Education

Many children received no education after schools closed all across the continent in March 2020 and a lot of the children had no instructions, feedback, or interaction with their teachers.

Some classes were taught over radio or television, but the program was standardized for everyone and therefore too difficult to understand for the younger learners. While edtech solutions brought some good ideas into the remote-education world, they relied on technologies that many families didn’t have the access to.

• Platforms and programs to educate the teachers and teach them digital skills
• Quality ICT education resources and systems to teach students the skills needed to thrive in the actual rapid changing labor market
• Access to learning tools to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by digitization
• Tools that help the students and teachers to cope with the emotional stress of distance learning
• Programs to ease the digital divide
• Programs to help girls, who face unique barriers to continuing to follow formal education from a distance

Food Security

In Africa, recent estimates suggest that 73 million people are acutely food insecure. Furthermore, since last year, African regions, particularly the Sahel and southern Africa, have been severely affected by climate change (UNCTAD)

Since long before the COVID-19 pandemic, these chronic food crises have been driven by a variety of factors, including economic shocks, climate, and conflict. A regional slump in food production and a fall in global demand may prolong the negative effects of COVID-19, with poverty and food insecurity expected to continue to rise in 2021.

In the long term, it is critical that countries take the steps to build resilient, climate-smart, and competitive food systems. Increasing the productivity of agricultural systems; it also aims to diversify agriculture by supporting the development of other value chains.

Ideas we are looking for:

• Pre-organized food distribution systems for a door-to-door distribution to avoid public gatherings

• Distribution systems of seeds for future harvests to help households that may go hungry due to COVID-19

• Mobile payment mechanisms to distribute compensation for vulnerable households

• Other creative ideas on how to provide the food for those in need

• Agtech solutions that increase productivity and diversify agriculture. Solutions to transform the delivery of inputs, soil testing, crop insurance, credit, extension advice, and market linkages

• Solutions which help all food producers, smallholder and commercial farmers alike, adopt sustainable practices to become more climate-smart and therefore protect the entire ecosystem upon which human food production depends

Job Security

Historically, women, young people and low skilled workers have always been more harmed by recessions than highly skilled and educated people (who also had the chance to take lot of their tasks online during the lockdown in Spring 2020). The report published by African Union predicts that nearly 20 million jobs both in the formal and informal sectors, are threatened. Africa is demographically the world’s youngest continent. By 2030, one fifth of the global labour force – and nearly one third of the global youth labour force – will be from this region. While 10 to 12 million youth enter the workforce each year, only 3 million formal jobs are created.COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate this trend even more. Large youth unemployment – associated with socioeconomic inequalities and corruption – is also a driver for instability and national insecurity.

Ideas we are looking for:

• Develop inclusive business models that facilitate young people’s transition to the formal economy

• Unformal ICT education for the young people to learn the skills that are often needed to apply for a higher quality and more stable positions

• Tools to help young people train their “soft skills” to survive in today’s job market

• Other creative ideas!

Vulnerable Populations

Vulnerability is a hard to grasp concept. On October 19, 2005 all UN member states adopted a Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO, 2005). The declaration represented a first attempt to develop a global normative framework for bioethics. The declaration defined vulnerable individuals and groups, proclaimed "human vulnerability" as a basic principle of bioethics, and stated that vulnerable individuals and groups must receive adequate protection in the development and application of medical, scientific and technological knowledge. There are many circumstances that make the individuals or groups vulnerable, but the main ones are considered to be disease, disability, other personal conditions, environmental conditions and limited resources.

COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating existing vulnerabilities. Many of the vulnerable people have also been most affected by job losses and the resulting income loss. The loss of jobs and income is likely to result in the reduced ability to access healthcare and a nutritious diet. This, in turn, will negatively impact people's health. Vulnerable groups have also hard time coping with the social distancing and using the other protective measures to prevent them from the virus, making them more likely to get sick.

While many of the hackathon ideas we are looking for could contribute to making the lives better for everyone, under this track, we invite you to come up with the ideas that could make the difference in the lives of the most vulnerable.

We are looking for ideas that could bring a positive impact in the lives of :

• Children- children affected by AIDS, orphans, children affected by the violence and exploitation, street children

• Pregnant women- more than ⅔ of the world’s maternal deaths happen in sub-Saharan Africa. The leading cause of maternal deaths is inadequate access to quality care during pregnancy or delivery or after birth.

