Co-creation Hub (CcHUB) in partnership with Facebook launched the Design for Epidemiology project, an innovative project that took the form of a designathon challenge. This project aimed to explore creating solutions leveraging data from Facebook’s publicly accessible Data for Good platform towards understanding, monitoring, and controlling the spread of diseases in Nigeria.

The spread of contagious diseases is recognized as a key health issue globally. This designathon is however one step closer to creating lasting human-centred designs and sustainable solutions geared at curbing and eventually containing the spread of infectious diseases in Africa. Respected epidemiologists, researchers, and public health professionals prepared the problem statement that was used in the designathon to focus the research and create a more cohesive and guided approach.

The designathon was held  on 13th – 15th October and saw 12 startups in the field of Epidemiology and design compete to develop innovative solutions to address the challenges within the public health sector of Nigeria, targeting collaboration, disease transmission and pandemic response.

Speaking on the launch, Zahra Kassam, Head of Design Lab, Co-creation Hub said: “For Co-creation Hub, we’re excited as we believe in the Innovations born from the designation and how we might change the field of epidemiology. This work has been a rapid process of Human-Centered Design where we’ve had experts who have joined us to provide advice, knowledge, and most importantly Facebook’s Data which has helped the teams to validate their assumptions.”

Four out of the 12 startups won with their proposed innovative solutions targeting disease transmission and pandemic response. The four winners were 9th Digit Contracting Limited, Healthstack, MyClinic.ng and D-Tracker.

9th Digit Contracting Limited Team and Healthstack Team emerged as winners under the MVP stage category to win a grand prize of $15,000 each!

9th Digit enables indiscriminate access to quality health resources using technology, while Healthstack is a digital health platform that aims to strengthen health system capabilities.

MyClinic.ng team and D-Tracker Team also emerged as winners under the Idea stage category and won a prize of $ 10,000 each!

Hydra by MyClinic.ng is a real-time disease surveillance and data aggregation platform for healthcare, while D-Tracker aims to build a solution that offers prediction, early detection and tracking of public health threats in Nigeria.

Over the next 3 months, the CcHUB Team will support selected organization(s) to iteratively test and refine the solutions; and develop an implementation plan for  building the solutions proposed during the hackathon.