MTN Ghana Foundation in collaboration with Women in Tech Africa organized the Accra edition of the MTN Girl Code training program last week. Mobile Web Ghana was the location partners for the training program. The 5-day boot camp was aimed at encouraging young ladies who are passionate about computer programming to pursue careers in the IT industry.
The training program had a total of 30 ladies attending, most of whom were students and a few others were workers. On the first day of the camp, the ladies were given the opportunity to share the problems they had identified in their communities and the solutions they would develop to solve them. After that, they were taken through lessons in programming, game development and idea generation. They were then put into groups – others worked individually – and tasked to develop applications that would solve the problems they identified.
The pitching day saw the presentation of so many exciting and innovative ideas, much to the judges’ delight. Some of the apps developed were on E-ticketing, online shopping and games.
At the end of the day, BLUE, a team of four young ladies emerged as winners of the competition. Their idea is to develop an app for baby monitoring. It will work with the Bluetooth device for the free version and the premium version will have other devices that will help mothers see and hear their babies, as well as know their baby’s temperature.
Vanessa Otchere, a student of the Ghana Institute of Journalism came second in the competition. Her idea is to create a mobile application called TicketEx that allows bus users purchase their ticket online. The app will allow you choose a seat location of your choice on the bus and also make payment through mobile money. This will make travelling easy and less stressful.
PEKK, also a team of four that came third, came up with Di-dwa, which will be a web and mobile app that consumers of organic food products will be able to order and have it delivered to them at their comfort. There are other interesting options that will be on the app like recipes where one can choose and learn new recipes online for different dishes. The first, second and third winners were given Gh 2,500.00, Gh 1,500.00 and Gh 1,000 respectively.
The MTN Girl Code train is currently in Cape Coast for the Central Region edition.