TFS Cargo Bicycles, a venture from Benin City, Nigeria, is one of eight innovative social enterprises from across Africa selected to participate in the 2025 ASME Innovation Showcase (ISHOW) Africa. This prestigious international accelerator, hosted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), champions hardware-led social innovations addressing critical challenges in agriculture, energy, healthcare, and transportation.
The virtual program for the 2025 ASME ISHOW Africa began on Tuesday, June 10. The eight ventures will pitch their groundbreaking solutions and undergo a comprehensive design and engineering review with industry experts. These participants are competing for three coveted spots in the 2025 ISHOW cohort, which includes grant awards and crucial technical support to help bring their impactful innovations to market. The virtual awards ceremony will be held on Wednesday, June 18, at 7:00 PM Eastern Africa Time. Interested individuals can register to attend here.
The innovations from this year’s ISHOW Africa ventures offer affordable and sustainable hardware technology solutions. Here’s a closer look at the selected ventures:
- Agrivolve Limited (Nairobi, Kenya): Their “Agrivolve Balcony Units” are compact, self-watering vertical farming systems designed for urban households, allowing users to grow fresh, chemical-free vegetables at home.
- Baini Technologies Limited (Kampala, Uganda): The “HemoSave Device” offers real-time and accurate quantification of maternal blood loss during cesarean section births, enabling early detection of postpartum hemorrhage and facilitating life-saving treatments.
- CIST East Africa Industries Limited (Kisumu, Kenya): Their “CIST-Second Generation Bioethanol Fuel Micro Distillery System” converts waste cellulose biomass, including sugarcane bagasse and water hyacinth, into 95% ethanol for use as cooking fuel and transport energy.
- GreenWize EV (Nairobi, Kenya): The “GreenWize EV” solution converts end-of-life internal combustion engine motorbikes into eco-friendly electric vehicles through a battery swapping system and an open infrastructure for hybrid solar-powered fast charging.
- H2Energies (Rusape, Zimbabwe): Their “Hydrostove 1.0” utilizes water and solar power to produce hydrogen gas, providing an affordable, clean cooking fuel for hard-to-reach rural communities, thereby reducing indoor air pollution and deforestation.
- I-Dress (CAMTech Uganda-Mbarara, University of Science and Technology): The “I-Dress” solution is an affordable, sterile wound dressing made from gauze infused with honey and olive oil, designed to prevent infection and accelerate healing for post-cesarean wounds in low-resource settings.
- MariTest Africa (Kampala, Uganda): Their “MariTest” is a non-invasive, AI-powered diagnostic device for rapid malaria detection and monitoring, specifically designed for frontline health workers in remote areas without access to lab facilities.
- TFS Cargo Bicycles (Benin City, Nigeria): The “SunHaul Bike” is a solar-powered, electric-assisted cargo bicycle built for navigating rough rural terrains. It features a heat pump for cooling or drying farm produce and a solar tracker for optimized charging on the go.
Ventures selected for the 2025 ISHOW cohort will be invited to the annual ISHOW Bootcamp in the winter. This bootcamp provides extensive and customized design and engineering reviews by experts, guiding them as they scale their products to market. They will also receive design services to support product development and become part of the ISHOW alumni network, an international community of hardware innovators with exclusive access to experts and resources.
The ASME ISHOW India event took place in April, and the ASME ISHOW Americas virtual event is scheduled for July 29-31. Three ventures from each of the three regional events will form the complete ISHOW 2025 cohort.
ASME extends its gratitude to its global implementation partners, including The Lemelson Foundation, for their continuous support of the ISHOW and a multi-year strategic investment in ASME to bolster the hardware impact innovation system.