The top prize of 10,000 euros in the BMZ-funded competition for digital media start-ups went to “Ineffable Art & Culture”, an Algerian cultural exchange platform. In addition, out of more than 50 teams, a Tunisian fact-checking website and a podcast platform as well as a Moroccan online health project were awarded 3,000 euros each. The competition was launched by DW Akademie in cooperation with the Tunisian NGO Al Khatt. 

South Africa was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. To support the government, Volkswagen (VW) transformed an empty production hall into a field hospital for up to 1,450 COVID-19 patients. BMZ is funding the project with a total of 5.2 million euros. The idea originated in the Strategic Partnership Technology in Africa (SPTA) and is a part of the BMZ’s develoPPP.de special COVID-19 Response Programme.

Although important digital innovations have already emerged in many developing and emerging countries, their potential is not fully exploited yet. Commissioned by BMZ, Innovation Factory supports start-ups that contribute to solving social and ecological challenges through local digital innovations in Mexico, Ethiopia, Senegal, Ghana and Indonesia. Twelve winning teams emerged out of the latest accelerator programme.

The population growth in African cities has led to a diversification and increase in transport needs. The Africa Transformative Mobility Accelerator supports eight start-ups from Kenya and Uganda to implement and accelerate their mobility solutions. In line with the needs of the population, these approaches combine solutions to mobility challenges with digital concepts and methods.

“Open for Good – Inclusive AI Commons with Localized Data” was officially launched on 25 November, 2020, together with FAIR Forward and other partners. The alliance shares a commitment to openly available non-discriminatory training data for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in Africa, Asia and beyond. “Open for Good” thus contributes to the development of locally adapted digital solutions and strengthens the local private-sector.

BMZ and the Mozilla Foundation are working together to achieve AI for all. To this end, voice recordings in African languages are being collected and made openly available through the FAIR Forward initiative. Together with the Rwandan organization Digital Umuganda, 1,200 hours of voice data have already been recorded in the local language Kinyarwanda. This data offers local developers the opportunity to develop solutions with an open and free infrastructure.

Atingi hosted the pan-African knowledge tournament “Contest Against Corona” online from 23 November to 11 December 2020 to strengthen health knowledge about the virus. Roughly 110,000 people answered a total of almost 1,000,000 questions on relevant topics such as the One Health approach and fake news. The quiz game was developed by international health experts, epidemiologists and doctors.

In November 2020, the digital platform Yoma was launched with UNICEF, Goodwall and other partners. Yoma enables young people to acquire soft skills relevant to the labour market, which allow them to shape their professional careers in a self-determined way. To date, more than 250,000 young people took advantage of the offer. For atingi, this is the successful piloting of its new learning-by-doing approach. 

As part of its strategic focus on digital health, WHO has both developed the SCORE Toolkit for digitised health data and published the Digital Health Platform Handbook together with the ITU.

The ITU report provides an insight into the state of digital development worldwide and shows that the gap between broadband coverage of urban areas and that of rural areas remained a concern in 2020.