Build54 Undergraduate Prize in Engineering 2025

Africa's engineering challenges demand innovative solutions that work within unique constraints: limited access to specialized components requiring designs using locally available materials, unreliable power grids necessitating energy-efficient and fault-tolerant systems, harsh environmental conditions demanding robust engineering, and the need for solutions that can be manufactured and maintained with local expertise. 

Students must demonstrate how engineering innovations in robotics, IoT systems, renewable energy, embedded systems, or signal processing can create practical solutions that address critical needs in agriculture, healthcare, infrastructure, education, or industry while being feasible to implement and scale across diverse African environments.

The Best Undergraduate Final Year Project in Engineering celebrates breakthrough engineering solutions from Africa's most promising engineering students. This challenge seeks projects that demonstrate exceptional engineering design, practical problem-solving, and innovations that address real-world challenges through physical systems and hardware solutions.

We welcome projects across all engineering disciplines with particular interest in robotics for agricultural or industrial automation, IoT systems for smart cities and infrastructure monitoring, renewable energy solutions for off-grid communities, embedded systems for healthcare or education, and signal processing innovations for communications. 

Projects should showcase strong engineering principles while creating tangible, working solutions.

Successful projects will demonstrate excellent engineering design methodology, prototype development, rigorous testing, and clear paths to deployment. Whether you're building autonomous agricultural robots, designing IoT networks for water management, creating innovative renewable energy systems, or developing embedded medical devices, we want to see engineering excellence applied to African challenges.

Projects should show consideration for local manufacturing capabilities, maintenance requirements, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability. We particularly value solutions that can be produced and maintained locally, use readily available materials, and address critical infrastructure or development needs.