Over the weekend, the Space Apps Challenge led by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched in Kigali. Debuting for the first time in East Africa, the challenge birthed a pool of projects, ranging from interplanetary communication to space art and predictive technology. In just 48 hours, eight teams from diverse backgrounds were able to submit their solutions, attempting to solve the challenges faced in space and on earth such as natural disasters. One of the projects is FloodWiz. A team of four seeks to address the issue of flooding in Rwanda by building a data-visualisation map that shows historical data of the floods per district. “We thought of a way that we can use the historical data to come up with a solution that could assist government authorities or development NGOs to make data-led decisions in allocating resources according to places that have been affected most by the floods,” said Bonté Ineza, 20, a programmer on the team. His teammate Pascaline Niyonsaba, who is currently pursuing a degree in mathematics and statistics at University of Rwanda, was in charge of gathering data. Their team was the youngest, participating in their first hackathon. “I don’t have any background in coding and computer science, but I want to be a data analyst. So during the pandemic I decided to teach myself about programming,” said the 19-year-old. FloodWiz is not the only one attempting to address the environmental challenges. In fact, a team of three software engineers wants to apply machine learning to predict climate hazards. The team is using weather data to build an intelligent platform that can rely on a sequence of past events to predict floods and landslides in the African Great Lakes region. “I and my team believe that forecasting hazards accurately would save lives and it’s for that reason that we plan on improving on our project to offer a platform that can alert people with high accuracy about upcoming hazards,” said Arsene Muhire, 24. The urgency of a solution to mitigate the climate crisis is not a surprise. Like other countries in the region, Rwanda loses hundreds of lives and billions of cash every year to climate-related disasters. On the other hand, two brothers went for education, developing a mobile application that simulates the solar system in real-time, according to your location. By using a smartphone, any person can see the location of and additional data about planets in the solar system, something usually done by a telescope. The application relies on NASA data, GPS, and augmented reality technology to create an interactive visualization of the solar system. Anaclet Ahishakiye says that the lack of learning materials in schools inspired him and his younger brother, Isaie Kozera, to come up with the idea. “I liked to know more about the universe as we studied it but materials were a problem and I think it is a common problem because there is no access to a telescope,” said Ahishakiye, 24. The Space Apps Challenge has become the world’s largest hackathon. Taking place simultaneously in more than 200 cities around the globe, the Kigali challenge virtually gathered 10 teams and a dozen mentors from the tech ecosystem. The hackathon was organized and run on a volunteer basis, according to the organizing team. Winning projects at country level will be awarded while outstanding ones have a chance to compete globally.
