UN SDG Action Campaign

Nigerians Hack4Good: Next Generation MY World 2030 global solutions

Nigeria is set once again to take the MY World survey to the next level

Abuja, Nigeria February 5-7, 2018

Between 2013-15 Nigerians collected 2.7 million votes in the MY World 2015 Survey setting a global standard for public engagement. The collected responses allowed the Government of Nigeria hear the concerns of citizens and place them at the heart of decision-making process about the 2030 Agenda. This March MY World 2030 is set to launch once again across the country aiming to mobilize millions of citizens to have their say on the country’s development priorities.

In a previous survey conducted, millions of paper ballots were shipped across Nigeria and hundreds of people then helped transcribe responses to the database. Despite the tremendous results achieved, the process required money, time and human resources which could be better spent. To do things better this time, we challenged Nigerian talents and developers to harness technology to build a next generation MY World 2030 global solution.

On February 5-7 2018, the SDG Action Campaign and the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on SDGs partnered with Civic Innovation Lab to host a hackathon. Our challenge for the participants was to have developed a prototype to support response collection and data management of the MY World 2030 survey. Developers came from across Nigeria to the 3-day event in Abuja, where participants learned about the SDGs and 10 teams pitched their solutions to judges.

“I am really passionate about the UN from a very young age and I have always wanted to work with them. Being here in this social space which creates such a collaborative environment is such a blessing. I can’t wait to see what we come up with and to work hard for solutions that can be used around the world to be inclusive. For women, for children, for disabled. Even across language barriers” Ikuromor Ogiriki, Hackathon participant

Three winning solutions were selected for a second round. The teams were given the task to continue to build and develop their prototypes to compete for a final prize of N100,000,000 (one million naira). After, the winning solution will be deployed in the national roll out across Nigeria and thereafter globally.

Congratulations to the three teams who were the selected winners of the first round!

Get to know our winning teams and their solutions below.

Team A

Perewari Pere – Team Leader and Lead Prototyper
Richard Igbiriki – Lead Developer
Ikuromor Ogiriki – Lead Designer
Adaka Iguniwei – Software Developer

Team A developed a prototype of an app that would enable the direct upload of survey responses into the app allowing the surveyor to work both online and offline. When online, responses are immediately sent to the database after a session is completed. When offline, responses are automatically saved in the device and can easily be uploaded to the online database with one click once connected to internet.

For paper ballots the team developed a prototype of a tool for scanning and a text recognition using Google CloudVision. The tool would enable that texts are automatically extracted and categorized under each survey question and then uploaded to the online database.

Team B

Chidi Stephen, Lead Developer
Vivian Egeruo, Developer
Daniel Nduka, Designer

Team B developed a prototype of an application which would collect user response from questionnaires using USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). The application works by collecting user response from questionnaires using USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). USSD is a Global System for Mobile(GSM) communication technology that is used to send text between a mobile phone and an application program in the network. Example *556# to check balance on a service provider Network. When the USSD is created on a service provider platform, users will be able to interact with contents (questionnaires) uploaded by the admin on such platforms by entering the specified USSD and interacting with the response. The responses collated is then sent to a central storage area

TEAM C

Olabosinde Oladipo (Software Engineer)
Akinniranye James (Software Engineer)

Team C created three separate solutions to address issues identified in the current process. The suggested solutions were: 1. Scanning backlog of paper surveys with an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System to eliminate the manual data entry. 2. Use online means like a progressive web app and Twitter Polls to reach out to more demographics. 3. Develop a mobile app that could be used by surveyor and the public to both collect responses and send results to the central database. The app would work offline while leveraging the coverage and reliability of SMS to push time-critical data to the central database from remote places.

About

Hack4Good is a civic and youth participation program of the Civic Innovation lab that encourages the youth to develop innovative solutions to pressing problems in our society.

The Judges

Mr Muyiwa Ibrahim – Data Scientist. • Mr Adepegba Oduntan – Oracle Strategic Initiative Specialist • Mr Bolaji – Technology Advisor, Civic Innovation Lab • Laura Hildebrandt – UN SDG Action Campaign • Gayan Peiris – UN SDG Action Campaign

The United Nations launches hacking challenge to bring Nigerian voices to decision-makers

Hackathon to be held from 5-7 February 2018 will award 1 million naira to winner team

BONN, Germany, January 31st, 2018 – The United Nations SDG Action Campaign, in collaboration with Civic Innovation Lab, is calling on Nigeria’s best software skills to contribute to citizens’ engagement with the SDGs and bring the voices of Nigerians to the Government and the United Nations.

“The SDGs are a new way of thinking and doing. They provide guidelines for how we can, and need, to do things more creatively, more effectively, and more inclusively. Nigerian developers and the innovation community have invested in helping their communities thrive and we want to provide the opportunity to transfer this innovative thinking into action for good, to solve the most important problems that we are facing right now. It is very exciting to bring this program to Nigeria for the first time, and we are convinced the results will have a tremendous impact locally and globally,” said Mitchell Toomey, Director of the UN SDG Action Campaign.

A hackathon to be held from 5-7 February 2018 in Abuja will bring together top innovative minds to design a tool, app or system to enable a more efficient roll out of the MY World survey across the country.

