“Design and Develop for People and Planet.” This was the theme of the 25 hour DoGood Hackathon that took place at the Nokia Factory in Kaikukatu Helsinki. It was organized by Nokia and Parsons, the School of Design in New York and the aim of promoting new ideas for mobile applications. At the event finals, there were 10 teams at the global event and two were from Africa; these being AppCRAFT from South Africa and Synacor Consortium from Kenya. There were two catergories the DoGood category and the Open Data category, the former which is to encourage development of apps that help people contribute to making the world a better place and the latter to promote access of free and useful information to the public. Synacor Consortium, a mobile web and consultancy company won the Data category with their MajiRipoti application.
According to Water Services Regulatory Board of Kenya statistics, the reported national annual water production is 346 billion litres while the average unaccounted for water is 49%. At an average tariff of Kshs 40, 000 litres, the annual financial loss through unaccounted for water is approximately Kshs 6.8 billion. The amount of water lost is almost half of what the country produces.
Synacor Consortium took home some 2000 Euros to go jump-start the MajiRipoti project.This product will shortly be available to the Kenyan public as a mobile application with GPS to allow tracking, and as an SMS based solution to mobile phones without GPS. The application is designed to run on the Windows Phone Platform. MajiRipoti will also incorporate a rankings game that will depend on the number of reports a user makes to encourage use of the app. Ranks will be published to both Facebook and Twitter.
