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UN Women hackathon – a weekend of coding for gender equality and women’s rights

Amidst the braais and relaxation that are the hallmarks of any good South African long weekend, our friends over at Geekulcha decided to hold another one of their famous hackathons. But this one was held in the spirit of Woman’s Day.

Thirty developers were provided challenges by the UN Women office, and representative Dr Auxillia Ponga was on hand to oversee the event.

The challenges this time included Gender-based Violence, Women in Leadership and the HeForShe campaign.

Developers show off their project
Developers show off their project

After Afroes held a workshop to kick things off, the weekend of hacking commenced and the final projects were put in front of judges from Afroes, Geekulcha, Dimension Data the University of Pretoria.

The winning projects were:

First: 3MKV (winning project)

This team tackled the Gender-Based Violence solution, developing a web application and a USSD app to help women speak-out against about domestic violence and abuse. The solution also teaches women about different types of abuses.

Second: The Primitives

This team aims to put the features from HeForShe gender equality campaign website  into an app. The team targets female teenagers to make them more interested in the campaign. The app was developed with the Intel XDK.

Third: Perception

Solving the Women in Leadership challenge, this team of enthusiastic developers created a platform for women to freely talk about abuse [in one-on-one sessions]. They also feature an experienced female leader [who shared her story with her team and other users of the app].

Forth: Violence Stoppers

Also addressing Gender-Based Violence, these hackers developed a solution that maps gender-related crime hotspots. Their app also include a panic button to easily report incidents.

Geekulcha also provided us with some interesting infographics about how the event was trending on Twitter during the weekend:

Info

 

If you’d like to partake in a hackathon, don’t forget that the Northern Cape will have it’s very first event of this kind on 21-22 August.

 

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