Hackathon: Innovation for Social Challenges

1. About the Hackathon

The Hackathon is a creative platform for entrepreneurs and innovators to ideate, design, develop, execute, and lead social initiatives that address public challenges in our community through empathy, courage, knowledge, and collaborative leadership.

Social-driven startups with innovative digital/tech solutions have a unique opportunity to find a new ally to help them provide their products or services to a wider market. Even though startups often do not think about the public actors as potential partners, this Hackathon is creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and problem solvers to collaborate with local and global public sector institutions to provide solutions that serve ordinary people in their day to day activities and the community as a whole.

Throughout the hackathon's days, participants will be guided through a three-stage journey and provided with resources, experts, and access to community support; including training, mentorship, and initial start-up funding to launch a social change project in their community.

2. Benefits of the hackathon

• Participate in a process of creative ideation to address a social challenge

The best way you can be innovative is when the pace at which you are generating creative ideas and testing prototypes is higher than the pace at the usual working days. This is what the hackathon will offer you, a higher pace process in an enabling environment.

• Rapid prototyping

More experiments allow you to test out a large set of hypotheses and conducting not-so-perfect experiments also means that the cost of failure is low while giving you many insights. This hackathon is the perfect environment for rapid prototyping and testing validity and feasibility before full implementation.

• Jumpstart product roadmap

Hackathon helps to quickly check the feasibility of some of the ideas that can be taken up in the immediate roadmap. The dedicated time that one gets during the hackathon along with the competitive spirit and adrenaline rush can accelerate product development.

• Come up with a future roadmap list

Even though all ideas generated at a hackathon don’t get implemented, they can become a good reference list for future road-map discussions.

3. The Program:

The program is divided into three phases:

Phase 1- Application & Selection:

        (March - April)

The first step will be selecting the participants for the Hackathon. A call for applications will be announced in March and will be open for one month.  (The Challenges and screening criteria are detailed below.)  To ensure the participants understand the challenges and can get the information they need a workshop will be held. In the workshop experts from the Government, JICA and 249Startups (if needed) will share information about the identified challenges. A panel of experts for each Challenge track will be held. the expected participants will have a chance to ask their questions.

Phase 2- The Hackathon Event:

        (May)

The Hackathon itself will be held in May 2023. During the four-day event, 50 participants selected from Phase 1 will compete together. The participants will work on validating their solutions, testing them, and building their business models. On the final day, the participants will pitch their solutions and 4 winners will be selected, one from each challenge track.

Phase 3- Post Hackathon:

(June - August)

As part of their reward, the four winning teams will get three months of support at 249 Startups. This will include providing working space, bi-weekly coaching sessions, and learning sessions in addition to access to the 249Startups events & network.

The winners will also get prizes in the form of financial support for procurement to build their solutions. Each winner will get 6,250 USD.

4. The Selected Challenges:

The Hackathon aims to get innovative solutions for social challenges in four sectors:

       4.1- Water:

Collecting and analyzing these data, will allow efficient responses to claims and better distribution of resources such as water infrastructure construction, which would lead to improvement of service provided to the Sudanese people.  

• Solutions for water leakage and tank overflow.

There is a need to have data of water that is lost through leakages from pipelines or tanks overflow. This data can help in identifying the areas that require immediate action. Therefore, improving the efficiency and sustainability of the water supply management.

• Solutions for reliable and integral water coverage data

There is a requirement to obtain data on the coverage of water supply sources, for domestic use. Namely, wells, water yards or Haffirs, which would include information about the area being served, the population, and the volume of water produced by the source. This data would help to identify areas with the most pressing needs, making interventions more efficient and less time-consuming.

        4.2- Health: 

Provision of safe and continuous care is important for wellbeing of the members of the communities. It is also important to recognize the impact of patient safety in reducing costs related to patient harm and improving efficiency in health care systems.

• Solution for monitoring and follow-up of patients with chronic diseases

Patients with chronic diseases have challenge with continuing their necessary regular medical checkup and follow instructions of their health care providers. As a result, they are risking their health and life. Solutions to support these patients are required.

