Cape Town Sanitation Hackathon

Young IT professionals, with the help of sanitation experts will go for an intensive brainstorming and programming marathon session to develop innovative IT applications to tackle the poverty in Bangladesh.
More than 150 participants, mostly IT experts and university students have already registered to participate in the two-day Sanitation Hackathon from November 30, 2012 at the Ruposhi Bangla hotel in Dhaka.
The event is being organised by Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank.
This intensive coding marathon is aimed at finding innovative IT solutions to address the lack of access to basic sanitation by 2.6 billion people in the world. The Sanitation Hackathon follows last year’s Water Hackathon which was organised by the World Bank.
The overall goal of the Sanitation Hackathon is to form a community of IT professionals and sanitation experts that will collaborate in future to address challenges in the sanitation sector.
Lack of access to basic sanitation causes the death of approximately 4,000 children a day and billions of dollars in economic losses. Using new technology like data maps, mobile games, SMS services, crowd sourcing and opening up data can also help to solve various other development problems.
Registration form and details are available at its website www.hackathonbd.com.
The Sanitation Hackathon will take place simultaneously on the same weekend in Lahore, Jakarta, Cape Town, Dakar, Lima, Manila, Dar es Salaam, Pune, various locations in North America, Hartford, Helsinki and London.