Hackathons as a Support Tool for the AU-EU Partnership JAES: A Case Study

The Africa-EU partnership’sHackathons, Africa-EU Partnership sustainable development objectives for Sub-Saharan AfricaAfrica-EU partnership, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are frequently revised due to unforeseen events that shift the path toward the agreed fixed timeline. Due to the diversity and volatility of the SSA environment, each nation must address a unique set of needs while also contending with unforeseeable occurrences that might dramatically change their path to attaining sustainable development by a specific date. With this alternation comes the need for European Union (EU) and African financial organizations to redirect official development assistance (ODA) to fund the newly revised sustainable development areas for SSA. With the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19 escalating pre-existing economic, environmental, and sociological difficulties, there is an urgent need to bring SSA nations “back on track” to meet the agreed-upon sustainable developmentSustainable development, hackathon plan for 2027. While COVID-19 continues to have a worldwide impact, SSA nations continue to be among the most badly afflicted nations due to a lack of infrastructure and scarce resources available to allocate. Therefore, there is a need for rapid innovation that can enhance residents’ current living standards in SSA. Fortunately, hackathons have grown in popularity as a method for fostering innovation processes not just within corporations but also within communities. Currently, the World Bank’s Private Sector Development acknowledges that hackathons provide an “all-society approach” in which “entrepreneurs and governments collaborate to produce better [policies]” in Africa (Laure & Stever, 2019). Sebastian Molineus, the World Bank’s Director of the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation (FCI) Global Practice, emphasizes this issue further. Molineus states that with hackathons, everyone has a “stake in development, and this multifaceted process” provides a great example of African innovation (ibid.). Thus, hackathons are increasingly being used to address development concerns and become a trusted medium for international ODAHackathon ecosystem, Official Developmental Assistance agencies such as the World Bank.