• Elderly people- diseases, poverty, age and gender discrimination for elderly women  

• Those with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and those with other chronic health conditions

• Refugees - digital ID for refugees, refugees access to mobile services in creative ways, mobile financial services at refugee camps and mobile enabled services that work on low data or without data

• Economically disadvantaged groups- People suffering under poverty: poor housing, homelesness, malnourishment

Health and Wellness

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacies in health systems of many countries globally. In Africa, the same exposure of health system weaknesses is unravelling as in the rest of the world, but there is another dimension: how the responses and recovery trajectories beyond the pandemic intertwine with development realities. The strategies that have proved effective elsewhere which include testing, tracing, adopting and enforcing social distancing, timeous decision-making to stop economies from free-falling, and engagement of the private sector are harder to adapt due to historical and contemporary development realities of inequality.

Still, COVID-19 has so far taught countries that there is no need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ of measures to deploy, but to tailor them to national and local contexts.Health is the main focus at the moment all around the world as the economic recovery relies heavily on protecting the public health and stopping the spread of the COVID-19.

Ideas we are looking for

• Adequate information sharing

• Ways to adapt the existing effective strategies in different countries across the continent

• Coordinated systems to prioritize testing

• Tracking systems

• Adopting and enforcing social distancing

• Assisting people who become sick

• Health in public places

Financial Services

Across the continent, fintech isn’t so much disrupting traditional financial services as building up a historically underdeveloped industry and driving financial inclusion outside the traditional banking systems. In recent years, Africa has witnessed impressive gains in the development of digital financial services (DFS) for financial inclusion.

By creating a pool of tech-based products and solutions, that focus strongly on including and catering as much people as possible, including mobile money (now used in over 30 countries across the continent), online payment processing, lending, and investing, the fintech startups are plugging large gaps that exist in local financial service industries. In a bid to curb the spread of the virus, the World Health Organisation has been cautioning against the use of hard currency and encouraging the use of digital payments. Even with all the fintech solutions, it is still a challenge in a continent, where around 66% of the adult population in Africa remains unbanked.  

Could the coronavirus pandemic provide the trigger that pushes Africa towards becoming a digital economy? What pre-existing conditions have become the crucial building blocks that will foster this?

Ideas we are looking for

• Fintech ideas that encourage the use of mobile money and digital wallets for peer to peer, implement cross- border payment solutions

• Peer to peer lending platforms

• Solutions that foster seamless intra-Africa trade that will make it easier for everyday Africans to conveniently and affordably access financial services and for consumers and businesses to make and accept payments with fewer hoops

• Solutions to encourage online merchant payments to service the essential business transactions

• Creative lending practices for SME’s (encourage reduction of rates, refocusing on capital loans with a max duration of a year to offer bridge financing to SME’s and micro enterprises, etc)

• Creative loan practices for investment loans

• Mobilization of public funds to compensate for damage suffered as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak

 Big Data

The coronavirus pandemic has spurred interest in big data to track the spread of the virus and to plan disease prevention efforts. Data sources like the mobile networks’ call data records, location update logs, social media updates will be of great use in these times. Mobile-phone data already showed effectiveness during the 2014–2016 Western African Ebola crisis.

Ideas we are looking for:

• Tracking people’s mobility patterns to find allocate and predict the spreading points of the virus

• Tracking COVID-19 positive patients and quarantined people’s movements, associations and activities

• Gathering aggregated insights into people’s behaviors

• Anonymizing the data that is used to track movements to prevent breaching data privacy rights of the subjects

Cyber Security

Africa has always been prone to cyber-related threats due to the high number of domains paired with weak network and information security. In Africa, Nigeria remains the largest target and source of malicious Internet activities. It is known to be one of the primary origins of scam and phishing emails and other online fraud schemes.  

In major African cities, such as Cairo, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Nairobi, the rate of cyber connected disturbances, such as fraudulent financial transactions and child kidnappings, especially in Kenya, facilitated through Internet communications has doubled in the past three years. A 2019 Deloitte Touche survey found that financial institutions in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia had registered losses of up to $245 million due to cyber fraud, a high sum for countries without highly developed banking systems.

Cybercriminals have taken advantage of COVID-19 related disruptions (remote work, instability) to stage attacks on small and large business entities all over the world. A survey commissioned by Liquid Telecom in August 2020 revealed that 57 percent of network managers in Africa reported a spike in cyber threats as the continent struggled with COVID-19 pandemic.

