GitHub’s Black Employee Resource Group, Blacktocats, recently hosted our first hackathon event in Africa. Over 100 mid-level and senior software engineers attended the CodeNaija Hackathon 2019 event in Lagos, Nigeria, on Saturday and Sunday, October 26-27.

The Blacktocats’ mission is to attract and empower Black lives in tech. According to our recent Octoverse Report, Nigeria is one of the fastest-growing open source communities (by projects) in the world. We wanted to highlight this community of developers by promoting their fantastic talent and showcasing their work.

Understanding the community ecosystem

Ahead of the hackathon, we hosted a developer roundtable that focused on developers and social impact organizations. We partnered with market entry firm Ingressive to bring over 20 developers and social good “techprenuers” to help with the discussion. Ultimately, we wanted to connect with the developer community in Lagos to understand the ecosystem and answer questions about our work at GitHub. During the discussion, we were excited to have attendees that included the organizers of GitGirl and GirlsCoding, who work to bring adult women and young girls, respectively, into the tech industry.

The CodeNaija Hackathon was highly anticipated, with more than 800 developers applying for one of only 100 spots to attend. In the end, 80 participants across 19 teams devoted over 30 hacking hours to deliver the best technological solution to a social issue in Nigeria.

Take a look behind the scenes of the Code Naija Hackathon

Thank you

We partnered with talent accelerator Andela to recruit attendees and help make the hackathon a reality. We also received support from our sponsors Flutterwave, Microsoft, and M12 who provided input, funding, and prizes.

We’re incredibly thankful for our partners and participants. We couldn’t have done this without you.

Learn more about the CodeNaija Hackathon