“PACE7 Removes Dependency On Expensive Foreign Vendors”

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“PACE7 Removes Dependency On Expensive Foreign Vendors”

Ynna Merveille Matchiffo, IT Project Manager.

16 Sep 2026 15:51

How does your innovation work, and who is your target audience? PACE7 runs on affordable hard ware like the Raspberry Pi. You feed the device data including network traffic, text, or photo graphs, and it checks for threats right on the spot without sending data anywhere. It detects network anomalies, phishing scams, fake media, and even crop diseases. Our target audience includes government agencies, schools, non-profits, small businesses, and farming cooperatives that need security but cannot afford expensive systems. What challenges have you encountered along the way? Our team faces several key hurdles. Amongst them, we can cite ma king complex security software small enough to run efficiently on low-cost hardware, gathering local data on regional threat patterns, and understanding varying data privacy laws across African coun tries. Additionally, keeping pro duction costs genuinely low so small organizations can afford the units, alongside raising capital to scale properly, remains an ongoing challenge. How much capital was re quired to launch, and what does the device cost? We started with organizational support, spending roughly FCFA 8.5 million to 11.3million that’s about 15,000 to 20,000 dollars on initial hardware, team effort, and ente ring competitions. If we are to sell commercially, a device will cost approximately FCFA 450,000 FCFA. To scale across regions, we estimate needing over 28.2 million to FCFA 56.5 million over the next 18 months. What security and data privacy measures have you imple mented? Privacy is central to our architec tural design. Everything happens locally on the user’s device. This means n...