Over 70 people came to the finale event of the Innovation & Development Hackathon to hear new approaches to real poverty and hunger challenges.
The 2013 Innovation and Development Hackathon, came to a close on the 23rd March after a week of intensive collaboration and innovation. The event was part of the Cambridge Science Festival and was, run by the Humanitarian Centre and CUTEC, The Hackathon provided a platform for students and professionals to apply their skills to development challenges posed by NGOs, companies, social enterprises, research institutes and consultancies. As Anne Radl, the Projects Manager at the Humanitarian Centre put it, the goal of the Hackathon, is to provide “an infusion of new thinking”.
The Finale
The Innovation & Development Hackathon finale was hosted by the University of Cambridge Office of Public Engagement at the Pitt Building in Cambridge, where over 70 students, professionals, and members of the public eagerly waited to hear new ideas generated by the six teams that took part in the event.
Each audience member was awarded a voting card: to pick the winning team, the audience vote was equally weighted with the decisions of a panel of experts in international development, enterprise and innovation. Each team had exactly 5 minutes to present their ideas and to receive questions from the audience and judges (2 minutes each).
Approaches, not solutions
The six teams each addressed challenges relating to issues of poverty and hunger, thereby linking with the Humanitarian Centre’s theme of the year on food security. Through the presentations, the scope and diversity of the challenges became clear; each team described different, yet equally inventive, approaches to their individual challenes[1].
The Afrinspire group came up with a low-resource points system, ‘Tally Me In’, to incentivise women to regularly attend a literacy and life skills programme, even when the short term opportunity cost of attending class rises, as it does when food is scarce. In ‘Tally Me In’, points are awarded for attendance, as well as punctuality and progress. The team adapted the successful Grameen group model, where annual rewards are given, in accordance with the points accumulated, to the group as a whole. By providing more tangible and short-term incentives for class attendance, the model aims to reduce food security related dropout rates.
The Azuri Technologies team won first place at the Hackathon with their innovative combination of traditional and new technologies.
The Azuri Technologies team presented the only ‘tangible’ solution—they brought along a prototype of a stand for existing Zeer pots (clay pots used to keep food cool in South Sudan and across Africa) with an integrated fan which links directly to Azuri’s 5V solar panels – the ‘Azuri pot’. By adding the fan, shelf life of the products kept the Zeer pots is significantly extended, and the pots become usable inside and in humid climates. The team made a convincing case that their solution, combining new and traditional technology, was cost-effective, culturally appropriate and feasible.
The HubCiti group presented the idea of incorporating game mechanics into their crowd-funding platform. By creating an enjoyable online experience for users with user profiles, progress bars, rewards and personal goals, game mechanics will allow HubCiti to attract and retain online crowd-funders. As a result of this they will be able to scale up their crowd-funding model.
The iDE UK team proposed a two-step model allowing iDE to scale its very successful Farm Business Advisor (FBA) model across sub-Saharan Africa. During the first phase, cooperation with local clusters of excellence in journalism and agricultural science would provide the foundation for a cost-effective, radio-based branding strategy with positive spill over effects, for example, on youth unemployment. Once a critical size is reached, the model’s further expansion is supported by a strategy to increase the FBAs’ profits. The strategy revolves around the utilisation of the FBAs’ close networks with remote customers/farmers. Asking the FBAs to conduct surveys and to provide agricultural input suppliers with customer feedback will strengthen bottom-up information flows and provide FBAs with a competitive advantage in selling customer-adapted products.
The Mott MacDonald group presented a novel way to use information, proposing an innovative ‘flock analysis’, where people affected by an irrigation project could position themselves independently on a chart of benefits and risks. Their ‘flock analysis’ model could inform the decisions of Mott MacDonald as to whether they should go ahead with a certain project. During the project’s implementation the model would allow Mott MacDonald to assess support for the project by the people and communities affected.
The final team, Nunuza, presented a series of ‘hacks’: innovative adaptations of the Nunuza platform which would ensure that SMS users would not default on their transactions. Among the proposed low-cost hacks were upfront payments into a ring-fenced account, a linkage of Nunuza with MPesa and GPS tagging.
Whether or not any of the teams approaches turn out to be “on the ground” solutions remains to be seen. Several of the organisations that posed the challenges have said that it may be appropraite to pilot their team’s idea, and continue to shape it with local feedback and input. Should the pilots prove successful, it may be that the Innovation & Development Hacakthon did indeed turn out some solutions to pressing challenges of poverty and hunger.
