Andela Supports Facebook, UNODC To Host Hackathon4Justice

Andela, Facebook and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) joined hands as they hosted the ‘Hackathon4Justice’, a challenge focused on building prototype solutions to tackle crime, uphold justice and promote the rule of law.

At the end of the contest, Predex, students from Covenant University and the University of Lagos emerged the winning team. They won an all-expense-paid trip to Kyoto, Japan for a UNODC conference, having developed deep learning model investigators’ solution.

The solution, which could be used to detect child predators prowling on their victims before they strike, flags suspicious conversations between children and potential predators, thereby helping authorities and parents prevent cases early enough.

The second-placed team, RecyclAl, built a solution that is based on Object Classification using Artificial Intelligence to detect whether e-wastes are recyclable or not. The team added key features like educational blogs, newsletters and conferences meetups, to sensitize users about the solutions to e-waste recycling on their web application.

The third-placed team, InsideLife VR, had a solution, which employs the cardboard virtual reality SDK to implement an easily accessible interactive experience that is highly educative on some of the more subtle aspects of the rule of law. The second and third-placed teams won Oculus Go devices and Sure Gift Coupons, respectively.

Speaking about the event, the Partner Engineering Manager at Andela, Omogbolahan Alli, said that the energy that radiated from these young students was incredible and that Andela is known for being the home of and for celebrating technical excellence.

“Seeing how the groups of students tackled the problems they were given, their approach to teamwork, and the focus they had in order to meet the deadlines was fantastic and demonstrates that we should be very proud of the future technical talent Nigeria has to offer,” he said.

Alli added that this is the second year of Hackathon4Justice and Andela was grateful to their partners UNDOC, Facebook as well as all the students that participated. He said he hopes to make this regular on the Andela calendar.

Through the UNODC’s Education for Justice initiative, students from universities across Nigeria came together with the purpose of building prototype solutions that can help tackle crime, uphold justice and promote the rule of law.

About Andela: Launched operations in Nigeria in 2014, it is a global firm that identifies and trains software developers to help global companies overcome the severe shortage of skilled software developers. It provides a network of top software engineering talents from some unlikely countries.