What do human urine and a virtual laboratory have in common?
Not much, at first glance. But both are at the centre of South African innovations shortlisted for the 2026 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation — and both illustrate a bigger challenge facing African science: turning good research into solutions that work beyond the laboratory.
South African researchers Dyllon Randall and Sincengile Ntshingila are among 16 innovators from 11 African countries competing for a share of the £85,000 prize fund. Run by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, the prize promotes engineering innovation and entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. The winner, who takes £50,000, will be named in Joburg in October.
For Randall, the commercial opportunity began with something most people would prefer not to think about.
A chemical engineer and professor of water quality engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Randall became interested in recovering nutrients from urine after returning from studies in Switzerland in 2017. Cape Town was in the grip of a severe drought, and the absurdity struck him.
“We’re using drinking water during a drought to flush our urine away. And I knew how valuable our urine is, so this didn’t make sense,” he says.
That observation became the foundation for Pee-Cycling, a UCT spin-out Randall founded with former student Caitlin Courtney.
The company is commercialising technology that separates, stabilises and concentrates urine into liquid fertiliser while recovering reusable water. It eases the burden on wastewater systems and recovers nutrients that would otherwise be lost.
Urine contains large quantities of water, and removing it conventionally can be energy intensive. Randall and his team turned to reverse osmosis — better known for desalinating seawater — to develop a lower-energy process.
The technology has moved from a 7l laboratory proof of concept to a system processing 750l a day at Cape Town’s DHL Stadium. Potential uses range from commercial buildings and hotels to residential developments.
“People think that it’s easy and that it’s going to work the first time,” Randall says. “But honestly, without fail, we can plan an experiment and it will never go the way you expected.”
Ntshingila’s innovation also grew out of personal experience.
Raised in Pongola and educated partly in neighbouring Swaziland (now Eswatini), she studied agricultural economics at the University of Swaziland before completing a master’s degree at the University of Pretoria. She had wanted to be a doctor, but could not afford medical school.
A hairdressing salon she had established drew her into hair and scalp conditions. To understand them better, she went to UCT in 2018 and completed a PhD in dermatology, focusing on alopecia (hair loss).
She is now a postdoctoral research fellow in medicine and the founder of Nothile Biolab, the company behind LabZero, which develops immersive computer simulations for biomedical and pharmaceutical laboratory training.
The business addresses a practical skills gap. Students entering biomedical laboratories may have limited hands-on experience, particularly those from underresourced universities. And mistakes involving expensive reagents, specialised equipment, or human tissue can be costly.
LabZero lets students practise procedures, make decisions, get feedback, and learn from mistakes before entering a physical laboratory.
“It’s them interacting with the system,” Ntshingila says. “They can make decisions. They can fail safely until such time when they are ready to transition into a physical lab.”
The market extends beyond universities. LabZero is initially targeting drug developers and pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers in Africa, the UK and the US.
African researchers are not necessarily short of ideas. The harder task is turning those ideas into viable products, companies and markets.
Both innovators have known failure. Randall speaks of experiments that failed and funding that disappeared. Ntshingila lost an earlier business. Neither treated the setbacks as a reason to stop.
The wider shortlist ranges from AI-enabled health care and mobile dialysis to renewable energy, agritech, clean water, waste management and digital education. Since its launch in 2014, the prize has supported 165 businesses across 22 countries, which employ more than 40,000 people and have benefited more than 11-million people, according to the academy.
The pair’s inclusion is a reminder that universities can be more than centres of academic research. They can also be launchpads for technologies that address African problems — and for businesses built around solving them.
The test will not be whether their ideas are innovative. It will be whether they can make them useful, scalable, and commercially sustainable.
That is where the laboratory ends and the real business begins.
