Selasi Ama Domi-Kuwornu

SAK

Photo: University of Cape Coast / GNA

The problem Selasi Ama Domi-Kuwornu chose to solve was not abstract. In Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa, hundreds of millions of people live without access to formal banking. They cannot open accounts, cannot receive or send money digitally, cannot access the basic financial infrastructure that the rest of the world takes for granted. Mobile money services like M-Pesa have begun to change this — but they depend on internet connectivity, literacy in the dominant language of the interface, and a smartphone capable of running apps. For the elderly, the uneducated, the physically disabled, and the rural poor, these preconditions alone create an insurmountable barrier. Selasi looked at that problem and decided to solve it.

The result was KASA CASH — a name drawn from "kasa," meaning "to speak" in several Ghanaian languages. The application is designed for the offline environment. It requires no internet connection, operates on a basic feature phone, and accepts voice commands in any language the user chooses — including Twi, Ga, Ewe, and Hausa. Users can initiate and receive mobile money transfers, check balances, and access financial services entirely through spoken interaction, without needing to read a screen, type a PIN in English, or have consistent signal. The interface is the voice. The language is the user's own. The barrier is gone.

Selasi built KASA CASH while completing her final year as an Information and Communication Technology student at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) in Ghana. She had already demonstrated her technical ambitions at nineteen, when she won the 2019 Ms. Geek Ghana competition — a national programme supported by the Ghanaian Ministry of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations that seeks out and elevates young women in technology. That win was the foundation on which the more ambitious project was built.

In late April 2023, the Ms. Geek Africa competition was held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe — a gathering of the continent's most talented young women in technology, with national winners representing eight African countries including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, and Nigeria. The format requires each competitor to present and demonstrate their technical project before a panel of expert judges. Selasi presented KASA CASH. She explained the problem, demonstrated the solution, showed the offline functionality, the multilingual voice interface, and the underlying architecture. The judges did not deliberate for long. She was named Ms. Geek Africa 2023 — overall champion.

The prize package was substantial in material terms — a certificate, laptop, smartphone, and US$5,000 in cash — but the professional recognition exceeded the cash value. Ascend Digital Solutions, a Ghanaian technology firm, pledged an additional US$1,000 and a job opportunity. She was sponsored to attend the GITEX Africa Digital Summit in Marrakech, Morocco in May 2023 — one of the continent's largest technology business events — where her profile and KASA CASH were introduced to an international audience of investors, technologists, and policymakers. The University of Cape Coast featured her prominently in its institutional communications as one of the most distinguished students it had produced.

What KASA CASH represents technically is sophisticated: offline-first architecture, natural language processing adapted for multiple African languages, integration with mobile money APIs that work at the SMS layer, and a user experience designed specifically for people who have never used a smartphone app. What it represents philosophically is more important: a young Ghanaian woman who looked at the technology she was learning to build and immediately asked not "what can I make?" but "who needs this?" The answer she found — the rural grandmother, the physically challenged trader, the new migrant who does not read English — is the answer that the global financial technology industry, with billions in venture capital, has consistently failed to reach.

Selasi Ama Domi-Kuwornu graduated from the University of Cape Coast, is the two-time winner of the most important young women in technology competition on the African continent, and has built something that works where nothing else does. She is in her early twenties. The career this implies has barely begun.