In 2023, at the University of Rwanda's ACEIoT incubator hub in Kigali, she co-founded NEEM Company Ltd with Alex Muhirwa, Grace Nyirarukundo and David Rwakayiro. The hub sits inside the College of Science and Technology and trains postgraduate engineers in embedded systems and sensor networks — the electronics side of a problem she had only ever met in the clinic.
What the team built looks unremarkable: an insole, moulded to the individual shape of a patient's foot, silicone, a scatter of pressure sensors, a low-power Bluetooth module. It maps the plantar pressure across the sole in real time and sends the readings to a phone, where the algorithms look for the thing a patient with numb feet cannot feel — pressure that stays in one place too long. The alert goes to the wearer and to the clinician at once.
Munyampuhwe Jean d'Amour was diagnosed with diabetes in September 2025 and fitted with the insoles afterwards. Watching the pressure map caught the warning signs early.
At Hanga PitchFest 2025, the competition's fifth edition, NEEM placed second in a field that included Ambucycle, Ingoga Technologies and Nabsil; Re-Banatex, which makes clothing and bags from recycled textiles, took the top prize. The Rwf 20 million grant that came with second place is earmarked for two unglamorous tasks. The first is hardening the insole for rural use, where the constraints are dust, distance from a clinic, and somewhere to charge a battery. The second is clinical validation — the paperwork that would let the device be covered by Rwanda's national health insurance instead of paid for out of pocket, which decides whether it reaches the people who need it or only those who can afford it.
The engineering constraint Nikuze names is sourcing: the team is still hunting for the smallest components available on the market. Alongside the company she has opened a wellness centre in Kigali for diabetes prevention, lifestyle change and foot-health education — the part of the work that requires no sensors at all.
She learned to replace the limb before she learned to keep it.