Nairobi County Hackathon Tackles Urban Mobility Challenges with Innovative Solutions

Nairobi, 10th April, 2024

Nairobi County Digital Economy and Startups sub sector, together with Africa's Talking Limited and Liquid Intelligence Technologies, held an open hackathon theme being Transport and logistics- Nairobi Kenya at Nairobi Primary.

The event aimed at addressing the pressing challenges of urban mobility, focusing on innovative and practical solutions to traffic congestion and parking dilemmas that plague the city of Nairobi.

Chief Officer for Smart Nairobi, Tiras Njoroge said "In the last one and a half year, we have been trying to look for a solution for our traffic management and when we thought of holding a hackathon, we came up with this theme. If we can get a possible and workable solution that can make Nairobi a better place, I assure you, it will be implemented. Digital Economy and Start-ups, together with Smart Nairobi, endeavors to create a platform for young people to showcase their ideas and talents to make Nairobi work."
He further shared that the minds behind e-citizens were young, talented youths who have worked hard to provide long-lasting solutions to the citizens. "I encourage you to keep on with the excellent work you are doing," he said.

County Director for Digital Economy and Startup, Elizabeth Ndung'u said "Our vision is to create Nairobi startups stakeholders engagement to establish Nairobi as a startup for the launch pad for international exposure for global innovation forums and also, to establish sub-county and word vision programmes to get to Mashinani where people are".
She encouraged the participants to participate in such forums and showcasing. "As a county, we will ensure we establish policies to guide and protect such initiatives as well as organize for other sectors in the county to embrace these initiatives.

Liquid Telecom, Senior Group Research Engineer Daniam Henriques, talked about a Vehicle Enquiry Service (VES) to support traffic and parking solutions by offering real-time access to vehicle details based on registration numbers. He presented a local API based on the United Kingdom's DVLA (VES) to showcase possible solutions that can be integrated into Kenyan traffic management systems.
Co-founder and Head of Growth at Fonbnk, Michael Kimani took the participants through Apl documentations, Apl Authentication and Demo applications, and shared different models and computer vision together with the available challenges.

Team: Ni Mimi by Alex Murimi emerged as the winner. Alex came up with a solution of using USSD and IoT to show accurate available parking slots in the city.
Second runner up were Team:WM (Urban and Mobile) by Wayne Marga, whose solution was a platform to assist Nairobi County in levying, incetivising better mobility, and monitoring and evaluation using data and ML.

Third runner up was Team : Matatu by Naphtali Makori and Elvis Ogunga who came up with a solution of an efficient way of managing public transport in the CBD to avoid congestion, through advance number assignment to avoid the chaos that result into long queues spanning kilometers and causing traffic using SMS:OTP and a dashboard to show the situation and prompt the driver to plan well.

The event targeted software engineers, engineering students and academics, and tech innovators, among others.

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