Saturday the 6th of August 2022; in celebration of Women’s month under the theme #Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights for an Equal Future, GirlCode hosted its ninth annual Hackathon – Which is the largest all-female hackathon in South Africa.
The 9th Annual GirlCode Hackathon kicked off across 3 provinces Johannesburg – Riversands I-Hub, Cape Town- Workshop17 and Durban – Innovate Durban with a welcome message from the CEO, Zandile Mkwanazi. The hackathon then started with some words of inspiration from prominent women in tech with Johannesburg having Kerryn Lee, from Tarsus On Demand, Fifi Sali from Vuma, Manuella Nouko from Takealot, Yvonne Dias, Mint Group CFO, and Gugu Sema from MICT Seta. The Cape Town participants we were joined by Mitso Qalaba from Takealot and Wendy Moulang from Byte Orbit. Whilst in Durban, the participants were joined by Nosisa Duze, from TakeAlot.
Over the next 30 hours, 328 participants built 66 technology solutions aimed at addressing Generation Equality! The weekend was followed by non-stop coding, debugging, fun, food and beverages to keep the students active with amazing spot prizes worth over R50000 given throughout the weekend on our social media. These included Vouchers from Saratoga, Entelect, Superbalist, Mr D, TakeAlot, and three brand-new Dell laptops sponsored by Dotcom Software Projects, and 6 Headphones sponsored by the TakeAlot Group.
On Sunday 7 August 2022, judging commenced across all cities with the Johannesburg judging panel consisting of Justine Whitbread, Senior Software Engineer at Superbalist, Lizelle Conradie Development Delivery Lead, Mint Group and Inayeth Govender Biography General Manager for Demand Generation at Tarsus On Demand; Cape Town judging panel included Pierre-Patrick Senior Software Developer & Electrical Engineer, Byte Orbit, Nicole Bell: Senior Software Engineer, Takealot and Melissa Slaymaker: Women in Tech Country Director for South Africa & Talent Hub Director for Women in Tech Global. And the Durban judging panel included Dr Rosemary Quilling, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) University of KwaZulu-Natal, Varsana Maharaj, Software Engineer: Takealot and Muhle Ndwalane founder, Tech Entrepreneur, Digital & Creative Solutions Director Education of Asante Solutions.
The first prize winners across all cities walked away with Laptops, and R1000 TakeAlot
vouchers. The second prize winners walked away with Tablets and R500 TakeAlot vouchers, and the third prize winners walked away with Headphones and R250 TakeAlot vouchers.
The overall hackathon winners between the 3-cities, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban were announced live on GirlCode Instagram page on the 9th of August as part of the Womens Day celebration. The team consisted of Seipati Tshabalala, Denise Kamanga, Charlo Jacobs and Tracy Lethoko, who walked away with an additional R 60 000 cash prize.
“The success of the hackathon reflects the ever-increasing dedication and enthusiasm of young women who want to be equal contributors to our society and in particular, the tech industry. We were blown away by all the solutions and of course the winning team who built a website that will allow students a safe and anonymous place to request Sanitary items and Health support. The website is an anonymous locker system that allows students to request sanitary products by creating an anonymous ticket. Once the anonymous ticket is created, another person can view and accept the ticket to fulfill the request i.e., purchases the student sanitary items and places them in a locker where the student will be notified via SMS to collect their items.”
“I thought this was a unique way to tackle a problem that has kept many girls from school and has the scope to scale nationally with ordinary citizens being able to fulfil requests without necessarily exposing these young girls in need. I particularly loved the fact that the whole process is anonymous. What we saw this weekend was real practical solutions with the potential for making a huge impact in society and the lives of many girls and women”
Said Zandile Mkwanazi
