Four Kenyan Startups Win US$580 Grant at the Ed-tech Mobile Hackathon
With fourteen (14) teams from Nairobi and Mombasa participating at the first ed-tech mobile hackathon hosted by Ideation Worldwide in Nairobi last week, four (4) Kenyan startups; Uni-Informal (Most Innovative), Mayne Dev (Best Product), HTTP (Global Impact), and Elimu Kasi (Excellent Engineering), emerged winners and were awarded a total of US$580 grant.
The hackathon was aimed to come up with solutions – towards improving the informal educational sector in the country. Participants were asked to build mobile apps for the untrained teachers working in schools in slum areas provided that they were given field data to accomplish this task.
According to Disrupt-Africa, the prototypes included; an inter-school course information sharing platform, an M-PESA service for teachers to streamline registration, loan repayment process, and a SMS-based platform for small regular savings.
At the give away ceremony, Joany Huang; the Programme Director at Ideation Worldwide, said, “for the five million underprivileged Kenyan children taught by thousands of untrained and unqualified teachers, this is our first step to change the status quo,” he said.[related-posts]
