Picture Courtesy: Nikita Gautam

On April 24th, 2016, three students from Batch of 2017, Nikita Gautam, Asmita Kunwar and Ruby Shrestha participated in a Hackathon organized by NTA(Nepal Telecom Authority) in collaboration with Women Leaders in Technology and bagged the first prize. The result of the competition was announced in the event of International Girls in ICT Day, organized by NTA.

International Girls in ICT Day is an international event that has been organized in more than 150 countries by the International Telecommunication Union. The event, conducted for the first time in Nepal, saw more dozen IT colleges from Nepal take part.

The DWIT team developed “Nari Sarokar”, a legal aid app that helps women victims of different crimes connect to the right people, lawyers, and organization. The team after submitting the form for the Hackathon brainstormed on the idea for the project. They conducted a small survey for feasibility study to find out the different forms of violence faced by women.

Nikita Gautam, who worked on overall integration, development and design of the app said, “We practiced the pitch for about three hours. And, after the pitch we were quite scared. We feared if we would not be able to develop the app.” Asmita Kunwar and Ruby Shrestha did the research and development of the app.

During the development phase, the team faced some difficulties in installing the plugins as the files got overridden. But, since it was a one-day event, they had to develop only the prototype, so they didn’t go in depth with the development.

The team was awarded winner certificate by the Minister of Information and Technology of Nepal and a cash prize of Rs. 30,000.

The Girls in ICT initiative is a global effort to raise awareness on empowering and encouraging girls and young women to consider studies and careers in ICTs, and this win has motivated the team to complete the app.