Hackathons as a talent pipeline: Kenya's young builders

Over the weekend of 3 and 4 October 2026, forty-four participants gathered at Konza Technopolis for the third GirlCode Kenya hackathon. The winning team, Mary Wangui, Linet Mugwanja, Aisha Barasa and Cynthia Chepkorir, built Naulisako, a digital fare-collection platform designed to make matatu payments easier to verify for passengers and to automate reconciliation and sales records for vehicle owners, according to Capital FM and Techtrendske. As the Kenyan winner, the team went through to GirlCode's Pan-African final.

It is a very Kenyan solution. Anyone who has shown an M-Pesa message to a conductor, argued about whether a payment went through, or run a matatu and tried to reconcile the day's takings will recognise the problem.

Why hackathons matter

Hackathons are often dismissed as weekend competitions with pizza. At their best, they do more:

• They teach shipping. Building something that works in 48 hours teaches scope, teamwork and pragmatism.
• They surface local problems. Participants build for problems they live with, like matatu fares.
• They create networks. Mentors, judges, sponsors and teammates become future colleagues and co-founders.
• They open doors. For many women and young people outside Nairobi's tech circles, a hackathon is the first time they are seen.

Women in Kenyan tech

GirlCode's hackathons exist because women remain under-represented in technology across Africa. Events like this, along with university clubs, bootcamps and communities, help change who builds Kenya's technology, which changes what gets built.

From prototype to product

The hard part comes after the weekend. Most hackathon projects never become products. The ones that do usually find:

• A real customer: a sacco willing to pilot, a business willing to pay
• Mentorship: someone who has built a company before
• Funding: grants, prize money or early investment
• Time: the team needs to be able to keep working on it

What businesses can do

Kenyan businesses can be the missing piece:

• Bring real problems to hackathons as challenge sponsors
• Pilot promising projects with real data and real users
• Hire participants: internships and junior roles for people who have shown they can build
• Mentor: an hour a month from an experienced professional can change a team's trajectory

Telling their stories

Young builders also need to tell the world what they made. A short video explaining a product, its problem and its users is now a standard part of a pitch. Tari Studio can help: type /script with the length and the idea, edit the timed scenes, and make a short explainer, in English as Kenyans speak it, Kiswahili or the mix. Scripts with /script.

The next generation of Kenyan technology is being built in weekends like the one at Konza. The country's job is to make sure it does not stop on Monday.