Ideas we are looking for:

• Set up tracking, detecting and taking down the fake news on all platforms. Detecting the misinformation and synthetic media (deep fakes, synthetic images, voices)
  
• Improving counter-messaging and automated fact-checking.
  

• Map existing national and regional data privacy and protection (policies, regulations, promotion and enforcement mechanism) in relation to e-trade, digital industry, e-business, digital entrepreneurship, e-business registration, e-investment and e-service providers across Africa, and identify points of alignment and divergence (Smart Africa Senegal Flagship). Conclusions for best practices.

• Protecting personal data. Anonymization of personal data that is used for tracking people’s trajectories or monitoring health

• Fights against cyber attacks and malware targeted against corporate organizations and

• Contingency plans in place to boost the organization’s cyber resilience

• Protecting smartphones against cyber attacks

• Monitoring and defending national networks to make African countries less vulnerable to cyberespionage and cyberterrorism

• Using ICT to detect and track terrorism attacks across Africa in the planning phase

• Cybersecurity legal frameworks to fight cybercrime

• Education initiatives on Internet safety and security to tackle the issues of child protection and social security in general

• Education programs on ICT-related security issues for stakeholders (ICT regulators, law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, end-users)

Digital Economy

As a continent with the youngest population of the whole world and a constant lack of jobs for the young people who enter the job market, Africa has to focus on building a strong ecosystem that supports homegrown firms to generate world-class products and services which help to widen and deepen digital economic transformation. Almost 80% of the region’s employment is created by small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s), meaning entrepreneurs of the continent should be supported by governments and proper infrastructure to enable economic growth.

In order to accelerate sustainable socio-economic development on the continent and encourage building the digital economy, we are looking for the following ideas

• Startup and innovation ecosystem building projects, with a special focus on connecting the different regions in the continent

• e-Services

• eCommerce and digital trade as the bloodstream of digital economy at the national, cross-border and continental levels

• Innovation-driven entrepreneurship projects

• Creative economy

• Digital society: this includes agriculture, education and health sector solutions

• Other creative ideas

e-Governance

While Africa has made good progress on catching up with most of the e-services with more than half of the Africans having some sort of a digital id card, the continent is still lagging behind in adopting e-governance practices. A big cross-cutting problem is the lack of internet - UN estimates that only 22% of the African population has access to the internet.

E-governance is important, since developing it will improve the economy of all countries on the continent, reduce corruption and help to engage citizens more actively in the decision making process.

E-developments inspire African entrepreneurs to come up with new solutions that are fine-tuned to match the needs of the African market and that will give a remarkable boost to the local economy.

Ideas we are looking for

- Develop good guidelines and tools for building e-states

- Creating digital public service platforms and platforms which support providing governance-related services digitally

- e-Participation as a tool for engagement and strengthened collaboration between governments and citizen

- Digital market for Africa- with products and services accessible easily throughout the   continent

- Data-driven public policies and decision-making (big data, AI, IoT, blockchain )

- Mobile Government: challenges, opportunities and establishing proper standards

- Legally binding digital ID and eSignature- eID

Smart Cities

The urbanization rate of the African continent has increased from 15% to 40% between 1960

and 2010, and is expected to reach 60% in 2050. The urban population in Africa will triple

over the next 50 years. This is an unprecedented demographic boom that is accompanied by an increase in challenges for governments in terms of housing, food, access to water, transport, waste management, and energy supply. Africa must take advantage of this rapid growth of urban citizens to overcome its difficulties through better management of its cities.

The concept of the smart city is to better manage African cities and meet the challenges of exponential urbanization.

Smart Villages in Africa is a relatively new concept, which looks to address complex problems of continuing poverty, inequality and marginalization through fresh approaches and digital transformation in rural villages. For the digital transformation to be effective, there is a need to shift from traditional technology-centric, siloed, supply-side approaches, to demand-driven approaches.

Ideas we are looking for

• Water conservation and quality

• Controlling and reducing air pollution

• Waste management solutions

• Traffic congestion and pollution, route planners for public transportation

• Creating urban green spaces and gardens

• Remaining biodiversity

• Planning a city's infrastructure

• Involving residents - sharing the smart city initiatives with the people, who live in the city so they are more aware of what’s happening and could be involved in some of the activities

• The use of data from all the local stakeholders - governments, residents, and businesses for better decision making

• Smart Villages - step by step guide to designing an SDG-smart rural village, creating SDG related services, which citizens can have access anytime, anywhere via mobile devices

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