Supported by the African Development Bank

On the 17th - 19th of April 2020, The African Development Bank’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab, working closely with the Youth Entrepreneurship & Innovation Multi-Donor Trust Fund hosted a 72 hour Ideathon, with partners Seedstars, digital agency WAAT and development consultants Luvent Consulting to create tech and non-tech solutions to tackle some of the most pressing challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic.

In an attempt to slow down the spread of the coronavirus and to flatten the curve of infections, governments worldwide have imposed isolation and social distancing measures that make it impossible to continue with face-to-face collaborative processes. #AfricaVsVirus is creating an online platform in order to promote the fast and innovative co-creation of solutions to help African countries address some of their most pressing issues.

The platform is an opportunity to create tech and non-tech solutions to tackle some of the most pressing challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic. The initiative led by the Human Capital, Youth and Skills Development Department, calls on socially committed citizens worldwide, problem solvers, creative minds, health experts, programmers, graphic and web-designers to come together in a 72-hour digital collaborative process to bring about ground-breaking solutions addressing some of the social and economic challenges posed by the coronavirus for Africa.

As a result, over 25,000+ participants from 54 African countries detected 3,000 challenges on 9 themes that they tackled with the support of 4,000+ mentors and moderators through an online platform exchanging over 200,000 messages. Our of 750 teams formed, 100 top solutions were highlighted and can be found from this list: top100.africavsvirus.com.