Pitching GUARDIAN at the UNICEF StartUp Lab Pitch Day

On 9 June 2026 I represented the United Youth Initiative for Africa (UNIYIA) at Pitch Day for the UNICEF StartUp Lab Reducing Child Labour and Trafficking Challenge, held at the UNICEF Ghana office in Accra. I pitched GUARDIAN, the child-protection platform I designed and built for UNIYIA.

The challenge

The challenge invited innovations that could help reduce child labour and trafficking in Ghana. More than 60 applications were received, and 11 teams were selected to pitch. Each team had ten minutes before the judges: a five-minute pitch, a two-minute demonstration of the solution and three minutes of questions. Teams based in Accra pitched in person, while teams outside Accra joined online.

What GUARDIAN does

GUARDIAN (Ghana Unified Referral and Digital Intelligence for Action on Neglect) is built around one observation: child protection in Ghana rarely fails because no institution is responsible. It fails at the handoff between institutions. A single case can involve the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, the Department of Children, the Department of Gender, the Department of Social Welfare, the Labour Department and the Ghana Police Service, and the referral between them is often a phone call or a letter that no one follows up.

The platform addresses that gap with:

• Multi-channel reporting through USSD, WhatsApp and the web, so that a case can be reported from a basic feature phone without a data bundle;
• an offline-first design, because the districts with the weakest connectivity are often the districts with the widest protection gap;
• geospatial routing that sends each case to the nearest institution with the mandate to act on that category of case;
• severity-based escalation, so that a case nobody has claimed becomes visible before it is too late; and
• an inter-agency dashboard that gives the six institutions a shared referral trail without replacing their own systems of record.

The pitch

I presented the problem, the platform and a demonstration of the solution, and set out a proposal for a district-level validation pilot to test GUARDIAN with the institutions that would use it before any wider roll-out.

GUARDIAN is a design and prototype, not yet a deployed national system. Before deployment it would need formal agreement among the agencies on routing rules, a lawful basis for handling sensitive data about children, and training for the officers who would use it.

Outcome

GUARDIAN was one of the 11 finalists. The winner of the challenge was SWIMS-Connect. Finalists received certificates of participation from the UNICEF StartUp Lab team.

Pitch Day brought GUARDIAN before UNICEF and child-protection practitioners, alongside ten other teams working on the same problem from different angles.

Acknowledgements

I thank the UNICEF StartUp Lab team for organising the challenge, the judges for their questions, my colleagues at UNIYIA, and the other finalists for an inspiring day.

Photographs: UNICEF StartUp Lab Pitch Day, 9 June 2026.