Winners of the ‘Manresa Social Hackathon’ awarded €1,500 to develop their solutions

• Students from Manresa solved the challenge of coming up with a technological solution that would make it easier for migrants to carry out all the administrative and bureaucratic procedures required upon arriving in the city.
• The hackathon was part of ‘BeFuture! Manresa’, an event organized by Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital).

September 16, 2022

35 youths from Manresa took part in the first ‘Manresa Social Hackathon’ in the frame of ‘BeFuture! Manresa‘, a reflection and technological dissemination day promoted by MWCapital offering Manresa’s citizens an agenda of different activities.

Split into groups, they worked on various technology-based proposals to help migrants arriving in the city to manage all the procedures to obtain social, health and employment coverage and thus facilitate their inclusion. Among the solutions presented, the jury of experts chose two by two teams made up of Institut Lacetània, the Escola Joviat and the UPC Manresa students as well as youths with scholarships from the Fundació del Convent de Santa Clara.

In just three hours, the winners developed and pitched two website projects to help migrants register with the town council and then find Catalan learning courses as well as training to get to know their surroundings, both of which are requirements to apply for a residence permit. The pitched proposals featured services such as QR codes redirecting users to the documents needed to obtain certificates, translators and an integrated chat to help understand texts and offering personalized assistance, as well as  geolocators showing  points of interest in real time, such as active food banks or open primary care centers.

The MWCapital, Generalitat de Catalunya, Huawei España and UPC Manresa, Lacetània and Joviat jury members, among others, highlighted the quality and rigor of all pitched solutions, as well as the outstanding knowledge level of all participants. They also underlined the young participants’ ability to understand the situation of the newcomers, which allowed them to devise solutions that responded to their most immediate needs.

In addition to a ‘Huawei Watch Fit’ smartwatch and a MWC Barcelona 2023 ticket for each winning participant, the winning teams were awarded €1,500 to co-develop their proposals.

The awards were given by Therese Jamaa, Vice President of Huawei Spain, and Gabriel Prat, Director of the Board of Trustees of the Convent de Santa Clara Foundation, the organizations supporting the hackathon. The foundation’s director sister Lucía Caram and Eduard Martín, CIO and director of Intelligent Connectivity at MWCapital, delivered the closing ceremony speech encouraging the young participants to pursue the challenge and to not abandon the social approach when developing technological projects. “We look forward to seeing you at the next MWC Barcelona with your prototypes. We would like the solutions proposed today to become a reality that can help many migrants, not only in Manresa, but all over the world“, said Eduard Martín.