Initiated in June 2012, the Cairo TApp has engaged technologists on transport challenges ranging from harassment and other personal safety issues to encouraging shared rides and car-pooling, increasing effective traffic enforcement, and improving driver behavior. Egyptian technology specialists worked alongside stakeholders and experts in transport and urban development to develop 23 new mobile applications, or apps. The competition was organized in a collaboration between the World Bank, the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Egyptian Ministry of Transport, and Egypt’s active technology community. The participants in the first ever Cairo TApp were recognized at an Award Event on Saturday in the Smart Village near Cairo.

The partners for the Cairo TApp Award Event are Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Ministry of Transport, Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, Vodafone Egypt, Orange, Google, TA Telecom, Microsoft, Alashanek Ya Balady, Green Arm, Bey2ollak, Arabnet, Wamda, dotopen.

“The Cairo Transport App is an opportunity for young Egyptians to invent and innovate in a bid to contribute to addressing the current social and economic challenges, and to stimulate and develop the spirit of entrepreneurship. We are investing seriously in the development of technological human resources and we have programs and projects that enable our youth to compete globally,” said H.E. Minister Atef Helmy, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

Cairo faces many critical urban transport, traffic management, and environmental issues. These include an overcrowded and unreliable public transport system; aggravated traffic congestion, with serious economic consequences; poor road safety, with at least 1,000 residents dying each year in motor vehicle crashes, more than half of them pedestrians; institutional fragmentation and insufficient financial resources for transport facilities; and high levels of air and noise pollution, aggravated by the large number of aging microbuses, minibuses, and taxis in the city.

Conversely, the use of mobile phones has exploded in Egypt and mobile applications now provide an accessible platform to improve service delivery and help tackle problems such as those facing Egypt’s capital. Egyptian technologists already participated in the first Water Hackathon, organized by the World Bank in 2011 in Cairo and other locations worldwide, which developed apps for improving delivery of water services.

“The Cairo TApp is a great example of bottom-up, local innovation that can complement the more traditional lending operations supported by the World Bank,” said Hartwig Schafer, World Bank Country Director Egypt, Yemen and Djibouti. “We are very impressed by the creativity and dedication of the young technology specialists who took part, and the energy they bring to solving the everyday problems faced by Egyptians.”

The Cairo TApp began with a workshop held at Egypt’s Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) in September 2012, which resulted in more than 24 application submissions. Out of these, 10 finalists were selected through online voting (for one popular app) and by mentors and experts.

The winning app, Beliaa, is a “mobile car mechanic” designed to assist car owners. It is the first mobile application for road assistance and car maintenance in Egypt, using GPS location to help drivers locate road assistance centers and sending car maintenance requests with the required service, date, and time to authorized car workshops. The app is also integrated with the General Department for Traffic to provide quick and reliable traffic updates. The Beliaa team won US$3,000 and a nomination to an international mobile application competition at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Children without a birth certificate have no legal status,” UNICEF’s Deputy Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa, Elke Wisch, said at the opening of the Second Conference of African Ministers responsible for Civil Registration.

“Birth registration protects children from child labour, recruitment into armed forces and militias, human trafficking, early marriage as well as other forms of exploitation,” Wisch added. “Birth registration is essential for children to access health care and education, as well as for orphans to inherit from their parents.”

The two-day conference, organized by the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank, the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and other UN bodies, including UNICEF, as well as other partners, will deliberate on ways to strengthen national civil registration and vital statistics systems. In addition to the registration of births, civil registration includes the registration of death, marriage and divorce.

Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a UNICEF press release, has the lowest birth registration rates in the world, with on average only 38 per cent of children below the age of five holding a birth certificate, although there are wide disparities between countries, with South Africa, Djibouti, Burundi, Togo and Gabon all having made strong advances.

In Nigeria, Africa’s largest country with a population of 160 million, just 30 per cent of children are registered at birth. Some countries, such as Namibia, have high registration rates in urban areas, but low rates in rural zones.

UNICEF said that factors contributing to low registration rates include a lack of sustained political commitment, limited institutional capacity, costs, cultural barriers and lack of awareness among families about the importance of registering their children.

The agency stressed that innovative partnerships with the health sector and the use of mobile technologies are opportunities to achieve greater registration coverage.

In Namibia, for example, 95 per cent of pregnant women attend ante-natal care services. Within two years of introducing birth registration facilities in 23 hospitals, the number of infants registered at birth increased by 50 per cent.

In Uganda, where 43 per cent of children are not born in health facilities, UNICEF said it supported, along with Uganda Telecom, the Government’s launch of an internet-based registration system using mobile phone technology that aims to further boost registrations.

“Throughout the continent, millions of people are using the internet on a daily basis and there are few places in Africa that do not have mobile phones network coverage,” Wisch said. “But when we look at the civil registration systems, we find that some countries have not yet caught up. We have to take advantage of these new technologies to make our civil registration systems more effective.”

“Impressive GDP growth rates in Africa have not translated into the elimination of hunger and malnutrition,” said the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Helen Clark, at the launch of the report in Nairobi. “Inclusive growth and people-centred approaches to food security are needed.”

With more than one in four of its 856 million people undernourished, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s most food-insecure region. There are more than 15 million people at risk of malnutrition in its Sahel region alone – stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – and an equal number in the Horn of Africa remain vulnerable after last year’s food crisis in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia.

UNDP’s Africa Human Development Report 2012: Towards a Food Secure Future stresses that action on agriculture alone will not be enough to eliminate hunger, and new approaches will have to include the improvement of health services and agricultural infrastructure, as well as giving a greater voice to the poor through strengthened local governments and civil society groups.

“Building a food-secure future for all Africans will only be achieved if efforts span the entire development agenda,” Miss Clark said at the report’s launch, which was attended by Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki. The report is the first in UNDP’s Human Development Report series which focuses specifically on Africa.

It underlines that food insecurity should not be prevalent in a continent that has been experiencing high rates of economic growth and improvements in life expectancy and schooling in recent years.

“It is a harsh paradox that in a world of food surpluses, hunger and malnutrition remain pervasive on a continent with ample agricultural endowments,” said the Director of UNDP’s Africa Bureau, Tegegnework Gettu, in a news release.

While acknowledging that there are no quick fixes, the report emphasizes that food security can be achieved through immediate action in four critical areas. These include increasing agricultural productivity of smallholder farmers; boosting nutrition by expanding access to health services, education and clean water; implementing social programmes that protect farmers against natural disasters and conflict; and giving women and marginalized groups access to land and technology.

“The impressive economic growth which much of the continent has been recording must now be accompanied by decisive action to improve food security and nutrition,” UNDP’s Helen Clark said. “Growth divorced from advances in human development does little for people, and without advances in human development, countries cannot meet their full potential either.”