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By Johnathan Paoli
Deputy Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Nomalungelo Gina has warned that the country must not be left behind in the global race for innovation, urging young entrepreneurs to dream big, commercialise faster and lead South Africa into the digital future.
Delivering the keynote address at the University of Johannesburg-BRICS Summer School’s 2nd Innovation Challenge, Gina described the challenge as “serious and important work” by a university that has positioned itself as a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), calling on students to seize opportunities to create solutions that respond not only to South Africa’s development needs but also to global challenges.
“BRICS nations are not simply consumers of global innovation; we are producers, pioneers, and contributors to global progress. South Africa must continue to learn from these experiences while adapting them to our own context, particularly in renewable energy, digital skills development, and advanced manufacturing,” she said.
The event, held under the theme “Strengthening Digital Skills and Entrepreneurship in BRICS+ through Student Innovation”, brought together students, academics, policymakers, and industry leaders in a celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Gina highlighted a persistent challenge in South Africa’s higher education landscape: while universities produce numerous prototypes each year, many struggle to move beyond the Technology Transfer Office stage into the economy.
To address this, she outlined the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation’s initiatives, including the Innovation Fund and the Higher Education Innovation Fund, launched last year with the support of the UN Development Programme.
These funds are designed to help students and researchers bridge the costly gap between prototype development and commercialisation.
“I would like to see more innovators collaborating with the CSIR, the Technology Innovation Agency, and our Departmental teams. Our aim is to build a resilient and agile innovation ecosystem that supports young innovators with venture capital, angel investors, and institutional backing,” she said.
Gina also stressed that South Africa must position itself strategically within both the global and African innovation race, citing progress in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
She connected UJ’s efforts to the broader BRICS Young Innovators Forum, established in 2015 as a platform to connect youth-led innovation across BRICS nations.
“Events such as today’s challenge serve as a springboard for South Africa’s representation on global platforms. They allow us to identify and empower the most promising talents, ensuring that when our young people step onto stages like the upcoming BRICS Young Innovators Forum in Brazil, they do so as confident leaders,” Gina explained.
Executive Dean of the College of Business and Economics Tankiso Moloi hailed the challenge as a milestone for youth-led solutions in the Global South.
He paid tribute to Sebonkile Thaba, the driving force behind the challenge, and Vicky Graham, who helped create an enabling environment for the initiative.
“Innovation without direction is like an engine without a steering wheel—powerful but prone to chaos. What we need for the BRICS+ era is ecosystem leadership: from policymakers, academics, industry partners, and most importantly, from students themselves,” Moloi said.
He argued that BRICS+ innovation must be contextual, solutions rooted in the realities of Johannesburg as much as those of Beijing, Brasília, New Delhi, Moscow, Cairo, or Jakarta.
Such innovations, he said, could reshape the global innovation map, turning the Global South into a distributed hub rather than leaving dominance to a single region.
Moloi also called for a pedagogical revolution in education, where digital skills go beyond basic computer literacy to include computational thinking, data literacy, ethics, cybersecurity, and cross-border collaborative learning.
“Our students must not just be job seekers, but job creators, audacious problem-solvers, and agile global citizens,” he said.
At the heart of the event were the top five student-led start-ups, who pitched their projects to an expert panel of judges.
Among the standouts was Inkulumo Connect, an AI-powered real-time translation platform for South African Sign Language, designed to bridge communication barriers for more than 230,000 SASL users.
Another finalist, ProcureTech Innovations, is using AI and blockchain to revolutionise rural healthcare supply chains, addressing inefficiencies in medicine and equipment delivery.
Other projects showcased cutting-edge solutions in fintech, agritech, and education technology, reflecting the challenge’s emphasis on digital skills and entrepreneurship.
Judges commended the quality of the pitches, noting the scalability and potential global impact of several of the ideas.
Both Gina and Moloi positioned the challenge as more than a competition—it is a step toward reimagining South Africa’s place in the global knowledge economy.
They argued that innovation ecosystems, if nurtured, could transform the country’s socio-economic trajectory while strengthening ties across the BRICS+ alliance.
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