Developers and techies from across Sub-Saharan Africa can now apply to win the grand prize of $10 000 in the Lesotho Public Financial Management hackathon. Supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lesotho’s finance ministry will host the hackathon in Maseru from 24 to 26 January 2023.
Organisers say during LesothoPFMHackathon, teams of up to five members are required to reflect their skills in cryptographic expertise, enterprise architecture and software development.
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The hackathon aims to design a practical and cutting-edge technological solution to authenticate transactions and documents in Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS). This can be in the form of a digital signature utility which authenticates against the national digital identity infrastructure.
Additionally, the solutions that will be worked on have the potential to be used across the public sector for transaction processing.
LesothoPFMHackathon is presented amid increasing awareness that modernisation of public services is needed to meet demands of evolving industries, population growth and government business. E-Government has therefore become a key step to provide efficiency in service delivery.
Various countries, such as India and Singapore, have demonstrated that the implementation of IFMIS presents additional benefits if fully utilised in a secure and people-centred approach.
In adopting to this shift, the ministry of finance in Lesotho embarked on a public financial management digitalisation journey in 2009 by implementing IFMIS solutions. This was further upgraded in 2019 to resolve issues faced in its implementation, particularly to strengthen the quality of financial reporting.
The hackathon is therefore considered an additional step in the digitalisation of the public financial management systems by government. The winning solution will automate these processes by doing away with the paper-based processing of transactions in the system while strengthening internal controls and preventing further accumulation of expenditure arrears.
Registration can be done online until Wednesday, 21 December.
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