Women developers are increasingly turning technical skills into commercially viable digital products as She Code Africa and global web-scraping platform Apify seek to create new income pathways for Africa’s technology workforce.
The organisations concluded the 2026 BuildHer Hackathon, themed ‘Ship and Earn Africa’, with participants challenged to build, deploy and monetise technology solutions addressing real-world problems across agriculture, education, financial technology, cybersecurity and small businesses.
The hybrid hackathon culminated in a Demo Day on September 25 at The Zone, Gbagada, Lagos, where teams presented their solutions to a panel of judges.
Team Data Divas emerged first with LoanSafe, an Apify Actor designed to help Nigerians verify digital lenders before borrowing.
LoanSafe connects to the official lending registry of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), enabling users to check whether a digital lender is registered and monitor changes to its status.
The platform stores verified records, allowing users to identify when a lender is removed from the registry, when a new lender is added or when a lender’s status changes.
The tool could also provide fintech companies, developers and consumer protection researchers with easier access to lending-registry information without having to build monitoring infrastructure from scratch.
Team Byte Queens placed second with the Nigeria Flood Early-Warning Agent, which combines data from the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA), GloFAS river-flow forecasts, rainfall forecasts and upstream dam releases to generate community-level flood-risk assessments.
Users can input a community, Local Government Area or GPS location to receive risk assessments for the next seven and 30 days, alongside factors driving the risk and recommended actions.
The team also developed a WhatsApp bot capable of delivering alerts in English, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin. Its current minimum viable product covers Kogi, Benue, Adamawa, Anambra and Lagos.
Team SentinelNG came third with Sentinel, a cybersecurity tool that uses publicly available Certificate Transparency logs to identify internet-facing assets linked to an organisation’s domain.
The tool can flag unexpected assets, certificate anomalies and possible impersonation domains, while assigning risk scores and severity levels to identified threats.
Speaking about the partnership, Mfonobong Umondia, Community Manager at She Code Africa, said: ‘The She Code Africa x Apify Hackathon is a hybrid hackathon that brings together women and girls from different engineering tracks to build solutions to real-time problems. So we’re basically bringing them together in one room to collaborate and build solutions to problems.’
For Apify, the programme also addresses a broader challenge in Africa’s technology ecosystem: converting technical expertise into sustainable income.
Saurav Jain, Senior Developer Community Manager at Apify, said: ‘With time, we have noticed there is a huge gap in the African market where developers cannot really make money out of their software skills, but they have definitely very good, great developer skills.’
He said the partnership with She Code Africa was part of Apify’s effort to engage more women developer communities, particularly across Africa.
‘So this year, we made a pledge that we will participate with many women communities all over the world and especially in Africa. So what can be a great start other than collaborating with She Code Africa?’
The hackathon required participants to use Apify’s pay-per-event model, giving developers an opportunity to build products that can generate revenue based on usage.
Beyond the competition, the top three teams will participate in a post-hackathon workshop on October 7 led by Apify’s Developer Relations team and She Code Africa.
Members of the top 10 teams also received $100 each in prepaid Apify platform credits to continue developing their products.
The organisers said post-hackathon engagement would focus on helping participants improve their technical capabilities and further develop the Apify Actors created during the programme.