Remember when Global Citizen explained what a “hackathon” was? You learned it’s not just about pizza and Red Bull or Anonymous but that it can be used for social change.
Well, leading up to the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), Global Citizen along with our partners at Ericsson led the Education challenge as part of a 24-hour hackathon! Basically, we invited a group of tech-wizards from around the world to sit in a room for 24 hours (a countdown to the WHS) and help the world come up with a creative, tech-based solution to delivering education in emergencies.
Other challenges included Health, Language, and Food, so it was critical for us to make sure Education was part of the 'solutions conversation'. Ericsson's engineers joined us on-site and helped Global Citizen 'rally' hacking participants to enter the Education challenge (see our live announcement from the hackathon below.) Surprisingly, the Education challenge ultimately had the most teams competing! This despite one of the corporate sponsors for another challenge offering Apple watches as an incentive to their winning team.
What did the hackers create from the Education challenge?
One of the three winning teams for the hack developed a great online app called ‘Anatolia.’ The app is meant for refugee kids to not only 'learn' remotely but also for them to be able to teach their parents something new each week through a 'gamified' weekly challenge.
It was a novel and unique way to think about education and our ‘crowd-sourcing’ paid off! This and other solutions can be viewed on devpost and will be featured during the UN General Assembly.
The collaboration around new ideas was intrinsic at the WHS. There was a huge private sector attendance committed to working on refugee issues through a novel and solution-driven approach. Many of these are partners who Global Citizen is already involved with, and we look forward to driving more collaboration between these organisations, the UN and sector colleagues to jointly address humanitarian issues in the months to come.
Stay tuned in the next month for more hackathon fun! Global Citizen and Ericsson will be working on a Global Challenge on Education, building on the hackathon outcomes as well as Ericsson’s ‘Connect to Learn’ program. Anyone around the world will be able to enter come June 20!