The Nigeria Data Protection Commission, in collaboration with the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, has rewarded winners of the Code4Africa Privacy Hackathon.

They also called for the development of data privacy solutions to enhance data protection in the digital ecosystem.

The hackathon, held during the 17th annual ISACA conference in Abuja on Thursday, brought together students who pitched innovative solutions focused on data privacy and protection.

Being the second edition, the competition was also hosted in partnership with Scratch and Script Ltd, an IT and data privacy company.

Daniel Segun emerged as the overall winner with his Data Guardian application and received a cash prize of N750,000.

Mr Segun expressed delight over his win, saying he was fulfilled to contribute value and happy that such value was being recognised and rewarded.

Other winners were David Adegunse, who developed a Digital Privacy Legacy Manager to help track handsets before the power on the device goes out, and Ogenyi Adams, who created an AI Summariser.

Both received a cash prize of N250,000 each.

Vincent Olatunji, national commissioner of NDPC, stated that the hackathon aimed to enhance the capacity of youths in developing artificial intelligence-driven solutions for data privacy and protection.

Mr Olatunji said the innovations demonstrated how emerging technologies were shaping data privacy. Mr Olatunji commended ISACA for its support and pledged that the NDPC would sustain the collaboration to achieve the socio-economic impact on the country.

Chidera Ike-Okonkwo, project coordinator of the Code4Africa Hackathon, said the competition received over 250 entries, including 10 virtual teams from Kenya, with one of the winning solutions emerging from a Kenyan university.

Mr Ike-Okonkwo said they would create more awareness on the innovations to attract support for incubation, internships, and opportunities to scale up the solutions.

“We are happy that one of the winners emerged from Kenya, and we are going to give these solutions a lot of publicity. We want to solicit support that can help them grow their ideas into real-world solutions,” she said.

Mr Ike-Okonkwo also said that subsequent editions of the hackathon would be expanded to include more African countries.

(NAN)