And the winner is . . .
It was incredibly difficult to choose between the different groups. Nevertheless, in the end the results from the audience vote correlated exactly with those of the judges. The Nunuza team took third place, the Afrinspire team took second, and first place went to . . . the Azuri Technologies group!
Everyone is a winner
The real goal of the Hackathon is not to win, but to have a space to try different approaches, apply skills to different areas, and to learn.
Kata Fulop, Team Coordinator of the Afrinspire group, said, “one thing I learned is how widespread mobile phones are in Africa, [it’s] amazing how many interesting projects there are out there”. But Kata’s challenge was set in an area with low technology levels which made the challenge,finding, “an idea using pen and paper to make it work”.
Reflecting on the process as a whole Kata describes benefits all round: “students benefit; we all learned a lot… organisations benefit; Afrinspire has already decided to hold a conference on our proposal … [it is also] good for the Humanitarian Centre in attracting more attention to these issues and challenges”.
Three participants, Adelina Chalmers, Igor Romanov (Mentor) and Yu Bian (Team Coordinator) from the HubCiti team learned most about the importance of presentation and communication, i.e. “how to communicate complex ideas clearly so as to get people on board”, how to manage teams effectively, and “how to stay calm and professional to ensure that everything goes smoothly”. For some this was their first contact with a social enterprise, and it opened up a whole new channel to come into contact with novel and interesting ideas – simply “fantastic.” All three of them found a lot of complimentary ideas amongst the different teams which they saw both as a potential source of collaboration as well as a reminder of the importance of differentiating their ideas from those of other teams. They all agreed that they “definitely plan to take the ideas forward”.
The feedback from audience members was just as positive: An audience member, Michael, who heard about the event through the Cambridge Science Festival, was positively surprised by the presentations: “Certainly not what I anticipated….an interesting competition in relation to diverse challenges which have been set by the different organisations… I must admit judging between them is extremely difficult, as it is not comparing apples and apples.” Although personally feeling that “several projects felt like they had been inspired more by academic study than by reality on the ground”, he was “particularly impressed with Azuri pot – practical and simple…a solution which will actually work”.
Marian, an audience member interested in innovation in health and development, was “positively surprised with quality of ideas and age of population, a very dynamic and inspiring group of people”. Impressed with the innovative, interesting approaches, she saw one of the big benefits of such an event as reaching out, beyond an inner development cirlce, to share ideas with the broader public. Marian is sure that she “will follow up on the different projects and organisations”.
A personal note
As both a co-author of this blog series and a team coordinator of the iDE UK group, I learned a lot about the challenges and the potential of having a group of very diverse people working together on one challenge. It was eye opening to see how people’s academic background and cultural context shapes their approach to issues.
From another perspective, the Hackathon proved to be very effective exercise in deconstructing the process of innovation. How do you go about coming up with something new in an environment where it seems as if everything that could be tried has already been tried? Interestingly, what mattered for our team was believing in an initial idea, but approaching it from a different angle when we came up against barriers and evidence of previous (failed) attempts at building a similar model.
Finally, coming from the discipline of ‘development economics’, I realised just how difficult it is to avoid the mistakes for which development projects are typically faulted. For example,. how do we ensure that our model is feasible on the ground and in a local context?
In the end, for me it was a fantastic learning experience above all. And if the organisations take up and develop our solutions further it will be a testament to the fact that we achieved what we set out to achieve.
The final takeaway
As the 2013 Hackathon came to an end, participants, audience members, judges and mentors left “infused with new thinking”. I personally felt inspired and enthused by the number of students of different ages coming together and using their time and skills to find new approaches to global problems.
I spent the rest of the evening absorbed in a discussion of the different solutions with a friend. I can only agree with Marian’s remark that “while some ideas will need a bit more work and some are already a bit further, they all have at least the potential to become very interesting propositions”.
For now, I am looking forward to catching up with the Azuri team in one year to see where their idea has taken them!
By Emilie Hobbs and Clara Marquardt
There are two more articles forthcoming in this blog series on development and social enterprise, so watch this space! Previous articles include:
Social enterprise in development, or for development?
[1] For a detailed description of the different challenges see https://humanitariancentre.org/2013/03/Hackathon-challenges/
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