Using technology to solve social challenges
CrecheConnect wins R10,000 cash prize at Bertha Centre ECD Hack day
Diverse teams collaborate for R10,000 cash prize from Innovation Edge to kick-start their idea. ECDHack brings together the Cape Town tech scene with six local Early Childhood Development (ECD) NGOs, to ideate around challenges facing over six million South African Children under the age of six.
The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship is flipping the idea of hackathons by bringing together these unique groups for the first time. Long thought only for techies and coders, the traditional Hack Day was ripe for a Bertha Centre adaption. Cape Town developers and media shops have limited exposure to the challenges faced by ECD practitioners and thus may fail to recognise the opportunities for innovation.
Over 60 participants spent their Saturday in the MTN Solution Space, an innovation hub located at the UCT Graduate School of Business. Differing from the traditional hackathon the tech teams spent the morning with the ECD practitioners. Mike Jones, a father of four and founder of Western Cape Labs, described the difference. “Providing designated subject matter experts to each group was a very interesting approach. It did force a lot more discussion in the ‘discovery’ phase than usual in hackathons,” Jones explains, adding that he has “a million ideas floating around in my head so usually I come with a predefined idea in mind and try and persuade others to join me.” An approach he says he had to put aside this time.
“a million ideas floating around in my head so usually I come with a predefined idea in mind and try and persuade others to join me.”
The R10,000 for kickstarting the idea is provided by Innovation Edge. Projects for the development space can struggle to find early investors and seed funding because they may not be seen as sufficiently disruptive. The Innovation Edge offers up to R1 million for early stage ideas. Offering an edge to ‘Bold Ideas’, Innovation Edge’s mission is to give South African children the best possible start.
The South African ECD space is described as chaotic by Sonja Giese, the director of Innovation Edge, she says “the sector is fraught with complexity and we need innovation to surface new approaches to scale impact”. Scale is key to tech innovations in this sector with over six million children in South Africa under the age of six. The first 1000 days of a child’s life are key and early effective ECD interventions has been proven to shape a child’s brain and set them up for successful lives.
first 1000 days essential to set up children for success in life
Camilla Swart with the Education Innovation initiative at the Bertha Centre and Dr Mark Tomlinson from the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University came up with the idea of an ECDHack over a cup of coffee. The idea soon attracted interest from InnovationEdge, GovHack South Africa, Ogilvy South Africa, Silicon Cape, RLabs and CodeX, each of which recognised the opportunities.
The R10,000 prize for the most innovative idea went to Crèche Connect, an idea to develop an app for parents designed to rate a daycare centre’s effectiveness. Crèche Connect’s objective is to give parents more information when deciding the best place for their child. The team, who didn’t know each other prior to arriving on Saturday morning, consisted of members from South Africa Education and Environment Project (SAEP), RegenAfrica, Western Cape ICT, NextGen pioneers, Business Connexion, UCT ICT4Dev and CodeX.
Director of The Bertha Centre, Dr Francois Bonnici spoke to the magic of collaboration at the event. “The combination of people, action, and ideas in a motivated environment is powerful. These collaborative learning events have the potential to produce novel approaches to addressing key challenges. More than that, they provide all of us with inspiration.”
The success of the event isn’t measured by the winner alone, or by trending at number one on Twitter in South Africa, or even by the range of ideas pitched — which included a mobile referral systems for clinics, ways for parents to identify developmental delays and improving knowledge sharing and communication across crèches — or even by judges and funders showing interest in further developing some of these ideas. The success in the ECDHack day will show in the months ahead as techies and creatives take inspiration from the event to further the role technology can play in ECD and developing the minds of South Africa’s future leaders.
