Healthtech solution Guardian Health won the inaugural Best Youth App Award at the MTN Business App of the Year Awards last week.
The Best Youth App category is a new addition to the awards and is meant to recognise the top solutions from MTN’s App Academy launched earlier this year. The academy aims to mentor and train aspiring app developers.
Guardian Health has won five hackathons this year since its inception at ITWeb’s business intelligence datathon in March. Starting off as a maternal health solution, the app has evolved into a platform for patients, paramedics and other healthcare workers, such as hospital
administrators.The patient app allows users to request and track an ambulance, and input relevant medical
history and prescription information, which is then sent through to the paramedic when an ambulance is dispatched. The paramedic app allows the emergency response team to receive the request, accept it, and then find the patient. The management portal enables the allocation of resources.Guardian Health’s developers, data scientists Tino Manhema and Tsitsi Marote, said: “The other projects in our category were amazing; it was a tight competition so it's amazing that we made it. The recognition we’ve received from the awards will help us grow our brand.”
Manhema and Marote have been onboarding users and working closely with a doctor in fine-tuning the app. “The support we’ve received all-round has been great. We’ll use the prize money (R50 000) to cover operational costs and scale.”
The app is still in beta testing, but a launch date is expected to be announced soon.
Marote was also nominated for the Best Women in STEM award.
Also chosen from the App Academy, the Best Breakthrough Developer Award was won by 21-year-old Lesego Finger for his solution Matric Live. The award is given to the developer with the best app from the academy.
Finger, a self-taught coder, developed the app in high school to help fellow learners cope with matric. Matric Live covers 16 school subjects and offers study guides, essay questions, past exam papers and motivational quotes to inspire students. Initially, it cost R10 a month, or R100 a year for theservice, but the fee has since been waived during lockdown.
The app also won Best Educational Solution at last year’s app awards. It is being used by over 500 000 students. One learner on the platform said: “Thanks a lot for this app. I come from a poor village where we have to share textbooks because of the lack of resources. We have no computers so there’s a lack of information, sometimes it’s hard to study. Since I’ve downloaded this app, I have become one of the top learners at school… you saved my future.”
Finger says he plans to expand Matric Live’s scope, supporting students from Grade R all the way to university. He says he’d like to see tech play a leading role in enabling learners to write exams from home. “There must be a way to develop an app that will allow this. Devices now come with cameras and microphones. There are also tools that can flag eye movements, keystrokes and record screens so that the integrity of an online exam can be guaranteed.”
MTN’s App Academy was announced in July. The six-week programme was followed by a hackathon. Speaking at the time, MTN head of enterprise marketing Kholo Magagane said the App of the Year Awards were previously viewed as a “once-off event, but we noticed there’s a bigger part that we can play in ensuring these developers create the digital solutions South Africans need.
“We’re building a pipeline of digital brilliance to ensure local communities and the economy harness the benefits of the digital economy and the fourth industrial revolution.”
With around 600 young developers joining the programme, MTN sees the academy as a development hub that MTN Business will run with regional partners, academic institutions and enterprise clients.