Clarisse Iribagiza

"Recognising the work we do is encouraging and it is also a reminder that we are not doing anything in vain. It pushes us to greater heights."

"I was raised by a teacher and entrepreneur, who encouraged my siblings and I to be ambitious and pursue meaningful careers. After every school year, mom and dad would ask us what we wanted to do with our lives, and this put a lot of pressure on us to always ask ourselves why we were doing whatever we were doing."

"It is a great honour for the entire team working tirelessly to realise the dreams that we have ."

"As young people we want to be inventors," she told the onlooking heads of state ."

"But they face many challenges such as high cost of production, lack of access to energy and poor infrastructure. Technology can help reduce their costs and enable them to operate more efficiently."

"It was a lot of experimenting for us – we tried out so many ideas and at the end of it all we learned how to build mobile information systems – basically endless databases of relevant information, and build applications on top of that ."