How Africa Takes on COVID19

What a hackathon weekend! I was mentoring at MIT COVID19 Challenge and humbled to see what can be done when 2000+ people from 106 countries shaped into 180+ teams & solutions.  

Congratulations once again to everyone who took part in this event and a big thank you for the organising team and Katharine Krieger for inviting me.

And I'm especially happy that on Track J, "Combating Misinformation" one of the teams I mentored WON! Very well done Nigel, Adesola, David, Dominic, Michelle, Shahriyar, Yujing!

Together with other mentors I helped the teams to validate and focus the ideas, gave feedback to improve pitch decks and stories. The requests came flying in on dedicated Slack channel, showing what teams, at what channel needed help on what topics.

While I am no expert in African matters - sadly it is currently my least visited contient so far, I was happy to see that my experiences from startup world came handy. And while sharing tips how to rock at 3 min, I was at the same time learning a lot on local realities in various African countries.

Extra bonus: A very pleasant surprise was hearing out new music tunes during Zoom call waiting rooms. I learned about the tunes of Fela Kuti and other African musical gurus.

Try out these tunes on this special Spotify playlist of the event: