Earlier this year, a group of young people converged in Kathmandu, Nepal to try and develop tech-based solutions to violence against women, demonstrating along the way, a number of ways technology can be used to respond to key humanitarian issues.
The ‘Violence Against Women Hackathon‘, held in June this year, threw young tech professionals and humanitarian workers into the pressure cooker for a day, tasking them with specific challenges to address problems associated with gender-based violence, including:
- developing an educational tool which teaches students about socially-defined gender roles and asks them to redefine those roles;
- creating a mapping system that plots police stations and provides phone numbers so that victims can seek immediate help in emergency situations;
- setting up a system whereby victims of violence can report the crime via SMS (particularly aimed at people in rural areas); and
- building a monitoring system to help ensure that services provided to victims and their families are adequate.
Created by The World Bank, Young Innovations, International Finance Corporation and Computer Association of Nepal, the hackathon was designed to create out-of-the-box solutions (‘hacks’) to gender-based violence that are accessible and can be applied globally.
Check out some of the initiatives the teams developed as well as more on the hackathon itself:
Author: Anna Rees/ RESET editorial