• Solutions for ensuring proper patient identification

Proper patient identification confirmation at every step of clinical care is vital to patient safety. Identification of patients is critical at nursery, in-patients wards, laboratory, and operation etc.. Solutions for proper patient identification considering the available resources in Sudan is required.

      4. 3- Environment:

Collecting and analyzing these data, will allow for better planning and budgetary allocation. This includes improvement of service by efficient distribution of resources such as garbage collection vehicles, better route maps for the collection, adequate frequency of collection.

• Solutions for reliable and integral waste related data

There is a challenge in collecting data of waste from the different states of Sudan in one central database. Example of this is the quantity of the waste, methods of collection. These information are crucial for HCNER for policy formulation and allocation of funds.

• Solutions for transforming waste collection and optimizing transportation system

In the current system of waste collection, each waste vehicle has its own designed route that is predetermined by the locality. The drivers may not follow the designated route, or might dispose of the waste at the dumping site before the vehicle becomes actually full. A solution for transforming the collection and optimization of the transportation system will serve the community and help HCNER in there budgetary planning and resources allocation.

       4.4- Agriculture:

Agriculture contributes to 40% of the country’s GDP and around 70% of the Sudanese population depends on agricultural livelihoods. Providing technological solutions to connect the governmental officials, agriculture experts, farmers and markets, would result in better services provided to the farmers and eventually increase their productivity and income, which will lead to the livelihood improvement for these farmers’ societies

• Solutions for sharing market information with farmers

Solutions for the lack of information system about markets between farmers, producers, exporters and buyers. This information includes agricultural inputs, prices and demand of agriculture products, transportation availability and prices, markets locations and accessibility to markets.

• Solutions for sharing technical information and support with farmers

Solution for farmers to access technical information, such as exchange of information among farmers/experts and receiving technical support. For example; agricultural techniques, plant protection, diseases…etc.

5. The Application Form:

 The application will be online. There is no restriction of number of application submitted by the same applicant.  The form questions are generally divided to collect information about the Entrepreneur and the solution proposed:

1- Entrepreneur/Applicant Information:

• Personal Information
• Education Background
• Experience Background
• Entrepreneurship Background

2- Solution Information:

• Challenge understanding
• Proposed Solution
• The team will work on the solution.
• The needs required to develop and test the solution.
• Expected outcomes of the solution
• Partners to support the implementation.
• Timeline and Milestones of the solution development and test

6. The Selection Criteria:

 The online applications will be screened based on the following criteria.

• The applicant understands the challenge.
• There is a Problem / Solution fit.
• There is a Solution / Market fit.
• The team has the experience to develop the proposed solution.
• The timeline/ Milestones are straightforward and convenient.
• The team has an entrepreneurship background.
• The solution is innovative.
• The solution is scalable.

After the initial screening phone interview will be held to select the final participants.

7. Timeline:

Launching workshop:      20 March

Closing of application:        15 April

Announcing participants:     13 May

Hackathon event:       25 - 28 May

Post Hackathon:         June - end of August (3 months)

Application deadline is 11:59 of 15 April. Any application sent after midnight will not be accepted.

8. The Hackathon Partners:

JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) Sudan office has been working with government institutions through technical capacity building and grant aid support. Besides Technical Cooperation and Grant Aid Scheme, JICA has a short-term support scheme for survey and pilot events. Within this scheme, JICA is starting the “JICA Initiative in Promoting Solutions for the Development Challenges through Utilization of Innovative Technologies (DUIT)”. For this initiative, JICA would like to seek the possibility of improving public services through the usage of innovative technologies together with the private sector.

249Startups is an entrepreneurial ecosystem born out of the need to help startups, entrepreneurs and businesses grow. We've built a connected system supported by a collaborative international network of professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors. 249 Startups offers tools, incubation, acceleration, and finance services to entrepreneurs who have bright products but lack the resources to grow businesses around these products.