EmpowerHack

EMPOWERHACK

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about

EmpowerHack is a collective that creates sustainable design for women and girls in humanitarian contexts. Bridging the gap between technology, design, and NGOs to address key challenges, EmpowerHack galvanises volunteers to create code that crosses borders.

Despite up to 80% of world’s refugees being women and children, the problems faced by them are never at the forefront. EmpowerHack was born to change just that by taking collaborative design to scale. Female refugees are among the most vulnerable, facing sexual violence, coercion, forced and early marriage, social isolation, and a lack of access to gender-specific health care and education.
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Events

Global Refugee Health Hackathon April 2016

Ghana

1st April

London

8th - 10th April

Amsterdam

22nd - 24th April

EmpowerHack have launched a series of hackathons this month to create open source software solutions on health challenges of refugees women and girls. The hackathons will take place in Ghana, London and Amsterdam over a course of 2-3 day events.

Medical Professionals, Humanitarian Workers, Marketers, Software Developers, User Experience Designers and Researchers will all come together in each city/country in a new kind of hackathon that is focused on inclusive design, sustainability and partnerships.

Contact us at empowerhack@gmail.com if you are interested in hosting one in your city, are an NGO with a challenge, or a technology/hackathon partner with an existing project you want to build on at this event.

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Projects

In just two months, EmpowerHack has created a volunteer-run social impact accelerator to propel projects with clear routes to market, in partnership with NGOs plugged into the wider refugee aid ecosystem. Not only are we accelerating our own projects, we’re helping established projects grow their impact too.

HABABY
is a web app for prenatal, natal, and postnatal care for refugee women. This will have specific country, symptom, and medication information. It will have information in multiple languages with an emphasis on visual communication, an anonymous message board, and the option for live chat with a health care professional as well as offline features.
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HERSTORY
is a collaborative digital storytelling platform, where women and girls can contribute ideas, thoughts and solutions to current GBV issues within a refugee context.
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BREAKING BARRIERS
Refugees seeking work face significant barriers. Breaking Barriers work with refugees to break these barriers down and help them find meaningful employment that is commensurate with their skills, experience and qualifications. By doing so we help their successful settlement in, and integration with, local communities. EmpowerHack is helping Breaking Barriers grow their impact.
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Our other projects from the same event:

Health

HEALTHMATE
is a crowdsourced web app to geotag/locate critical health services based on ailment, focusing on simplicity of use, anonymous data, and simple keywords to allow for easy translations combatting language barriers.
It will cater for user journeys based on reason for use + access to Internet at a particular time using solutions like SMS and photo geolocation metadata for later upload.

Video Demo GitHub

E/MOTION
is a mobile app that invites refugee women to share how they feel daily with their responses being added as coloured elements to a visual map created based on the emotions of all other women in the communities at camps and cities who use the app. They can then explore the map or choose to chat with one other woman they feel more connected to. The software creates a safe space for women to express themselves emotionally and enables them to connect and support each other anonymously. It creates trust in emotional wellbeing by balancing security, service delivery and anonymity for increased safety and better care.

Video Demo GitHub
Presentation

Gender-Based Violence & Prevention

BUILD YOUR OWN GENDER VIOLENCE PREVENTION TOOLKIT
is a website that helps individuals, aidworkers and communities interested in creating safer spaces for refugee women and girls to “build-you-own” toolkit from open resources aggregated from specialists and NGOs around the world that can be be used, adapted, replicated, shared.

Video Demo Presentation

BEACON
is a small bracelet that helps refugee families stay connected. It is a small beacon device, in the form of a bracelet, that is paired with a mobile phone. Once the button on the bracelet is pressed the GPS location is sent via an encrypted SMS to a server that converts it to a address and sends it to the paired mobile device.

Video Demo GitHub

Employment & Education

CODING FOR REFUGEE WOMEN
creates code that crosses borders by helping refugee women learn to code together with other women through an online coding platform, crowdsourcing translations open courseware, and mentorship programs with professionals and leading code schools around the world.

Video Demo GitHub

MARHABA (Welcome)
is a meetup platform and app for women-only meetups for Jordan Refugee Camps to support Volunteer-driven digital and vocational skill training and self-organised skills sharing communities for Syrian girls in camps

Video Demo GitHub
Presentation

LEARN & SHARE
is a platform for skills exchange that changes refugee lives. It connects refugees with each other and to their host community. Users can share skills and offer services for free. This will help to keep them busy, make new connections, hone their skills and increase employability whilst tackling frustration and isolation.

Video Demo GitHub

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