Finalists score big with Orange Community Innovation awards

Orange community innovation awards

The 3rd annual Community innovation awards by Orange Uganda held on 8th August rewarded innovative students for the mobile applications they developed for social good under health, agriculture and education categories.

This year’s challenge attracted 72 entries from which 20 made it to the final round. With a mandate to fulfill a corporate social responsibility, Orange Uganda partnered with various organisations such as; Huawei as a technology partner, Vision Group as media partner, College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology as academic partner and CEOSummit as training and mentoring partner.

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The MD Hauwei Uganda Mr. Radoslaw Kedzia thanked the innovative students for their participation as he announced the Huawei Y300 android smartphones that were given to all finalists of the day. Amid cheers he boasted of Huawei’s position as a leading smartphones maker and distributor worldwide only behind Samsung and iPhone.

In the 3rd position was LuundaLite an android app–William Luyinda, artn Katamba and Ibrahim Ssekabembe from Busitema university–developed to assist animal breeders manage their farms easily. The beta version that currently accommodates poultry farmers provides vaccination schedules,diagnosis for various diseases,information about veterinary shops and feed stores and also an interactive platform where farmers share information amongst themselves. They won UGX 2.5 M and 6 months internship at Orange Uganda.

In the 2nd position was MensPreg–developed by Dut Athian and Joyce Nambalirwa from International College of Health sciences–an application that uses predictive formulations in helping ladies track their monthly periods. In hindsight it seeks to mitigate unwanted pregnancies based on ovalution schedules and also predict the time of conception and delivery. They won UGX 5 M and 12 months internship at Orange Uganda.

In the 1st position was AgroMarketDay–developed by Lisa Katusiime and Isaac Omiat from Makerere university–is an android mobile app that helps farmers dealing in agricultural products link easily to buyers thereby cutting out the unnecessary and exploitative middleman. It shows an updated list of different markets in Uganda highlighting the market conditions interms of supply vis-a-vis demand. They won UGX 10 M and 12 months internship at Orange Uganda.

Notably, the winners’ goals were to develop USSD versions of their apps to tap into the majority of the target market who are not smartphone holders.

In his key note address, Uganda’s Prime minister Hon(Rt.) Amama Mbabazi encouraged the finalists to go out to the real world and further innovate solutions to bolster social change and development.

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Image via NewVision

 

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10 thoughts on “Finalists score big with Orange Community Innovation awards

  1. Orange rewarding our young techy-brains; this is good.
    However:Last year, Orange did have the same innovation awards where My Reading Guide & Diet Assistant apps came 1st & 2nd respectively. I wonder what these winners are up-to now? Have their apps since developed into something we can use daily on our smart-phones? Or they [apps] are still being incubated.

    • Thank you for your observations keith. My Revision Guide, Diet Assistant and Brainshare were incorporated into the Orange USSD system(*100*7#). However, their market traction remains untold. Altogether, since the startup garage in 2011, many startups have braced headlines but not lived to see their first birthdays. I will document them and breakdown the tidbits in my subsequent posts.

      • Daniel, that is very right. Few have live to see their first birthdays. I guess the problem majorly lies with the corporate companies that push for these competitions. As soon as they’ve made the news, they’re back to their daily routine. In cases where no department is set aside to follow up what it is that these youngsters are up-to.. their apps together with everything else dies off.

        • I conquer with you Ronald. Telcos have to follow up on the apps developed and also the devs should be flexible enough to work beyond only competing in app competitions.

      • It’s mainly students who compete in these events or competitions. Students are by nature elusive with no particular direction for their lives. They’re not entrepreneurs or have no entrepreneurial experience or aspirations…the end result is projects/Apps that have a short life cycle.

    • Thanks for your comment. Season 4 is on next year and open to all institutions of higher learning.

      • @Ronkas:disqus Yes Sounds True.. But we are Quite different @MyRevisionGuide.. first i’m a developer @MyRevisionGuide.., we are working harder on the App, we have a Rails Zombie Version of the App behind the scenes making revision more fun and social.. we cofounded a startup [Patch-it], becoz at a moment we are not a big company.. but we are working harder to scale, and we too a have a foundation [MamaWalu Foundation] to teach code to young students [interested & at any Level] mainly those with no hope to continue with further studies due to financial problems, in order to expand [Patch-it].. Becoz at Universities,they do not teach how to code and how to build a startup.. the Foundation and Patch-it are good Experience 4 us.. u can check out @MyRevisionGuide here http://myrevisionguide.com/ and stay tunned..
        @mwesigwadaniel:disqus i’ll invite u when everything is set at our hub [Katwe CoLab]

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