The World Bank has named a Kenyan developer as one of the winners of the recent World Bank Application for Development challenge.
Athman Ali edged out a field of more than 107 entries from 36 countries, a third of them from Africa, with software solutions that can be used to solve development issues around the world.
Ali created an app that allows users to compete online in completing the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) challenges. His application is called 'Factcha: Stop spam, advocate for the MDGs!'
The overall winner was an Australian development company for the StatPlanet app, which allows users to visualise and compare country and regional performance over time in economic, social, and human development. The app offers an interface to these indicators, even without Internet connectivity via a desktop version of the app.
Among the other entries were a Web-based tool to measure the impact of global events on progress toward the MDGs, and an interactive app that lets users make their own comparisons of countries' performances.
“We recognised we don't have a monopoly on innovation. These apps clearly demonstrate how the software development community can harness technology to analyse and tackle some of the world's long-standing problems,” said World Bank group president Robert Zoellick.
Last year, the World Bank issued a challenge to software developers from across the globe to focus on some of the world's most pressing development problems by creating digital apps using the Bank's freely available data.
A panel of expert judges, including technology gurus such as Kannan Pashupathy of Google, Craig Newmark of Craiglist, and Ory Okolloh, co-founder of Ushahidi, selected the winners.
Okolloh's compatriot and co-founder of Ushahidi, Juliana Rotich, was announced as one of the winners of the Regional Social Entrepreneur of the year award at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town.
Ushahidi is a crowdsourcing platform developed at the height of Kenya's 2007 post-election violence to map out incidences across the country sent via simple mobile texts by the public. The platform has since been used to monitor crisis and catastrophes in places such as Haiti and Japan.
Of the four other winners in the Social Enterprise category, three were Kenyans, including Aleke Dondo of Juhudi Kilimo with a rural asset financing model and Evans Wadongo, the inventor of a solar-based lantern.
Last October, John Waibochi of Virtual City, a Nairobi-based tech company won the Nokia $1 million Growth Economy Venture Challenge, beating submissions from 54 other countries.
Virtual City developed a solution called 'Mobile Distributor' aimed at streamlining the supply chain for distributors and retailers of fast-moving consumer goods in emerging markets and improving efficiencies for small and medium enterprises by increasing the number of transactions, as well as improving inventory management.
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