The She Code Africa and Apify BuildHer Hackathon 2026 has created new opportunities for women developers to turn their technical skills into practical technology solutions and potential income streams.
Held under the theme “Ship and Earn Africa,” the hybrid hackathon brought together women developers and technical builders to create, publish and monetise solutions to real-world problems. The programme ended with an in-person Demo Day on Friday, September 25, at The Zone, Gbagada, Lagos.
The initiative focused on more than building technology. It gave participants an opportunity to explore how technical skills can be turned into products that solve problems and generate economic value.
Participants were challenged to build and deploy custom Apify Actors. They also had to explore ways of monetising their solutions through Apify’s pay-per-event (PPE) model.
The projects covered areas including agriculture, education, financial technology, cybersecurity and tools for small and medium-sized businesses.
Mfonobong Umondia, Community Manager at She Code Africa, said the programme was designed to bring women from different engineering backgrounds together to solve practical problems.
“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.”
Teams were assessed on technical execution, their use of Apify, the relevance of their solutions, sustainability and presentation. Following live presentations and evaluations by a panel of judges, Team Data Divas took first place with LoanSafe. Team Byte Queens finished second with the Nigeria Flood Early-Warning Agent, while Team SentinelNG placed third with Sentinel.
Winning solutions tackle real-world challenges
Team Data Divas took first place at the BuildHer Hackathon 2026 with LoanSafe, an Apify Actor designed to help Nigerians verify digital lenders before borrowing. The team focused on using technology to make official lending information easier to access and monitor. LoanSafe uses Nigeria’s official FCCPC lending registry to help users check whether a lender is registered. It also tracks changes over time, including changes in a lender’s status, the removal of listings and the addition of new lenders. The tool can also support fintechs, developers and consumer protection researchers that need to monitor lending information.
The project demonstrates how data extraction and automation can be applied to a practical consumer problem. Instead of requiring users or organisations to repeatedly check registry information manually, LoanSafe creates a system for accessing and monitoring those records.
Team Byte Queens placed second with the Nigeria Flood Early-Warning Agent, a solution focused on making flood risk information more accessible at community level. The team developed an Actor that combines information from NIHSA flood advisories, GloFAS river-flow forecasts, rainfall forecasts and upstream dam releases. Users can enter a community, Local Government Area or GPS location to receive flood-risk assessments for the next seven and 30 days. The team also developed a WhatsApp bot that provides alerts in English, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin. The current MVP covers Kogi, Benue, Adamawa, Anambra and Lagos.
The project places emphasis on making technical information easier for communities to access. By delivering alerts through WhatsApp and multiple languages, the team created an additional channel for communicating flood-related information.
Team SentinelNG finished third with Sentinel, an external attack-surface monitoring Actor designed for financial institutions and other organisations. The team built the solution to help organisations identify internet-facing assets linked to their domains and detect potential security risks. Sentinel uses publicly available Certificate Transparency logs to identify assets and can flag forgotten or unexpected assets, certificate anomalies and potential impersonation domains. It also assigns risk scores and severity levels to its findings, giving organisations a clearer view of potential areas of concern.
Alongside the three cash prizes, members of the top 10 teams received US$100 in prepaid Apify platform usage credits. The credits are intended to help the teams continue using the platform after the competition.
Partnership focuses on skills, community and continued development
The partnership between She Code Africa and Apify also reflects a wider focus on helping African developers find economic opportunities through their technical skills.
Saurav Jain, Senior Developer Community Manager at Apify, said the company had identified a gap between strong developer skills and the ability to earn from those skills.
“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 Apify wanted to work more closely with women developer communities around the world, with Africa forming an important part of that effort.
“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 therefore connected technical training with product development and monetisation. Participants were not only asked to build working solutions. They were also introduced to a model that can allow developers to earn from tools they create.
The programme will continue after the competition. The top three teams will take part in an exclusive post-hackathon workshop on Wednesday, October 7, 2026. The workshop will be led by Apify’s Developer Relations team together with She Code Africa.
Support will also continue for the wider participant community.
Oluwaseun Oladeji, Community Associate at She Code Africa, said participants would remain engaged after the hackathon to help them strengthen their technical capabilities and improve the Actors they developed.
“After the whole program, of course, we are also going to continuously engage with the participants who participated in this hackathon just to build on their technical skills, as well as improving more on how they can develop their Apify Actors.”
The continued engagement gives participants room to develop their projects beyond the competition. It also allows them to improve the technical quality of their Actors and gain more experience in building technology products.
