
Sep 26, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM (UTC)
Africa’s Talking Open Community | West Africa Hub
Telecom is the backbone of African digital life. This hackathon challenges builders to create subscriber-facing and operator-grade tools for self-service, top-ups, support, and onboarding, using the same telco rails that power Africa’s Talking.
17 RSVPs
Telecom is the backbone of African digital life. This hackathon challenges builders to create subscriber-facing and operator-grade tools for self-service, top-ups, support, and onboarding, using the same telco rails that power Africa’s Talking.
Telcos are the backbone of African digital life, serving enormous, mostly prepaid subscriber bases who interact through USSD menus, SMS, and airtime far more than through data. Customer care, self-service, and value-added services are constant battlegrounds for loyalty.
Participants can build self-service flows, balance and bundle management, value-added services, network-fault reporting, and subscriber engagement. The brief invites fresh thinking on how a subscriber experiences their operator, on any phone, in any language.

Objectives
Deliver subscriber self-service on any handset.

Developer Documentation (We welcome feedback)
The winning solution will receive cash prizes as follows:

Africa's Talking powers communications solutions across Africa with simplified access to telco infrastructure, developers use our powerful SMS, USSD, Voice, Airtime, and Mobile Data APIs to bring their ideas to life, as they build and sustain scalable businesses.
Winning the hackathon is just the start. Turn your build into a packaged, reusable product that any business on the Africa’s Talking Marketplace can subscribe to and deploy as their own running instance.
A marketplace-ready solution isn’t just a working app. It’s a packaged, reusable, deployable product. Think of it less as “my project” and more as “a plugin other businesses can pay to deploy.” To qualify, your submission should meet the following:
In short: if a stranger could find your plugin, pick a pricing plan, click Deploy, and get a live working instance, then it’s marketplace-ready.
1. Warm-Up
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
Opportunities:
4. Publish on the Marketplace: publish your solution on the Africa’s Talking Marketplace to be considered a winner.
Hackathon idea submission form (This form should be filled by all hackathon attendees planning to present it will be used to reach out to them later)
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:
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.
Africas Talking
Community Lead
Africa's Talking Community Lead
Software Engineer
Stonetech Innovation Hub
Head of Startups
Soft School
Co-founder & Product Designer
Quantum Heart & Droneforge
MD & Co-founder
iT Central
CEO & Founder
Saturday, September 26, 2026
9:00 AM – 3:00 PM (UTC)
| 9:00 AM | Warm-Up |
| 9:30 AM | Building/Hacking |
| 1:00 PM | Lunch |
| 2:00 PM | Demonstration and Wrap-Up |
Community Lead Kaduna, Nigeria 🇳🇬
Africa's Talking
Community Lead Ghana 🇬🇭
Software Developer/Community Manager
Abuja Community Co-Lead
Community Lead Kano
Abuja Community Co-Lead
Gambia Community Lead
YeleGroup
Ivory Coast Community Lead
Community Lead Lagos, Nigeria
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