West Africa: #senstopebola Wins #hackagainstebola

19 January 2015
Open Society Initiative for West Africa (Dakar)
press release

On January 14 and 15th, the Global Editors Network, OSIWA (Open Society Initiative for West Africa), the Union for Francophone Press (UPF) and Code for Africa invited 12 teams from the Senegalese media to participate in a competition on media innovation called #HackAgainstEbola, in partnership with Le Monde Afrique and sponsored by Google.

Each team was composed of a journalist, a designer and a developer, and they had two days to build a prototype on a specific theme: 'How to better cover and prevent Ebola'. It was the third and last edition of #HackAgainstEbola, a series of hackdays in West Africa (previous editions in Accra, Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria), part of a global programme called EditorsLab.

The competition was won by the team from SenStopEbola. SenStopEbola is an initiative of the Senegal Bloggers Network created after the announcement of the first Ebola case in Senegal, on August 26th 2014. These volunteers have set up a digital communication strategy #SenStopEbola on social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and created a mobile application to inform the public about the EBOLA outbreak.

Following the initiative, this project aims to reach a wider segment of the population via SMS and calls notifications in local languages, integrating with WHO data analysis APO and to make this application a diagnostic, monitoring, alerting and training tool for Health professionals and volunteers. The Digital Strategy "SenStopEbola" is focused on SMS, WEB & MOBILE with local content.

The specificity is that this strategy is duplicable in 48 hours for any other use in the field of health.

All the info about their project here.

Two special mentions were given to DakarActu, with FLOT contre Ebola, and OuestAf with ACCESSanté 2.0. The audience choice went to Neutraliser Ebola par le Jeu, by UPF.

You can see all the projectson the GEN Community. Pictures of the event are available on our Flickr account.

The winning team will be invited to participate in the Editors Lab Final, held in Barcelona during the GEN Summit 2015, next June. They will compete against the other winners from the Editors Lab.

Contacts:

Read the original article on OSIWA.

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