PAICTA has opened applications to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia & Namibia for the 2021 Healthcare Hackathon. This inter-country event promotes PAICTA’s ambitions to go beyond physical borders and create linkages, encourage youth cross-boarder collaboration in finding solutions to Africa’s most pressing issues .
Programmers are encouraged to pull their all into creating solutions through coding and code their heart into their work. Hackathons are actually a place where like-minded people come together to ‘hack’ innovative ideas and build realistic tech solutions to implement those ideas.
The aim of the Hackathon is to give the youth in the four countries in Africa early exposure to career and business opportunities being presented by the event – Embracing the Youth’s Power through Digital Collaboration.
The Hackathon creates a structured and sustainable community that nurtures and empowers developers by providing and democratising access to knowledge, capital and mentorship.
‘Our Hackathons are especially important as we promote and hold in high regard originality and creativity. We are edging industry to engage with their communities through PAICTA and source top tech talent, as the youth serves as drivers of innovation within their communities while using this hackathon concept to encourage attendees to network across the countries that otherwise wouldn’t have even met,” says Sonwabo Mdwaba, PAICTA’s president.
PAICTA with its partners are looking forward to this event that is sure to be a rewarding and invaluable experience for the Youth.
How the process works
The Hackathon google page explained the three steps that potential participants needed to follow for the Hackathon:
Programme content
Hackathon will take place from May 28th-30th 2021.
Topics covered will give participants a good understanding of rural, peri rural and township community challenges and how the digital solutions / applications will work in improving the lives of such communities in Africa. It will also cover current and future applications and how they are being implemented to change the communities to its benefit. and how it works. It will also cover current and future applications and how they are being implemented to change the communities to their benefit.
HACKATHON CHALLENGES
The health sector in the African continent remains one of the most challenged, with inadequate and poor services for most of the people. Africa accounts for more than 50% of young children below the age of five who die due to pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). On the other hand, women constitute over 60% of the total population of Africa, and face numerous health challenges. Therefore, better global health condition, a focus on African women and children is very critical. There have been interventions and initiatives done in the sector to improve service delivery, however more still needs to be done. The current state of the health sector between big cities and rural areas – public and private facilities is different and varies.
Healthcare experts from different fields in Africa are going to have a round table discussion of the challenges and then oversee the hacking from beginning to final award to the winners
PAICTA also emphasizes that participants will not only learn, but will have fun building solutions.
The structure of the contest
Individuals from the different countries will be put into teams that are mixed. No individuals from their country of birth are going to participate together.
One of the objectives of the Hackathon is to promote collaboration and building cross border ecosystems.