By NIGERIAN app, SaferMom, which provides pregnant and new mothers with simple tools to help make informed health decisions via SMS, voice services and its mobile app, has won the Economic Empowerment Impact Award at the FaceBook F8 Event.
The app, which was developed by Olarenwaju Adeloye, uses a chain of community health partners and mobile technology to track the health of pregnant moms and newborn babies, immunisation schedules for babies, nutrition and behavioural routines based on their fetal development stages and antenatal care. This service is available in the English, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Pidgin languages.
The F8 hosted over 4,000 people in person and hundreds of thousands watching via Facebook Live. Facebook celebrated the achievements and products of its growing African developer and partner ecosystem at its annual F8 developer conference, held in San Jose, California. African developers shared the stage with Facebook and developers from around the world, showcasing the innovative products and services they created for their local communities and the global market.
F8 hosts more than 4 000 people in person and hundreds of thousands of people watching via Facebook Live for two days of new products, tools, interactive demos and speakers to help developers build, grow and monetise their apps. This year, Facebook brought F8 to developers around the world through F8 Meetups hosted with tech hubs around the world. In Africa, it hosted F8 Meetups in Nairobi, Lagos, and Cape Town, where participants watched live streams of the sessions in San Francisco.
“We’re partnering with many African developers to launch products that not only meet the needs of their local markets, but which are also ready for the world stage,” said, Emeka Afigbo, Facebook’s Head of Platform Partnerships for the Middle East and Africa. Events like F8 are a perfect opportunity for us to talk about how we will work with partners to do more with our platforms. As importantly, they are a forum for us to get feedback from our ecosystem and to showcase our partners’ work to the world.”
In attendance were two representatives each from the winners of Internet.org’s Innovation Challenge in Africa awards. These awards from Facebook’s Internet.org recognised leading examples of ideas, apps, Web sites and/or online services that provide real value in the categories of education and economic empowerment. Ghana’s Esoko won the Economic Empowerment Innovation Challenge Award. Esoko makes it easier for businesses, governments, NGOs and others to connect with farmers through its Web and mobile apps.
The Economic Empowerment Impact Award winner was mPedigree Goldkeys also from Ghana. It is an anti-counterfeiting, tracking and tracing solution that uses consumers’ mobile phones as a verification tool. The Education Innovation Challenge Award went to SA’s Hyperion Development, a social enterprise that has built the first online course platform for computer science education.
At F8, Facebook also announced a programme for developers all over the world to connect, learn and collaborate with other local developers. Developer Circles is a community-driven programme that’s free to join and open to any developer. Each Developer Circle is led by members of the local community who act as leads for the circle, organising events offline and managing a local online Facebook community.
Developer Circles are forums to share knowledge, collaborate, build new ideas and learn about the latest technologies from Facebook and other industry leaders. Lagos was the first place Facebook piloted this global programme and Innocent Amadi, one of the community leads for the Lagos Circle, was featured at the keynote.
