Kabul, Afghanistan | 26 January, 2012 – The final day of the Innovation Lab has arrived and the participants arrived early to get their projects up and going before the ICT lessons began for the day. Bobby Soriano opened the Lab this morning with a presentation on internet and mobile security. To emphasize to the participants how insecure their information is on the web – he logged into several different Facebook accounts. His presentation highlighted the need to protect your computer and phone, because as he showed the group, hackers can easily get into your personal accounts which can lead to identity theft. You can read more on our blog about how to secure your computer when visiting Facebook and Google sites.

Following Bobby’s presentation the groups broke out to continue their presentations; rather than break for lunch that afternoon the groups ate in shifts, only releasing two or three participants at a time while the rest continued their work. ICT experts rotated from group to group, commenting on how dedicated and committed the groups were to their ideas; Jacobo and Arjun mentioned more than once how impressed they were at the participants.

As the evening neared it was more and more difficult to get the participants to pay attention to the ICT lessons; luckily our last presenter was a local business man named Farshid Ghyasi, who created jobs.af. Farshid presented the new mobile application for jobs.af and encouraged participants to work towards the development of their own technology, if they truly believed in it. Having Farshid present during the lab gave the participant a local role model to look up to and see how he was able to make his creation the number one jobsite in Afghanistan.

As the groups broke out one last time, the room was arranged for media, audience and a judging panel. Four judges took the front row of couches and with pen and paper in hand, readied to take notes and critique the participants on their creations. Among them were Farshid Ghyasi creator of Netlinks, Javid Hamdard Internews ICT researcher, Wais Payab the director of ANDC, and Jes Petersen co-founder of Paywast.

As the camera’s started filming and audience quieted down, Hashim from Internews introduced the judges and announced the prizes. The winning group would be given the opportunity to present their ideas in front of the Minister of Communications and his support in apply for the World Bank $5million innovation grant. And with that statement, the presentations began.

The first group was the Crisis Response team with their “IDP R U OK” project. IDP R U OK uses mobile technology for humanitarian organizations to make smarter and faster decisions to benefit the IDP population. Check out their presentation to see more…

Next was the Media team with their support of the FIX-IT project. The team created a tool that enabled communities to report problems to the Salam Watandar program FIX-IT. Once FIX-IT received the reports from the population they would be followed up and improved by the government. To see more about the tools they used check out their presentation…

The third presentation was by the Governance team. The participants created Easy Hajj; a mobile application that enables all citizens to register for Hajj and simultaneously allows the Ministry to communicate with Haji’s immediately. Check out Easy Hajj here…

The Agriculture team then presented their project Dehqan which created an agriculture encyclopedia for cell phones of farmers in remote areas who need access to information like weather, market prices and crop diseases; in order to keep them more informed and successful. To see the complete presentation, click here…

Following the Ag team was Health with their presentation on polio tracking. Their technology would assist the Polio Plus Afghanistan organization and the MoPH track the location of polio outbreaks and inform the populations about basic health information to respond to and prevent diseases. View the full presentation here…

And lastly, the Education team presented their project in partnership with the Aga Khan Foundation. The team created a mobile application to resource teachers in their remote locations that can be used to access educational information for themselves and their students. Read more about the tools here…

The presenters took seats in the back of the conference room upon the completion of their work and awaited the judges announcements. When the final decision was made, three groups won. In third, the Agriculture team, in second the Health team, and in first the Governance team. You can see the pictures of the all the teams on our photos page. With the completion of the lab, all participants – Afghan and international alike, were impressed with the event and requested one to be put on again in the near future. This was the first innovation lab to be held in Afghanistan, and any following event will have an impressive reputation to live up to.

<– Day 3

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