The NEM African mini-hackathon was initiated by the NEM Kenya and the NEM Africa teams, supported by Solo Energy and Two4One App. The event took place on the 18th of August 2018 and was hosted at SwahiliBox, a Technology Open Space in Mombasa, Kenya, which focuses on socio-economic technology empowerment, inspiring and developing individuals and helps them develop new and innovative ideas through networking, access to training and support and professional mentoring and coaching.

The NEM Africa SwahiliBox mini-hackathon was the first in a series of blockchain events planned by NEM Africa aiming at increasing the capacity for developers on the African continent to learn the NEM API and build their solutions maximising on the benefits of the most developer friendly blockchain platform in the world, NEM. Hackathons continuously prove a renowned African proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

Project goals.

The themes for this hackathon targeted the “big four” pillars of development that the Government of Kenya is focusing on to achieve its millennium development goals. The pillars are ease of manufacturing, universal healthcare, affordable housing, and food security.

Recap of the day’s events.

With the early morning start scheduled it looked like the hackathon attendees were in for a good morning as the conditions were great for coding, not too warm or humid but cool and calm. With the beautiful scenic view on the top floor out of the SwahiliBox Labs windows, who could resist coding at such a venue. The Hackathon came to a start at 9:30am with introductions from the NEM team that came to provide technical guidance on distributed ledger integration.

The NEM Africa team comprised Solo Energy’s George Mosomi and Endre Vasarhelyi, both of whom are working on DLT integration, Stanley Njenga of Two-4-One App, and Antony Musyo a NEM Kenya Developer. The Solo Energy team gave an innovative illustration of how the NEM blockchain is being used to facilitate aggregation of battery assets to create a Virtual Power Plant in Ireland and the United Kingdom. You can read more about how Solo Energy’s model empowers a decentralised shared energy economy of peer-to-peer energy trading and how it is using NEM’s distributed ledger technology here.

George Mosomi from Solo Energy engaging the attendees with integration using Node.js and React.js

Project teams

The attendees were grouped into four teams ensuring that each team comprised one front-end specialist, one backend specialist, one blockchain specialist and a business development specialist.

The teams settled down to business and four groups were formed with the areas of interest narrowed down to Health, Food security, Manufacturing and Housing. Within the first hour the teams were done brainstorming and made their first pitches of the ideas they had for development. The NEMbers were treated to 4 very interesting ideas including lands ownership blockchain enabled ledger, food distribution platform, fishermen’s platform and health platform.

Lands Ownership Ledger

This was a platform that took on a collaborative approach with the Lands ministry to enable this ledger acquire all the land ownership information plus parcels owned thus storing them on the NEM blockchain ledger. It would enable easy check-up by end users on with concerns over land they were purchasing. This would allow for a more transparent means of land ownership confirmation before transactions take place between buyer and seller of a piece of land. The data acquired could provide for an interesting trend on land ownership around the country.

Food Security Platform

This solution aimed to help solve the age old food security problem by aiming to reduce over reliance of food supplies from one central source. Farmers with their recent harvest would post their wares on this virtual blockchain backed platform and wait for various players within the market to make bids on the posted produce. This almost wholly eliminates the need for brokers ad middlemen thus empowering the farmers.

Fishermen’s Platform

This is a platform that links the fishermen with buyers for their produce enabling them to even sell their catch before they reach shore. Enabling an efficient model of commerce thus cutting out the middlemen who in most cases drive down the price per kilo when they buy from fishermen but sell at exorbitant prices to the final consumer. Makes it easier as well to conduct purchases and sales between the consumers and fishermen plus with the blockchain one can trace transactions made and gain precious data that could go a very long way in research as to different types of fish caught along our shores while also giving an great insight into the types of fish preferred by the local communities.

Health Platform

The platform put simply enables a patient recognise their symptoms tagging them to the nearest health facility/chemist which would help them acquire the medical help they require. Blockchain here would work on the data acquired about the patient as well as different health facilities available. This would give data scientists a plethora of data that would enable them establish myriad of different trends.

Results

The groups had another 2 hours to thrash out some adhoc prototype that would enable the judges make more sense of their projects. We had some forceful presentations after which it was left to the judges to decide and after careful consideration. The fishing platform ran away with top spot followed by the Land ownership ledger with the health platform following in a close third and food distribution 4th.

All in all it was a fulfilling day of pitches and all projects have been given one month to enable them create their prototypes thus compete for funding from NEM funding pool. Thus they also managed to go away with some NEM (XEM coins). All in all a great end to a very knowledgeable and technically fulfilling Day.

Part 2 will delve into the challenges and lessons learned, how to capitalise on the power of distributed ledger utility and the future of blockchain in the development sector in Africa.