Fintech Week 2018 Blockchain Hackathon

‘WOMEN AND ENDING WORLD HUNGER”

 

Introduction: 

Welcome to the Decade Of Women #HackQuantum Worldwide Series in London, UK.

The #HackQuantum series is aimed to advance the implementation and financing of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #5 by elevating the financial independence of women worldwide, and engaging women and girls to lead the forefront of realizing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The #HackQuantum series spans across developing and developed countries and combine diverse talent from all over the world into a “pressure cooker” environment to accelerate new and quantum ideas.  The goal of each hackathon is to generate new solutions for the tokenized Quantum Impact (Qi)  - Qi Bond and Qi Women Currency to deploy towards valuing women’s leadership in delivering each of the UN SDGs and an inclusive economy.

Today’s hackathon is focused on utilizing Qi Bond and Qi Women Currency to support  SDG 5 in achieving the solution to SDG 2: Women and Ending World Hunger. When you view the causes and solutions for global hunger, any lens through which you look points back to the “why” focusing on women and gender equity is the most effective and likely the only way we will achieve zero hunger in our lifetime.

Women and girls are the most affected by hunger, making up 60% of the hunger population

Women and girls are the most responsible in stewarding resources. In the areas of the world most affected by hunger, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, women comprise a staggering 80 percent of agricultural food producers  

Women and girls produce a massive multiplier effect dollar for dollar across financial and impact results – enabling resources to go further and accomplish more. When women own land in food insecure regions, crop yields go up on average of 10 percent and often more. 

Women are also proven to dedicate themselves when opportunity affords, to resolve hunger. In developing countries when women receive or come into control of financial and other resources, they reinvest 90 percent into their families nutrition, health and well being, versus an average of 20-30 percent by men.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #5 - Gender Equality

The United Nations has dedicated goal five of their SDGs to “achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.” Gender equality and women’s empowerment is a critical underpinning to achieving the rest of the UN’s SDGs and to accelerating quality of life in developing nations.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #2 - Ending Global Hunger

Hunger is the leading cause of death in the world. Our planet has provided us with tremendous resources, but unequal access and inefficient handling leaves millions of people malnourished. If we promote sustainable agriculture with modern technologies and fair distribution systems, we can sustain the whole world’s population and make sure that nobody will ever suffer from hunger again. The eight targets to eradicate world hunger are :

SUSTAINABLE FOOD PRODUCTION AND RESILIENT AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality.	DOUBLE THE PRODUCTIVITY AND INCOMES OF SMALL-SCALE FOOD PRODUCERS By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment.
END ALL FORMS OF MALNUTRITION By 2030, end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age, and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons.	UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO SAFE AND NUTRITIOUS FOOD By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular, the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.
MAINTAIN THE GENETIC DIVERSITY IN FOOD PRODUCTION By 2020, maintain the genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants and farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at the national, regional and international levels, and promote access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, as internationally agreed.	INVEST IN RURAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY AND GENE BANKS Increase investment, including through enhanced international cooperation, in rural infrastructure, agricultural research and extension services, technology development and plant and livestock gene banks in order to enhance agricultural productive capacity in developing countries, in particular, least developed countries.
PREVENT AGRICULTURAL TRADE RESTRICTIONS, MARKET DISTORTIONS AND EXPORT SUBSIDIES Correct and prevent trade restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets, including through the parallel elimination of all forms of agricultural export subsidies and all export measures with equivalent effect, in accordance with the mandate of the Doha Development Round.	ENSURE STABLE FOOD COMMODITY MARKETS AND TIMELY ACCESS TO INFORMATION Adopt measures to ensure the proper functioning of food commodity markets and their derivatives and facilitate timely access to market information, including on food reserves, in order to help limit extreme food price.

The Challenge

The Decade Of Women is committed to SDG 5 and utilizing frontier technology to find solutions paths forward in delivering all 17 UN SDGs. By levering the best of the blockchain, smart contracts, and digital exchange assets, your team is to come up with a solution that exponentiates paradigm-changing impact and delivers last mile solutions to ending global hunger. To meet SDG 2 by 2030 and achieve the level of course correction needed,  we are seeking exponential impact with the solutions from this hackathon –  "moonshot" level of impact, which sets the minimum bar for 10X change beyond what was the benchmark prior for all key elements of your results.

