Student teams from Alliance Girls, French school, Mang’u and MaryHill Girls were last week feted for their innovative projects during the Hack Ton Futur (Hack Your Future) French tech event.
In its first edition, the event had 40 projects presented by students from 10 different schools within Nairobi and its environs.
Hosted by La French Tech Nairobi at the Alliance Française, the hackathon is purely made for high schoolers with an aim to foster and nurture tech entrepreneurship among young people.
French School of Nairobi (Lycée Français Denis Diderot) emerged positions one and three with two projects called Agrineighbour that focuses on connecting pastoralists to landowners and Gold Maker that focuses on matching crops to soil using AI sensors.
MaryHill Girls emerged position two with their hydroponic systems for Kenya’s smallholder farmers project.
Alliance Girls was placed in fourth position with a project called anti-aflatoxin that is focused on detecting aflatoxins in plants and seeds.
Mang’u High tied with Alliance at position four with a project termed MS 6500 Rover, which is a tool designed to diagnose crop diseases, test soil and send data to the user.
Speaking during the event, La French Tech Nairobi president Loïc Ballaster said the topic of main focus for the maiden event was agriculture.
He said the industry felt like the perfect place to focus on as it is very relevant for Kenya and the East Africa region.
“For future events, we can focus on other topics such as education or even health tech or even fintech,” Ballaster said.
He said the reason they focused on high schoolers for the first edition was because they wanted to move away from the same old way of involving already established entrepreneurs and giving teens a chance to grow innovatively.
“We wanted to make them believe that they can also come up with an idea, work on a project, lead and present it to a team of experts for partnership, funding and any other kind of support,” he continued.
La French Tech Nairobi team visited different schools where they presented them with the idea for the hackathon and when the schools agreed to take part, they would be presented with the agenda for the competition.
Each team from the different schools would then be paired with a mentor for coaching sessions for a duration of one month, every single week.
Hack Ton Futur began in Casablanca, Morocco, where Ballaster said they have successfully completed two editions and have exported to Istanbul, Turkey.
