Lesotho Public Financial Management Hackathon

Registration closed on 21 December 2022.

Learn More Judging Criteria FAQs

About The Hackathon

WHAT A HACKATHON IS: A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 hours or more. During the hackathon, you will work together with your team to ulitise different expertise and skills in building a Minimal Viable Product.

Developing a Prototype for e-signatures to authenticate financial transactions in the integrated financial management information system (IFMIS)

The hackathon will be in the form of a three-day (72 hours) design thinking event where multidisciplinary teams will analyze the problem, generate ideas, and propose some concrete technological solutions to set up digital signature infrastructure for the IFMIS in Lesotho.

Proposed IT solutions are expected to be presented in the form of a prototype. The hackathon’s working sessions will be conducted by professional facilitators with experience in public sector digital innovations.

Eligibility Criteria

Must be based within the sub-saharan Africa region
A team must be inclusive of the skill sets outlined below
Registrant not be from stakeholder organizations
Members of a team must be 18 years and older
Team's proposal should cite open licenses published by the Open-Source Initiative (OSI) of the tech / tools to be used

NB: You may apply as an individual and be match-made with other participants.

The Hackathon Timelines

Here is the Hackathon journey for noting

25 Nov 2022

Registration Opens

06 Dec 2022

Briefing Webinar

21 Dec 2022

Applications close

22 Dec 2022

Top 10 shortlisted

03 - 06 Jan 2023

Hackathon Objectives

The main objective is to design a practical and innovative potential digital technology solution in a hackathon to authenticate transactions and documents in the IFMIS by the users. Additionally, this potential digital solution could be used across the public sector for transaction processing.

The main benefits of the digital signature infrastructure will be:

Automation

Automating the PFM processes by doing away with the paper-based processing of transactions in the system, therefore improving efficiency and effectiveness of PFM processes.

Internal Controls

Strengthening of the internal controls and preventing further accumulation of expenditure arrears by improving the coverage of commitment controls and e-Payments.

Processing

Stronger controls over payment processing and less chances of payment frauds.

Efficiency

Strengthen the efficiency of the treasury systems by decreasing the financial cost associated with the manual processing of transactions.

Hackathon Partners

The Lesotho Public Financial Management Hackathon is powered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Useful Resources

Where are some resources to help you formulate your proposal

Worldbank article

Lesotho National ID

Example

Singapore Case Study

Enlightenment

What is an e-signature

Understanding

Open Source Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Here is what you need to know about the hackathon

Unfortuantely, the hackathon is only open to participants in the sub-saharan Africa content.

A team needs to articulate the following aspects:

An innovative approach to a solution to develop a digital signature that will help users authenticate transactions in the national digital infrastructure
There must be an indication of technologies to be used.
Security considerations for the digital signature and how it accommodate any laws and/or framework that already exist in Lesotho
A high-level architecture is also required to provide an overview of the utility
Team skills composition to show experience and capability to prototype the digital signature

It is up to the team to determine the length of the proposal and needs to be as innovative as possible in the approach of the proposed solution.

Teams will be provided with the data structure (JSON format) of the National Identify Infrastructure to know what data is available, format and how to make queries onto the data.

Only the top 5 teams will work with the APIs against a test environment that will be setup for the hackathon.

Yes, you have to be in a team to participate. If you do not have a team, the hackathon facilitators will match you into a team to fit skills needed in prototyping the solution.

All travelling costs are covered for including accomodation, meals and local travels in Lesotho.

The teams will be assisted by the government officials, and other specialists from the private sector in the country to clarify business processes. The participation of government officials from other countries of the region will be promoted.

Teams are required to use Open licenses published by the Open-Source Initiative (OSI) to develop prototypes. Any proposal developed using technology and licenses not under OSI will disqualify.

Winning team will receive their prize in 3 phases of development of the solution with first 33% provided at the end of the hackathon.

More FAQs For more information, email: impact@geekulcha.dev

Five member composition for the hackathon

The composition of teams should reflect the following expertise profiles (within the 5 members - team may include other skills too):

Cryptographic Expertise

The role of the cryptographic expert will be to create a private and public key pair for implementing digital signatures using the existing digital identity infrastructure in Lesotho.

A solution to store and manage these keys through a centralized app will be critical to the prototype developed during the hackathon.

Enterprise Architecture

The architect's role will be to develop a scalable application architecture and technology stack of the prototype. If the prototype developed using the hackathon is successful, it is expected to provide services to almost all public sector employees.

This role will be crucial in designing an application that could digitally sign transactions as well as the documents in the IT systems of the Government. The system architect will document the system architecture and guide the programmers during the hackathon to follow secure coding practices.

Software Development

The software programmers will code the prototype. The programming skillsets will depend upon the system architecture and technology stack developed by the team at the proposal stage. One programmer should specialize in writing APIs.

The specialist will be responsible for designing and coding APIs to access the digital identity related infrastructure and provide services to the MoF applications to create digital signatures.

LesothoPFMHackathon