Silicon Valley: Where Innovation Meets Development

The Sanitation Hackathon & App Challenge three grand prize winners, mSchool, Taarifa, and SunClean, flew over from their home countries, Senegal, Tanzania, England, and Indonesia to attend the awards ceremony in Washington, DC. With a 64inch touchscreen provided by Microsoft, the teams showcased their apps to sanitation sector specialists at the WB-IMF side event on Investing in Sanitation. Immediately following the event, the three winning travelled to Silicon Valley for an innovation tour hosted by IDEO.org. A week-long intensive training with workshops about human-centered design, branding, scaling, and business planning, in combination with meetings at the Bay Area’s most innovative firms. Zynga, the world’s leading social games company (who doesn’t know about Farmville?), taught us about people’s incentives to play games, how to ensure people come back to your platform, and how you can use data to inform your decisions about changing and growing apps. Take a look at our first day: