Hello everyone,
Celo Kenya partnered with Ushahidi to hold the Code Beyond Barriers Hackathon Kenya 2023 from January 14th–21st, 2023.
Brief About Ushahidi
Ushahidi develops integrated tools and services to enable people to generate solutions and mobilize communities for good.
The aim of the Hackathon
The aim of this hackathon was to offer participants the opportunity to build innovative solutions across the themes of good governance, human rights protection, climate change, and disaster relief to bring out innovative web3 solutions that can be leveraged to give marginalized communities a voice and make sure the underrepresented in communities are equally heard and served.
The strategy was focused on three impact areas:
- Good governance,
- Humanitarian and disaster relief, and
- Human rights protection
The themes sought to solve the following technical Pain points and problem statement.
- Improve error messages and make them more intuitive on their Uchaguzi platform.
- Geolocating Twitter posts for mapping and monitoring
- Preventing users from being redirected to different websites when copying texts on their sites.
- Improving the scrolling experience on the Uchaguzi platform.
- Increase the visual contrast to improve readability and usability on the Uchaguzi platform.
- Prevent repeating posts that have already been worked on, on the Uchaguzi platform.
- Make it easy for users to see the status of their posts on the Uchaguzi platform.
Teams for the Hackathon
We had 10 teams (groups of 4 and 5) register for the hackathon, and 7 solutions were submitted on the final day of the hackathon.
Team Inua Sauti
Team Inua Sauti built a DAO that seeks to:
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Incentivize volunteers who share information on the Ushahidi platform.
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Verifying information shared on the Ushahidi platform.
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Crowdfunding resources, especially financial ones, to keep the Ushahidi platform afloat
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How to best escalate the issue to relevant authorities.
Team Chaguzi
Team Chaguzi built an Uchaguzi reporter solution that seeks to help staff and volunteers solve the problems of data structuring, verification, translation, and incentivization using AI and blockchain by improving the experience and usability of monitoring general elections by leveraging the power of active citizen participation, blockchain technology, and AI for real-time reporting of any incidents significant to the election.
Team NLMB
Team NLMB built a solution that would involve creating a waste management system on the Celo blockchain that allows for transparent tracking of waste collection and disposal; this would allow for real-time monitoring of waste management practices and the identification of areas where improvements can be made.
Team Nishati
Team Nishati building a solution that solves the problem of food donation and distribution by building a solution that seeks to remove middlemen, allow for transparent and decentralized systems for food donations, and allow donors to see how their funds are used.
Team Taarifu
Team Taarifu built an inventive decentralized citizen reporting platform that employs community-driven curation to streamline the validation and verification of information.
Team Code of Duty
Team Code of Duty built a blockchain-based platform called Linda that seeks to create a decentralized evidence management system to store and secure digital evidence.
Team Kura
Team KURA built a blockchain-based voting system utilizing smart contracts to ensure transparency, security, and immutability of the voting process to guarantee the integrity of votes.
All the teams that took part in the Hackathon demonstrated
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Fully working products
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High-quality smart contracts
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Intuitive UI/UX
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High quality tested code.
Winning Teams
- Winning Team - Team Taarifu
- First runners-up - Team Inua Sauti
- Second runners-up - Team KURA
We used the following Judging criteria to tally the points and award the winners of the Code Beyond Barriers Hackathon
The Judging Criteria
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Technology - Engineering skills demonstrated, and the quality code
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Design - Attention to aesthetics, interaction, and user interface
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Impact: A solution that meets a customer’s need has the potential to be a sustainable, impactful solution.
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Presentation - The clarity of written and oral presentation
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Inspiration - How much we love and are excited about the idea
Prizes for the Hackathon.
- The winning team received Ksh 100,000 equivalent in cUSD .
- The first runners up team received Ksh 30,000 equivalent in cUSD.
- The second runners up team received Ksh. 20,000 equivalent in cUSD.
- And each participant in the Code Beyond Barriers Hackathon was also granted Ksh 1,000 equivalent in cUSD.
Overall, the hackathon was a success, as we saw mind-blowing solutions built on top of Celo.
Engage with the tweet here:
We are open to feedback, review, and comments.