Bangladesh is rapidly changing, and we are facing new challenges every day in our urban spaces. We started BRACathon at the end of 2015, a competition to make mobile applications that could offer solutions for real social problems. Following its success, we complemented it with the Urban Innovation Challenge at the end of 2016, to engage young people to find urban social business models.
We spent this year incubating the five winning BRACathon apps, which cover solutions to problems ranging from tuberculosis to fire response. Incubation included prototyping, intensive mentoring and training, piloting - under the guidance of our leading development practitioners, promotion of the apps to increase their user bases, and connecting them to our programmatic work.
We launched the Urban Innovation Challenge in October, in partnership with Dhaka North City Corporation. We are offering seed support, bootcamps and coworking space to a new generation of innovators, and throwing our active support behind them to build the cities they want to live in. Participants will submit social business models as innovative solutions to specific urban problems in early 2017.
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