For three days starting tomorrow morning, I’ll be one of five judges that will be looking for the next best student innovation as Orange Community Innovations Awards returns in its fourth year.
Orange Uganda this week launched five apps from last year’s Community Innovations Awards, now available for download on Android’s Play Store (but with plans of expanding to other platforms), highlighting reasonable success of the competition that’s tasked students to find innovative solutions to community problems.
The previous year’s challenge had birthed Brainshare, a social-education app that is connecting people across Uganda, and the world, through education. It is “an online classroom that helps people study while networking, and combines real-time collaboration, note sharing and tutoring across a number of platforms.”
The app has been reasonably successful. In under two years, they’ve been able to enroll numerous Ugandan schools – from Primary schools to Universities – and and secure a partnership with Microsoft’s 4Afrika project. In a way, they’ve lived up to the expectations we, as judges, had at the time of selecting them in the competition that was held at Makerere University’s Senate Building.
