By NDUMBE BELL GASTON
MTN Cameroon has rewarded the best start-ups with prizes after the closure of the Cameroonian edition of what they call the MoMo Developer Hackathon (MDH) Challenge 2019, started in October 2019.
Start-up projects like College Plan driven by Takwi Gisele and FonkamLoïc of the University of Buea who are said to have ranked first has as objective to help young people better control their spending after combining their innovative application with an MTN mobile money account.
The other two projects that ranked second and third were the Teledocta and lightpay aimed at remote medical consultations and services and shopping respectively.
During the presentation of winners last January 23, 2020 in Douala, The SUN learnt that the M.D.H. Challenge attracted 200 participants out of which produced eight runners-up and later, three final winners, in descending order of superiority, who were rewarded with 1,500 US dollars for the third, 2000 U.S dollars for the second and up to 2 500 US dollars for the first.
In collaboration with MTN Cameroon, these winners have had 100% sponsorship by the Ericsson innovation laboratory in Sweden where College Plan start-ups will join other competitors of same MoMo Developer Hackathon Challenge 2019, from Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Uganda and Zambia.
It is expected to be seen how this joint initiative of MTN Group and Ericsson will enable developers and entrepreneurs to use their imaginations and computer language know-how to propose projects to use what technicians call Application Programming Interfaces (API), to capacitate lives of MoMo users.
According to Marie Rose Daya, president of the jury comprising MTN Cameroon, Ericsson and ActiveSpace, “the impact of such projects for Fintech is huge and I have no doubt that they will have a bold effect on our ecosystem”.
Chief Marketing Officer MTN Cameroon, Patrick Attoungbre believes that “the initiative is to accelerate financial inclusion and the digitisation of payments which many of them did brilliantly”.