The country’s first ever 36-hour-long Smart City Hackathon, jointly initiated by Preneur lab and Grameenphone’s innovation center White Board has begun at GP House in the capital today.

The event was inaugurated by the Honorable Mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation, Annisul Huq. Grameenphone CMO, Yasir Azman, CTO Medhat ELHusseiny, Nick Beresford, Director, UNDP and Khairul Islam, Country Manager of Water Aid were present on the occasion. Smart City Hackathon will end on November 12 after running for straight 36 hours.

Speaking in the occasion the Mayor said, ”Dhaka City has lots of problem and young innovators like you can help us to resolve many of them. It is good to see that private organizations are also coming forward to resolve some of the civic issues.” He thanked Grameenphone and Preneur Lab for taking this initiative.

The youths will try to solve the existing problems of Dhaka City through their innovative thinking at the Smart City Hackathon. Dhaka has a population of 17 million and the rate of population growth is 3.48 %. The idea of smart city is to efficiently manage the resources of a city and improve the quality of life for its residents through utilizing information technology. The objective of this hackathon is to identify talents and provide them proper guidance and resources so that they can turn their ideas into reality and use those projects in the development of the country. This Smart City Hackathon is such a platform that the youths can use to transform their innovative ideas into reality.

Speaking regarding White Board, Grameenphone’ CMO said,” This is an open platform for innovators. Anyone with a good ICT concept can come here and use our resources to implement that idea.”   

Thirty teams are participating in the hackathon with each team comprising of maximum four participants and minimum two participants. Each team will present their innovative thinking through software or hardware throughout the 36 hours. There will be a mentor or consultant for each team who will assist the participants in realizing their concepts. The initiative is open to all. However, each team had to register for the competition and submit their concepts before taking part in the hackathon. Anyone can attend the hackathon free of cost.

Dhaka North City Corporation and ICT Division are strategic partners of this initiative, EEE-Bangladesh Section and OT Council-Europe are knowledge partners, Google Developer Group, User Hub, Women Tech Maker are sales community partners, while Spider Digital (Dubai) is investment partner of the Smart City Hackathon.