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ReportTaka wins the #SmartCityNairobi Challenge; walked home w/ $10,000

by Milicent Atieno
ReportTaka wins the #SmartCityNairobi Challenge; walked home w/ $10,000

#SmartCityNairobi challenge was a hackathon hosted by Twitter Inc. in partnership with others like iHub to promote innovative solutions using the Twitter’s API. The winner for this competition is ReportTaka.

ReportTaka is a mobile app for crowd-sourced information on uncollected garbage around the city of Nairobi. The app works by allowing Nairobians take snapshots of uncollected garbage and post it on the app.

The app will then inform the Nairobi City Council of the site where the garbage is lying unattended. It will also post the picture on Twitter and tag the City Council’s Twitter handle, in a bid to arm twist the responsible authority to take necessary actions and avoid public naming and shaming.

On the other hand, it also works to the benefit of the City Council as they get reports and information on an aggregated database that can help them better track their garbage collection efforts. The same data will also come in handy when the City Council is making policies on garbage collection in and around the city.

ReportTaka’s mission is for a clean, healthy, and safe Nairobi city. Garbage can lead to problems such as health risks, and they cause clogged drainages, which result in flooding whenever it rains. ReportTaka walked home with $10,000 cash prize for their innovation.

The second runners up in the #SmartCityNairobi challenge is Naimotion. A project geared towards easing the Nairobi traffic nightmare by leveraging on integrated crowdsourced information on the IoT platform, Naimotion walked home with $7,000. The third runners-up were FixMtaa, which seeks to provide people a platform to report the common societal problems. FixMtaa walked home with $5,000.

ReportTaka, Naimotion, and FixMtaa qualified for the #SmartCityNairobi challenge after making an impressive pitch at the preliminary stage of the competition, which took place at the Nairobi Tech Week. A competition that took place at the Strathmore University in Nairobi from April 27-30

All the teams were each given $2,000 and taken on a six weeks incubation program at the iHub with Red Membership awarded to them. The got mentorship from both the iHub and Twitter teams to help them brush up on their final pitch.

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