The Next Generation of Learners, Disruptors, and Inventors – Largest Pan African Hackathon

Innovation is connected to every business's destiny, whether it's an emerging start-up or legacy multinational. 

According to an Accenture study, 95% of business leaders say innovation is crucial to their success.

With technology seen as the means to innovate, hackathons have become increasingly popular amongst companies as a way to push boundaries, and encourage unique ideas.

A hackathon is a design sprint-like event; often, in which computer programmers and others involved in software development collaborate intensively on software projects. 

The combination of diverse backgrounds and the time limit on hackathons creates an intense atmosphere that forces participants to create actionable solutions.

With 1600 registrations across 21 countries, Afrikathon, the Largest Pan African Hackathon is on a mission to evolve the next generation of learners, disruptors, and inventors in Africa. 

The five-day ideation and prototyping sprint simulated a remote work condition. Participants formed virtual teams with members in different time zones and of different native languages to create solutions in one of the five tracks: decent work and living, gender equality, media & entertainment, education, remote work.

I spoke with Andrew Miracle, Afrikathon's founder about his journey leading up to Afrikathon, how his experience at MEST inspired Afrikathon, and design thinking. 

How did your journey lead you to create Afrikathon?

I used to run a cybercafé, and one day someone asked me to build a website. Never having built one before, I still accepted the challenge. It took me about four months, but I really enjoyed the process and wanted to continue building products. So I invested the money into a Udemy course to further my learning. 

One year later, I was hired by a radio station in southeast Nigeria to manage its IT infrastructure, which started my corporate work experience.

Since then, I've worked at start-ups, founded my own company Tecmie LLC, a software development agency, and I'm currently at Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST).  

MEST is an intensive one-year scholarship program, where they bring in the best tech entrepreneurs across Africa, and train them across 3 disciplines: communication, technology, and business. During the program, you form a team and build a company. 

I'm working with a group of talented individuals on a project called Kpilens. Our solution gives development organizations, like UNICEF, GIZ, The MasterCard Foundation, the means to measure impact and track the outcome of their projects. 

My experience here at MEST is one of the many inspirations behind Afikathon. I live and work in the same building with 54 talented individuals from 16 different countries. It's truly an amazing experience and has furthered my belief that technology can solve a lot of problems for individuals and businesses across Africa.

What specific void or opportunity did you discover that inspired Afrikathon? And why are you the one to address this problem?

Generally, I've always looked for opportunities to share what I know, the things I've tried, succeeded at, and even failed at. 

The first step I took was creating a tech entrepreneur training academy, Teta. The goal was to teach newbies the core principles of building software products. Although all developers learn how to code, most don't understand the structure or the systems behind programming. I wanted to create a program to teach them.

With the first cohort, we experienced a lot of challenges. Although the outcome was really good for the participants, there were a lot of things we didn't do well. I decided to take a break to figure out how to overcome those challenges.

That's when I joined the mentorship platform Coding Coach as one of the first 10 mentors. I figured that since I couldn't manage it on my own, I'd join a team with a similar mission and contribute in my own way. As an early contributor, I received a lot of e-mails and responses from individuals trying to break into tech, especially Africans, mainly because I was the only black person at the time.

I got e-mails from people in Rwanda, Mozambique, Somalia, Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and they told me about their challenges with coding and breaking into tech. Some of these people have gotten jobs, published their apps on Play Store, built websites, and fully transitioned into tech and are earning really good money.

From that experience, I started to see the synergies that could be created if you connected individuals from across Africa, not just within a country or region, which coming to MEST solidified. 

The 54 individuals I'm here with are not just ordinary people. They're like me. They've started a project in their respective countries, run a business, have networks, and are influential. So I thought, how can I leverage this once in a lifetime opportunity and create something that can affect people's lives across the continent.

I decided that hackathons were the best because they require you to start from point zero and get to one hundred. Sometimes it's unrealistic, but what's more important is the learning and the networking. 

What role did Design Thinking play in creating the Afrikathon experience?

I used design thinking to determine the best way to organize the hackathon, given the constraints of COVID-19, but still achieve our goal. I designed the process around the GV Design Sprint. 

We made design thinking a core process because, in Africa, the problems here are unique and not adequately documented, and with design thinking, you're able to gain knowledge about a problem from the little information at your disposal.

If I give you an equation that says, _ + _ = 5, and I tell you to fill in the empty spaces. You can give four responses 2+3, and it's inverse, or 1+4, and its inverse. The point is that when you start with the solution to the problem, you find out that there are multiple "problems" that can lead to a solution. It can be 10 or even 1,000, depending on the complexity.

However, if I give you 1+1, mathematically, the answer can only be 2. The same goes for 2+2; the answer can only be 4. 

Design thinking teaches you how to understand the problem so well that you see the answer. 

When we applied the design thinking process to Afrikathon, I discovered two core problems.

1. Techies needed a way to network with other techies across the continent 
2. Most individuals do not have the opportunity or medium to take action or responsibility for the problems around them. 
   

We wanted to meet these needs with Afrikathon by providing participants with a place to learn, network with other Africans around a shared purpose, and solve problems.