U.S. MISSION UGANDA PRESS RELEASE |November 18, 2019 | PR 11/19
KAMPALA – On November 16, U.S. Mission Uganda partnered with the Uganda Wildlife Conservation and Education Center (UWEC) to host Zoohackathon 2019 in Entebbe. Zoohackathon is a computer coding event that brings together developers, designers, project managers, and subject matter experts to create applications, systems, and tools to help reduce demand for trafficked wildlife products and disrupt wildlife trafficking value chains.
This year’s Zoohackathon was the fourth year of the global event and the second year in a row that UWEC has hosted Zoohackathon in Entebbe. This year, 15 other cities around the world organized Zoohackathon events. Teams of coders competed against one another to develop a prototype solution that responds to one of the provided global and local wildlife trafficking problem statements.
This year’s winning team was Eden, which was a team composed of individual registrants. The team developed a rhino personality matching game to generate knowledge about and interest in rhino conservation, as well as advertise the opportunity to donate toward rhino conservation efforts. This team and prototype will now go on to the global competition along with the winners of the other Zoohackathon events. The global competition will be held in the coming weeks, and the overall winner will be announced in January 2020.
Uganda is an important destination in the global, black market trade of illicit products, earning it a designation as a “focus country” in the U.S. Department of State’s 2018 END Wildlife Trafficking Report. U.S. Ambassador Deborah R. Malac spoke at Saturday’s event and said, “Wildlife trafficking is an international conservation crisis. It is also a multi-billion dollar, black-market criminal enterprise that threatens global security, undermines the rule of law, fuels corruption, and hampers economic development.….We support events like this because we share the common goal of conserving Uganda’s biodiversity, promoting sustainable development, and enhancing security by countering the illegal wildlife trade.”
For additional information, please contact:
Dorothy Nanyonga
Information Assistant
U.S. Mission Uganda
Email: NanyongaDX@state.gov
Tel: + (0) 414-250-314 x 6410 Cell: + (0) 772-138-194
