50 000, while the three finalists will get £10 000 each, and £5 000 will go to the winner of the “One to Watch” award. The total value of the prize money is £85 000. The funding of the prizes comes partly from the UK Department of Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. The finals will take place in Johannesburg in October.

The two South Africans are chemical engineer and Water Quality Engineering Professor Dyllon Randall, and biomedical researcher Sincengile Ntshingila. There are 16 shortlisted candidates in total, from 11 countries.

All shortlisted candidates will benefit from a thorough eight-month training programme, centred on essential business skills such as market analysis and financial management. The aim is to enable the innovating entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into solutions that are scalable and market-ready. Additionally, the candidates can access experts for mentoring in business, communications, engineering and technology. This is possible through the Royal Academy of Engineering’s large network of engineers and industry leaders, across both Africa and the UK. Further, alumni of the prize have been able to collectively secure more than $34-million in grants and equity funding, from third parties, through this network.

Randall founded Pee-Cycling, to develop a modular urine-to-fertiliser recovery system. This uses purpose-built urinals to collect urine, then stabilises the urine to prevent the loss of nutrients, and thereafter uses reverse osmosis to concentrate it to produce high-grade liquid nursery fertiliser and reusable water. Africa is a water-stressed continent, and African farmers face increasing fertiliser costs, and many people do not have access to adequate sanitation. Yet water is often used to flush away human waste, including urine. Pee-Cycling addresses these issues by providing proper sanitation, saving water, and creating fertiliser.

Ntshingila founded LabZero, which is a virtual tissue culture lab. Tissue culture is essential for vaccine research, drug development and regenerative medicine. But training in handling tissue cultures is difficult, because even the tiniest of errors (such as touching the wrong surface, or mishandling reagents) can ruin an entire experiment. Given that tissue culture labs are expensive and highly sensitive facilities requiring maintenance of the highest standards, this makes training students in them difficult. LabZero deals with this by means of a browser-based virtual lab that simulates the full mammalian cell culture workflow, allowing students to practise growing and maintaining cells on a digital platform, before ever entering an actual physical lab.