Disrupt COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon

We are excited to announce that together with Startup Bootcamp we will be hosting the Disrupt COVID-19 Digital Hackathon. We are inviting startups, entrepreneurs, and innovators to join us as we develop solutions to further advance economic inclusion and build resilience.

We are calling innovators with radical solutions to address key challenges in the informal economy and SMME sector more widely. Through this, startups will be designing new approaches to overhaul state procurement, digitise information systems for ease of access to public information and support, and lastly improve transparency in procurement processes.

To do this we call for startups and innovators with technologies solving for:

1. Process automation for large data sets ensuring data validation and authentication in the procurement proces
2. Processing capabilities that ensure integrity and compliance against existing requirements of procurement date
3. Technology to open up procurement capability by the public sector to allow for rapid onboarding of new suppliers and SMMEs
4. Technologies for ensuring and checking compliance of SMMEs
5. Technologies that can reach the informal sector aiding in compliance checking and data access for other government organisations

We, therefore, invite founders to apply to one of the above challenge areas and present their technologies to combat the impact of COVID-19. We want solutions to ultimately achieve the following:-

1. Include SMMEs in public procurement as part of our response to COVID-19.
2. Drive transparency and best practice in procurement processes
3. Build a database of SMMEs nationwide that reflects information comprehensively
4. Ensure SMME are compliant for public procurement
5. Novel interventions for supporting SMMEs