Girlcode, a social enterprise that aims to empower young girls and women through technology, has announced the national winners of it its 5th annual Hackathon. The grand prize-winning team, ‘Lightbulb’, from Johannesburg, will be going to the Women in Tech conference in Amsterdam, sponsored by Cisco, as part of its Connected Women programme.
Known within the community as GirlCodeHack, this years’ event took place in each of South Africa’s three major cities simultaneously - Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban - and hosted more than 140 girls across the three regions.
The objective of GirlCodeHack is to provide young girls eager to join the software industry with an opportunity to develop some of the real-world skills they need to enter the business environment. Each year, the hackathon has consistently reached more and more girls with the specific goal to provide a collaborative environment where participants can compete and network whilst developing their skills.
The event was opened on Saturday 04 August in Johannesburg by deputy minister of telecommunications and postal services, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, who expressed sincere appreciation of events and organisations like GirlCode who go out of their way to help address gender representation in the technology industry and help empower the youth through skills.
“We need to work together to take advantage of the digital revolution,” she said. “No country is better placed than when it includes its women. Women are natural born teachers and leaders. I want South Africa to be a place where we are able to use the technologies we are exposed to, to take advantage of the digital revolution. Working together, as sisters across provinces, we can improvise solutions that will help change the lives of people around us. Because, when you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”
“Thanks to our corporate partnerships this year, we have been able to reach more girls than before by taking this event to Cape Town and Durban as well as Johannesburg,” said Zandile Keebine, co-founder of GirlCode. “The growth in support we’re experiencing from large technology companies is testament to the need for such events in the industry.”
The competition required the teams to build solutions that solve a United Nations sustainable development goal. The girls are encouraged to use any platforms or technology to build their solutions.
Lightbulbs’ winning project, a data accumulation solution, was an integrated device that assesses the soil in a garden/farm. The data is then shown on a website where the farmer can determine the course of action. As winners of the grand prize, the team will be headed to the Women in Tech conference in Amsterdam on 28-29 November, and will also receive a Microsoft Technology Associate Certification Course sponsored by LGIT Smart Solutions.
Second grand prize was awarded to the winning team from Cape Town, ‘Scatterlings Of Africa’, for its web platform which allows consumers to donate food, buy local produce, donate food scraps for compost and volunteer at community kitchens to actively engage in reducing hunger. They were awarded an Amazon Echo sponsored by Amazon Web Services.
Third grand prize went to the Durban team, which built a solution called Self-Educat, an Android app that provides girls in rural areas and townships with tutorials on various modules and study materials in school. This team received printers sponsored by Boxfusion.
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