Kenya is part of the global M2Work hackathon slated for September 15 to 16 this year. The code-fest will take place in conjunction with MLab East Africa.
M2Work, which stands for mobile microwork, will be conducting the hackathon in five different regions across the globe including East Asia represented by Vietnam, East Africa in Kenya, Eastern Europe, The Caucasus, and Central Asia represented by the republic of Armenia.
Southern Africa and South Asia complete the regions and will be represented by South Africa and Nepal respectively.
Earlier this year, infoDev, an entrepreneur initiative by the World Bank, and Nokia came together to launch m2workChallenge which encouraged young people to come up with ideas for businesses and how they can utilize the mobile phone to breathe life into the ideas.
The hackathon, it its next phase, will try and realize some of those ideas. InfoDev is now organising the m2Work Hackathons to be held in the chosen regions.
The background to this initiative is based upon the fact that there are over 5 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world.
Africa and other developing regions have their big share of mobile subscribers. The idea is to give income to these subscribers by handing those tasks that can be solved using the mobile phone rather than using the computer, which doesn’t have much user penetration, according to the event’s organisers.
Microtasks, as the project calls it, rely on the fact that humans are intrinsically better in some tasks than computers. Microwork offers jobs and second incomes for young people.
“Ideally, best competitors are prepared to take action upon their vision for a mobile application startup – and we will help the winners to do so, for example, through our mLabs and other entrepreneurship and innovation promotion activities,” the organisers said.
The coder’s fest will enable innovative and creative developers to get support for mobile ideas that would create jobs and make a difference.