MY World is the UN survey that educates and mobilizes citizens on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and allows them to share their perception of progress made in their countries and regions on those goals of most immediate concern to them in the past 12 months. Through this data collection, the UN aims to create space for every citizen in the world to participate in the discussions and send strong messages to world leaders on what needs to be done to solve today’s most pressing challenges.

“Nigeria is fully committed to faithfully implementing the SDGs and ensuring that no Nigerian is left behind. In spite of the current economic realities, Nigeria has continued to commit funds to the SDGs to devise effective means of ensuring the SDGs are promoted and owned by peoples of the world”, affirmed Princess Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, Presidential Adviser on the SDGs, Government of Nigeria.

The winner of the hackathon will receive One Million Naira and a 3 months’ Community membership at the Civic Innovation Lab to develop the tool that will be used in the roll out of the survey across Nigeria and around the world. Participants can apply through the online application, open until February 1st, 2018.

“Engaging social innovators in tech to take action for the SDGs is key to achieving these Goals. Our collaboration with the UN SDG Action Campaign will enable the Nigerian community of designers, social innovators and entrepreneurs to collaborate effectively in addressing the country’s needs and join the global community of change-makers who are tackling the world’s biggest challenges”, said Adaeze Sokan, Director, Civic Innovation Lab.

ABOUT THE UN SDG ACTION CAMPAIGN

The UN SDG Action Campaign is a special initiative of the UN-Secretary General, administered by the UNDP to create awareness about the 2030 Agenda, empower and inspire people across the world to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while generating political will, and help make the Goals attainable by 2030.

https://www2.sdgactioncampaign.org/

ABOUT MY WORLD 2030

MY World is the UN survey that asks citizens if they are aware of the Sustainable Development Goals, which six of the 17 Global Goals are of immediate concern to them and if the situation of these has got better, stayed the same or got worse over the past 12 months.

https://myworld2030.org/

ABOUT OSSAP-SDGS

The Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on the SDGs (OSSAP-SDGs) was established by the President of Nigeria with a mandate to coordinate national mobilisation, integration, implementation and reporting of the SDGs across levels of government. It also has the mandate to promote partnership and mobilise resources for the SDGs, working with multi-stakeholders including the private sector, civil society and international development partners. In 2017, the OSSAP-SDGs entered into a multi-year partnership agreement with the United Nations SDG Action Campaign.

http://sdgs.gov.ng/

ABOUT CIVIC INNOVATION LAB

Civic Innovation Lab is a social innovation hub focused on harnessing Creativity, Innovation, and Technology to solve our most pressing civic and government issues. We support technology solutions that enhance efficiency and effectiveness in public sector institutions as well as quality of life.

http://civicilab.com/

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Marta Rojas| UN SDG Action Campaign | marta.rojas@undp.org

Priscila Jordão| UN SDG Action Campaign priscila@sdgactioncampaign.org

Mitchell Toomey: “Youth power can lead the way towards the SDGs and the ambitions of countries all over the world”

Source: African Newspage/January 10, 2018

Mitchell Toomey is the global director of the United Nations SDG Action Campaign, a special initiative of the UN Secretary-General administered by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), mandated to support the UN system-wide and the Member States on advocacy and public engagement in implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

How important are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to Africa, in terms of achieving sustainable development in the region?

I think the Sustainable Development Goals are everyone’s responsibility and Africa deserves to achieve the SDGs just like other regions deserve to do so; we had the MDGs and countries like Nigeria were an incredible success in rallying people around some specific goals.

Moreover, the SDGs represent a much more ambitious agenda; they are not just about people’s survival but actually about ensuring people thrive. So, Nigeria is an obvious leader in Africa and with such a large youth population and potential we want to make sure the SDGs work here so that Nigeria can lead other countries in Africa.

We are already 2 years into the implementation of the SDGs, how has Africa fared in terms of achieving the goals?

Well, I think every country is different, every country has their own development plans and one thing we have learnt is that you can’t just bring something new and expect everyone to enforce it immediately; already there is the Africa Agenda 2063, which is a very important agenda that came before the SDGs. So, we have to be humble enough to understand that people already have their own plans.

Two years on, we are very happy to see how governments have taken them very seriously; they have set up departments and commissions to make sure there is some accountability in the implementation of the SDGs. Many countries have come to New York to talk about their action plans and what they want to do. However, two years on we can say the goals are still in their very early days.

The next few years will really determine how much progress we will see in terms of implementation of the goals. So, in 2019 the heads of state of all countries will gather again in New York to review the progress we have achieved in 4 years – it will be an incredibly important period. Therefore, we are confident that by then many countries would have achieved some of the progress necessary for the success of the goals.

Two key sectors of the world’s population i.e women and youth are very vital to the success of global development frameworks like the SDGs. How do you think given women and youth the opportunity to key into the implementation of the Global Goals will aid the successful realization of the goals?

Well, one reason the youth are such a focus of the goals is that the youth themselves helped designed the goals; when we were deciding what the goals would be we challenged young people from around the world to help us decide what the goals would be and they responded in amazing ways: by telling us what was happening in their communities and hence what the goals should be.

