The 2022 Orange Social Venture Prize winner has won the Presidential Grand Prize of Agriculture Innovation Challenge at the 2024 Tech Submit organised by the Ministry of Communications, Technology and Innovation.

Osman Yaah of Auto-smart Irrigation is excited about the US$30,000 win and Orange SL is proud of his success.

From a very young age, Osman had dreamed of becoming a tech giant like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. He, however, wasn’t opportune to touch a computer system until he was 15 years old. The environment Osman grew up in wouldn’t allow him to explore this dream of his, as he was limited or had no access to digital centres or digital education.

Luck, however, shone on him when he got admitted into the Orange Digital Centre (ODC) College where he became a full stack developer (Web and mobile app development) at the Orange College. Through this college, Osman with few others have been given an opportunity to change the country and continent digitally. The programme, which was borne out of a mission by Orange, was set to achieve digital excellence in Sierra Leone and Africa.

At the 4th Edition of the Orange Social Venture Prize (OSVP) pitch event, which took place earlier in September, 2022 at the telecommunications company’s headquarters, Osman Yaah emerged the Winner, winning the NLe100,000 National Grand Prize after representing Sierra Leone with Adeola Carew of Safe Space, Sierra Leone.

He won the grand prize after presenting a creative business idea that enables the use of mobile phones to supply water to farms from any location in the world, resulting to the development of the first digital agricultural irrigation system in Sierra Leone.