This is not a traditional hackathon – this is a “Quantum Impact Accelerator” because we're challenging teams to create more than just code.   The scope of the challenge includes early-stage ideas for a Blockchain solution, innovative business model and a timeline for scaling and sustained development.

The Decade Of  Women is committed to achieving the sustainable development goals and believe that you hold the key to discovering innovative solutions to these pressing problems. 

Work with your team on a scalable solution for the problems of: 

‘WOMEN AND GLOBAL HUNGER”

The teams will be judged on the following weighted criteria:

Originality
Innovation
Impact
Scalable impact of idea
Ideas that support cross-silo, cross-industry collaboration
Points awarded to teams who contain a woman/multiple women

Prizes

Prize Money : We are offering prize money to 2 winners of the hackathon

Advisory Services: The winning teams will also receive a full suite of Business Development Training, in addition to cash prizes.

Publicity: Winners and all projects will be promoted through Decade Of Women social media channels, coalition members' networks, and more.

Opportunity: Winners  will have the opportunity to showcase their solutions in front of impact investors, NGO’s, philanthropists, charities, and enterprise executives at London Fintech Week.

Commitment - If the winning innovation is truly paradigm changing - Decade Of Women and our partners are willing to support the solution substantially further including financial input and partnership support to bring the innovation to full scale and global application.

Hackathon Sponsors

The #HackQuantum Worldwide Series is created by the partnership between 5th Element Group and its global campaign and network, Decade Of Women, along with Fintech Worldwide and Abt Associates, who are together seeking to leverage their platforms to advance gender equity through frontier technologies and decentralized action and believe the greatest ideas are made through our collective efforts.

About Decade Of Women
Launched on International Women’s Day on March 8, 2018, the Decade Of Women is a worldwide solutions campaign created to celebrate, unite and exponentiate sustained action to foster bold financial commitments to fully advance the gender equity revolution and fulfill the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #5. The campaign is distinct in focusing on levering the vital power of frontier technologies across blockchain and digital assets to at last achieve economic engagement and financial independence of all women. This will require the unlocking of capital to allow frontier technologies to scale. The laser sharp focus is on actionable, large-scale initiatives to harness the power of exponential new technology to advance the Decade Of Women.

We've been running this hackathon series for 4 years. Previous sponsors have included, Lloyds Banking Group, Thomson Reuters, IBM, Bank of Papua New Guinea and ABT Associates.

We had over 700 registrations for our London hackathon in January. Previous winning ideas including IDbox and GovBlocks have been piloted by sponsors and have become startups in their own right. 

Once again, we're at Cocoon Networks in Moorgate. It should be a great experience as usual. 

Get Involved:

The winning teams will receive £2500 cash and present their concepts to the audience at the 5th Annual London Fintech Week to a room of 500-700 delegates. 

Click here for more information on London Fintech Week 2018.

Schedule: (THIS IS NOT AN OVERNIGHT EVENT)

Friday July 6th: Kick-off

18:00 Doors open
19:00 Kick off + warm-up
19:30 API Presentations
20:00 Fire pitches of ideas
20:30 Ideas Speed-Dating
21:00 Drinks / Nibbles 
22:00 End of Day 1

Saturday July 7th: Coding

9:00 Breakfast
10:00 Stand-up
13:00 Lunch
14:00 API Workshops
20:00 Dinner
21:00 Relaxation
22:00 End of Day 2

Sunday July 8th: Demo Day

9:00 Breakfast
10:00 Stand-up + Pitch Training
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Hacking ends
15:30 Demos
18:00 Award ceremony
19:30 Cocktail + End of day 3

 Rules:

Teams are limited to 3-5 participants. 

All projects submitted must be partially coded during the event. The use of open-source code and APIs are exempt from this coditioned.

Teams are to present the projects they registered at the begining of the event. Any deviation must be approved by the organizers.

Be respectful - Any behavior or presentation that objectifies or belittles others will be halted, with the presenters immediately disqualified and removed from the event. 

Above all - Have fun!