As such, most of the goals are youth-centered which means the youth can relate to them; we make sure that the icons are very friendly and easy to understand so that even children can understand these goals.

The reason is we are in a period of tremendous change in the world and young people are the future; the ability to access information, find networks of people, and learn new things using digital tools are what matters. It is a much different world than it used to be and young people are the ones who understand it best so we need to follow their lead in making these goals a reality.

And women have always played a very critical role in society even though sometimes such a role is marginalized outside of the traditional economies but we believe by giving everyone in the society the opportunity to participate we will achieve explosive growth which will lead to development in all countries.

Agenda 2030 is a very ambitious development framework that hopes to change the face of the world particularly here in Africa, around gender, education, governance, and public health. Where do you hope to see Africa by the year 2030 in terms of achieving these goals?

It is hard to generalize for Africa as different countries are at different starting points; different countries are progressing in different ways. We have to be very honest that different countries will progress in different ways.

Imagine how much the world has changed in the last 15 years, imagine all the things we never dreamed we could do like standing here and having this conversation with you and getting it out on the internet for everyone to see, we just would not even have thought it would be possible. So, I think if anything the goals aren’t ambitious enough to match the ambitions of young people around the world.

This article is culled from African Newspage – a digital newspaper for development reporting. View the original piece on their website.

MY World reaches 5 MILLION votes – The Celebration!

September 25, 2014, NEW YORK

Blog by Caya Johnson, Global Youth Advocate

THANKS A (FIVE) MILLION TO ALL MY WORLD PARTNERS!

If you were unable to attend, please enjoy the web-stream and picture album of the celebration

The evening of 25th of September during the UN General Assembly week brought together MY World friends from far and near, in person and via live web-stream – and these MY World friends had 5 million reasons to celebrate!

The hard work of dedicated MY World partners brought the voices of 5 MILLION PEOPLE from 194 countries into the United Nations. MY World has had very extensive support from a range of partners, over 700 organizations, including NGOs, heads of state, faith groups and youth movements who are still currently participating in its roll out and this collective achievement provides the perfect backdrop for a MY World Partner Recognition Event and MY World Award Ceremony which took place in New York during the UN General Assembly week.

This global survey, thanks to the dedication and enthusiasm of all is now the largest survey of its kind ever undertaken.

Continue reading “MY World reaches 5 MILLION votes – The Celebration!”

Collecting Offline Votes in Makoko, Nigeria

This is a guest Blog written by: Francis C. Anyaegbu, Africa Region Representative, UN-HABITAT Youth Advisory Board. Follow him on Twitter: @francisanyaegbu

During the 5-11 May MY World Global Week of Action, UNHABITAT, Youth Pioneers For Development, and various Youth Groups teamed up to collect votes in Makoko, a slum in Lagos, Nigeria. We decided to adopt the three suggestions for engagement suggested in the toolkit:

Drive online voting
Joined the MY World Thunderclap
Driving the offline voting

Our motivation for choosing Makoko community was drawn from our recognition of the neigbourhood as a slum with lots of residents from disadvantaged backgrounds whose voices needed to be heard. The population of residents according to Wikipedia is estimated to be over 80,000 and interestingly this demography was not enumerated in Nigeria’s last census exercise in 2007. We are also aware that in most cases, like other major slums in Lagos most of them usually do not have their voices captured in developmental initiatives.

For the school, we felt it was important to also capture the voices of students to enrich the survey.

We were only able to collect about 103 offline votes out of which about nearly as 40 votes came from the Residents of Makoko slum neigbourhood while the remaining came from Students of Yaba College of Technology, a institution of higher learning about 20 minutes away from the Community and 5 minutes away from the University of Lagos. One of the reasons we were not able to get much votes as anticipated from Makoko was because of general apathy for surveys. Resident of the slum settlement were concerned about any adverse effects that may ensue from the collation of the survey. But we were only able to allay the fears of a few with the kind assistance of the community Youth leader.

For Makoko, we recorded significant votes for “Better job opportunities,” “Better health care,” “A good education “as well as access to clean water and sanitation.

For more information:

MY World Data on Nigeria,
MY World Data on Youth Pioneers for Development Organization
World We Want 2015 – Nigeria

Continue reading “Collecting Offline Votes in Makoko, Nigeria”

Nigerian National Youth Corps finish inputting 150,000 offline votes for the MY World survey!

Members of the Nigerian National Youth Corps are in the final days of tallying votes of a representative offline survey, which heard from more than 150,000 citizens across the country. With nearly 110,000 votes already counted, healthcare is leading the way among Nigerian voters, followed closely by education and governance as the next most important issues.

Corinne Woods, Director, UN Millennium Campaign, spoke on the outstanding work that took place by saying “This survey shows how important it is for the decision makers, who will define the next global agenda, to hear from the people on the priorities that most affect them.”

The simple survey which asked citizens to choose their top six priorities out of a possible 16 choices, from issues such as climate change, equality between women and men, affordable food, better roads and transportation, and more.

Continue reading “Nigerian National Youth Corps finish inputting 150,000 offline votes for the MY World survey!”