Hackathon

The Ministry of Communications through the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) has organized a 4-day Data Upload Challenge and a Hackathon under the Ghana Open Data Initiative to make government data open and accessible to all for free.

The event held on the 2nd- 5th April, 2019 at the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (KACE) had about a hundred and thirty (130) participants from MDAs, civil society, academia and application developers to interact with datasets uploaded on the revamped National Open Data portal and create ideas borders on creating a applications for citizens and sector stakeholders to use. The ideas generated during the event helped teams create application helps citizens trade their waste for money, a dashboard that gives users a visual representation of agriculture, health and registered business in Ghana and, also an applications that gives users the opportunity to make predictions amongst others.

The Open Data Upload Challenge which was organized during the first two days of the event brought a group of software developers, data scientists and statisticians to interact with and aided representatives of some Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to do a data assessment on relevance of the data to development and subsequently enabling MDAs upload relevant data onto the portal using the standard all institutions are required to adhere to while making their data freely accessible to all.

Data was uploaded by the Energy Commission, Ghana Investment Promotion Commission, Ministry of Agriculture, Registrar General’s department and the Ministry of Inner City and Zongo Development. A total of 50 datasets and about 200 data resources were uploaded on the National Open Data portal during the event.

Data hackathon event t runs for the next two days of the event and brought people get together and work on data-related projects for problem solving from MDAs use-case recognition and networking. The hackathon enabled the use of datasets uploaded on the Open data portal to develop citizen-centric applications for citizens and stakeholders of MDAs.

Awards were given to the best three (3) institutions for the Data Upload challenge while the winners of the Data hackathon received a total of 15,000 GHs prize money and are currently undergoing a month acceleration program at Mobile Web Ghana to enable them fully develop their software solution.