Coming up: Hackathon for anti-corruption
Creating a corruption-resilient Ghana requires the hearts and minds of its people. Having launched the movement #JeSuisAnas (mentioned in our previous blog post), we are now leveling up with a Hackathon for anti-corruption to take place in Ghana in February 2019. We kicked it off last week in Accra in a warm-up event together with civic activists, software engineers, students and investigative journalists engaging in creating ideas to solve everyday corruption.
Joining forces with MEST Incubator in Ghana, a group of 20 anti-corruption activists teamed up to create a concept for a digital product that makes it easy for other people to take a stance against corruption and empowers them to act upon it.
The storylines for the warm-up hackathon were based on two typical scenarios of everyday corruption — bribery at the medical clinic hindering people to access health care, and traffic police stopping buses to collect bribes from the drivers.
After these two real life cases were presented, stakeholders from the private sector and civil society shared their view and recommendations on how to tackle the problems.
Fredrik Morsing, Managing Director at Scania West Africa, and Kojo Asante (Ph.D.), Director of Advocacy and Policy Engagement at CDD Ghana shared their perspectives and insights on the corruption cases presented.
In addition, we were honored to have Golda Addo, Monitoring and Evaluation Consultant, introducing her easy-reader publication “Know your constitution” which was later given out in the goodie bags to the participants.
Having heard from the experts on corruption, the teams were ready to dive into problem solving.
As the event and idea generation was coming to an end, all of the groups rushed to finalize the last touches on their presentations and got ready for their 2 minute pitches of innovative solutions on how to tackle the presented problems.
Ideas were presented for how to report people that skip the line at health clinic waiting halls, creating heat maps that show high frequent bribery spots and how to educate commercial drivers to stop paying bribes to the traffic police.
Some of the concepts will form the basis for our hackathon event in February 2019, where teams will gather to build functional products out of these concepts.
After a hard working morning, a lunch and mingle was served.
Special thanks to MEST for hosting us, and shout out to the dedicated followers of Je Suis Anas for having joined with such passion and brilliant minds!
