Safaricom academy students, comprising of five students, were proud winners in both Nairobi a Smarter City competition and the Twitters Smart City Nairobi challenge; where they won prize monies of $2000 and $10,000 respectively among other prizes. The students were Peter Gikera, Bettirose Ngugi, Kizi Dimira, Racheal Gathagu, and James Ngugi.

 

The Nairobi Tech Week event, organized by Moringa School in April 2016, brought together techies in Kenya and beyond for a week of discussions on emerging technologies. Twitter and Angel Hack were part of the esteemed sponsors of this challenge that was held at Strathmore University.

 

On the last day of the Nairobi Tech Week event, a hackathon was organized where teams were tasked with coming up with a solution that made Nairobi a smarter city within 24hrs. The Strathmore team developed a project – Report Taka, a solution that enabled citizens in Nairobi to report where garbage piles up. 38 teams participated in this challenge where the Strathmore team emerged winners.

 

Their win accorded them; $2000 prize money; a 6-week trade membership at iHub – an Innovation hub and hacker space for the technology community in Nairobi. This membership is the highest level of membership at iHub; they also won Microsoft goodies, a 12-week accelerator program to some of the leading tech industries, and finally invited to be incubated at the NEST – a venture capital that takes startups that show promise and build them up in technology, mentorship and business aspects.

 

The Nairobi Tech Week win gave the team a slot to participate in the Twitters’ Smart City Nairobi challenge, an accelerator challenge together with two other groups.

 

For this new challenge the teams were incubated for six week at iHub where on the last week they had a pitch competition with the other groups, and emerged winners again. The team won $10,000.

 

The Strathmore team plans to use their prize money to actualize their project – Report Taka; build capital to build their product; build customer acquisition; build more traction in terms of social media; and finally build partnerships.

 

 

Congratulations to the team!!