Abel Hailu was a second-year student when the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic set foot in Ethiopia in early 2020. He was studying at the machine department at Misrak Polytechnic College, one of the 15 Technical, Vocational Education & Training (TVET) schools across the country that reports to the TVET Institute. Soon after COVID-19 became this year's game changer, the government ordered a nationwide shutdown of schools in an attempt to curb and contain transmission of the virus.

Over 30 million students across the country, including Abel, were told to stay home.

The pandemic has been disruptive, to say the least, but it has also brought about much innovation. Youngsters who were forced to stay at home with fewer school activities have started to come up with innovative ideas  to explore their skills.

From the early days of the pandemic up to June, over 500 innovations have been registered under the Ministry of Innovation & Technology.

For Abel, the lockdown was an opportunity to use his skills to help the community in battling the virus. It was a time to consider the paths of transmission of the virus, to think about how to use innovation to help people keep themselves safe, and to imagine what COVID-19 preventive appliances could be invented with readily available materials.

He met for discussions with three of his peers who are students of the electric, information technology, and garment departments at the polytechnic school. They shared their ideas.

Abel and his friends understood that the virus spreads mainly through physical contact between people, and they then started to think about how and what to work on to minimise contact between members of the community. They also took into consideration what tools they had at their disposal to execute their ideas.

Two weeks into the shutdown, Abel and his mates had solidified their objectives and collected the necessary materials and inputs for the inventions they had planned. They decided to create a motion-sensing hand washing machine using photo-sensor equipment from the polytechnic college.

They asked the school to cede them the sensors and the college obliged. Within a short couple of weeks, the resourceful group of students had successfully created their contraption. The machine automatically senses movement and spouts water so that people can wash their hands without touching the machine.

"This was to avoid physical contact,” said Abel.

Abel has also invented an electric control box that can be used to start, stop or adjust other electric devices remotely. The machine has a timer with a range from a microsecond to an hour and was created for use by those who are bed-ridden or too ill to move around. It can be used to charge mobile phones, for example, or to heat a pot of food.

In addition to these contraptions, Abel and his friends have created a massaging backpack, a traffic light with new features, and over 10 other innovations.

Other groups of entrepreneurial individuals have also been working on innovations to fight the spread of COVID-19.

"Handwashing alone isn't a guarantee for safety from the virus; it can also be spread via our clothes and accessories that we wear,” remarked Melese Yigzaw, dean of Nefas Silk Polytechnic College.

When the College was shut down, it organised instructors from the manufacturing, metal, construction, electrical and garment departments to come up with innovations to combat the pandemic.

The instructors have since delivered several appliances, including a body-disinfecting machine. The apparatus is fixed on either side of a doorway, and it sprays vaporised disinfectant over people when they pass through it. The instructors used nozzles and dynamos from vehicles that are kaputto build the machine.

The body-disinfecting machine has the capacity to spray four people at a time.

It has become common throughout the capital to see public and private institutions put hand-washing machines at entrances so that people have their hands clean before entering the premises. Most of these hand-washing stations are not automated and work manually. Users press a pedal with their foot to pour water so that they can wash their hands without the need to touch anything.

Lemmi Yadeta, instructor and department head of electrical electronics at Nefas Silk Polytechnic College, had begun to think about what could be innovated other than these pedal-operated, hand-washing contraptions.

“There are already pedal hand-washing machines in many places,” he said.

He and his friend devised four inventions: an automated sanitiser machine, the motion-sensing hand-washing machine, an automatic pool body device, and a smart school gate device.

Among the innovations, the school gate device was aimed at avoiding contact between students and guards at entrances of educational institutions. The device reads student identification cards and automatically opens the gate when it detects a valid ID.

“I thought of the idea two years ago when there was instability in universities but only had the chance to materialise it recently,” said Lemmi.

He and his colleagues have already planned to commercialise the smart school gate device. They hope to start mass production soon and sell them to education centres.