Across Africa, startups and SMEs are solving critical challenges in sectors like health, education, agriculture, and finance. Yet many of these businesses struggle to achieve sustainable growth—not because of weak solutions, but because of limited market access, visibility, and customer reach.

Developers have a unique opportunity to bridge this gap. By leveraging technology, APIs, and creative problem-solving, developers can design tools that help businesses market effectively, access new customers, and scale operations.

The Marketing and Growth Solutions Hackathon, powered by Africa’s Talking, is a launchpad for developers to create these solutions. It brings together brilliant minds in coding, product design, business, and growth strategy to co-create innovations that directly tackle the marketing and growth challenges businesses face today.

Addressable Problems in Marketing

Participants will ideate and build solutions that address one or more of the following:

1. Customer Acquisition & Retention: Tools that help businesses attract, engage, and retain customers.
2. Market Access Platforms: Solutions that connect SMEs to wider audiences and enable cross-market opportunities.
3. Communication & Engagement: Innovative use of SMS, voice, chat, and other tools to strengthen customer interaction.
4. Growth Analytics: Dashboards and insights that help businesses understand performance and optimize growth.
5. Payment & Revenue Models: Seamless integrations that enable businesses to monetize effectively.

Objectives 

• Innovation for Growth – To inspire and enable developers to build solutions that enhance visibility, access, and sustainable growth for African businesses. 
• Ecosystem Collaboration – To create a collaborative space for developers, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem enablers to connect and co-innovate. 
• Talent Empowerment – To showcase developer talent and highlight their role in driving economic growth and market expansion. 
• Sustainability Beyond the Hackathon – To identify promising solutions that can be refined, incubated, or scaled in partnership with Africa’s Talking and ecosystem partners. 
• Hands-On Experience – To provide developers with practical exposure to building with Africa’s Talking APIs and other growth-enabling technologies.

Target Attendees

• Developers & Engineers: With experience in mobile/web development, APIs, or scalable platforms.

• Startup Founders & Growth Marketers 

• AI/ML & Data Scientists: Experts building analytics and adaptive learning models.

• Students & Learners: With a passion for technology and growth solutios.

• Business Analysts & Data Enthusiasts

• Ecosystem Supporters (investors, hubs, accelerators)

• UX/UI Designers

Why Participate?

• Access to Tools & APIs: Leverage Africa’s Talking APIs and SDKs to build scalable education solutions.

• Mentorship & Workshops: Learn from seasoned professionals and EdTech experts.

• Collaborative Innovation: Team up across disciplines to bring ideas to life.

• Cash Prizes & Recognition: Win exciting rewards and showcase your innovation.

• Make a Real-World Impact: Build solutions that transform education in Africa.

The winning solution will receive cash prizes as follows:

1. Winner - ₦80 (Join Marketplace Program)

2. 1st Runners Up - ₦60

3. 2nd Runners Up - ₦40

Africa's Talking powers communications solutions across Africa with simplified access to telco infrastructure, developers use our powerful SMS, USSD, Voice, Chat, Airtime and Mobile Data, to bring their ideas to life, as they build and sustain scalable businesses.

Agenda:

1. Warm-Up

• Introductions

• Form teams where need be.

• Feedback

• Feature requests

2. Building/hacking: Code in GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket and deploy in Docker/Automated CI/Travis CI/Bamboo

Note: This section needs additional setup.

Upon commit, the repository is built and deployed to an accessible web server or an S3 bucket.

3. Demonstration and Wrap-up

• Teams or individuals will demo what they have hacked for feedback or adoption.

Note: Carry a laptop

Opportunities:

• Network

• Innovate

• Access to our Talent bench (You can get a job or a gig on the spot)

New to Africa's Talking? Get started here.

Publish on Africa's Talking Marketplace

Marketplace : Get Call Back as a Service and Publish your plugin/app for our customer.

Developer Documentation (We welcome feedback)

New to Africa's Talking? Get started here.

Gigs:

We would love to reach out to you so that you can build for our customers, please fill out this form with details to ensure we have your details:

GIG/HACK DEVELOPER PORTFOLIO FORM

Join community channels:

Slack:

• Join Africa's Talking slack community here

Please follow our Twitter handles to:

• @AfricasTalking

• @ElarianHQ

You can get our videos, recaps, and event interviews on our youtube channels, subscribe to get updates:

• Africa's Talking Youtube Channel

Africa's Talking community allows developers to learn skills for the modern-day African Developer. We are language and framework agnostic. All developers are welcome. This is where Africa's Talking developers community meets to build, learn and exchange knowledge.

We are helping software developers and businesses to bring their ideas to life through easy-to-use APIs easily.

Would you like to partner with us? Kindly contact the Developer Experience Team.