Last weekend, Techfugees Jordan held its second hackathon bringing young refugees, engineers and the local tech community together at the Zain Innovation Campus in King Hussein Business Park in Amman. The event was designed to encourage participants to find tech solutions to the challenges faced both by refugees living in and outside of camps in Jordan and local Jordanians.
The event kicked off with the presentation of the 3 main challenges faced by refugees living in Jordan: water leakages that lead to 50% waste and tensions between host communities and refugees, a wide educational gap between male and female youth aged 10-17 and lastly the high unemployment rate amongst locals and refugees outside of urban areas and in camps.
Over the course of the weekend, 12 teams composed mostly of young refugees coming from Iraq and Syria worked to create innovative ideas and prototypes with intensive mentoring and support. Pitches took place Saturday afternoon at 4 pm in front of an exceptional panel of local and international judges most notably, Mike Butcher himself, editor at large at TechCrunch and founder of Techfugees.
3 teams were awarded prizes:
- WaterWatch is a crowdsourcing app that allows people to take pictures of the water leakage to pressure the municipalities
- LeakLess is a wireless sensors network that sends texts with the leakage information
- DecorNerd is an e-commerce platform for Syrian and Jordanian craftsmen
Check our live tweet of the pitches and if you want to watch the whole thing, click here
Thanks to our sponsor & local partner
Zain Jordan financially supported the full 3-day event, mentored teams throughout the whole weekend and CEO of Zain Jordan, Ahmad Hanandeh was present all weekend to connect participants, judges and mentors.
