Afrikathon

Afrikathon, “the Pan African Hackathon”, is the hackathon and innovation community I started in 2020 for young builders across the continent who wanted to form teams across borders. Our first call brought in people from Kenya, Ghana, Mali, Congo, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria. The first edition ran online from 11 to 16 May 2020 under the banner “The Opportunity Hackathon: Hack the Labour System”.

Over its life the community has touched 22 countries and 12,000-odd young people. For the 2020 event itself the number we can stand behind is 1,600 registrations from 21 countries.

The 2020 edition

Five days of ideation and prototyping sprints, modelled on the GV Design Sprint, with teams of two to four working over Slack. To get in, you had to finish IBM’s two-hour Design Thinking Essentials course first, a deliberate filter. About 40% of the 1,600 who signed up did it and took part.

Teams picked one of five tracks drawn from the UN Sustainable Development Goals: Decent Work and Living, Gender Equality, Media & Entertainment, Education, and Remote Work. We built the whole thing to feel like a remote job. Scheduled sessions, check-ins, time zones, language gaps: we left those in on purpose instead of smoothing them away, because that is the job.

We put together over $12,000 in giveaways, cash and credits. Congo Business Network came in as a partner the week before we opened. 43 of the 70 repositories in the Afrikathon GitHub organisation were created during those six days.

Why it exists

I was at MEST at the time, and Afrikathon came out of that plus our earlier TETA academy and the mentoring I was doing through Coding Coach. The premise was employment: Africa has more than 400 million young people and not enough of a labour system to absorb them, which is where the 2020 theme came from.