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Excellent news for all you young tech geniuses out there! The Khyber Pakhtun Khuwa IT Board has just launched an amazing initiative to promote young techies, entrepreneurs and designers that are primarily from Khyber Pakhtun Khuwa.

The intuitive initiative has been named “KPApps” and will be held next month, i.e March 2016.

All about KPApps

The vision of KPApps is to focus and enhance team building, entrepreneurship and networking among the youth so as to bolster the technology ecosystem of the province.

KPApps has done its homework in this regard and partnered with the PTA, Tech Valley Abbottabad, World Bank and Code for Pakistan.

KPApps basically is an online competition that will let participants create mobile applications, websites or any other innovative tech gadget. There are multiple categories that one can take part in, including:

1. Web
2. Mobile
3. SMS Apps for Civic Engagement
4. Governance
5. Health
6. Mobile-only Apps for Agriculture
7. Finance

The winner in each category will be rewarded with PKR 100,000/ in cash and the runner-up for each category will get PKR 50,000/.

How do I apply?

It is actually quite simple to enter the competition. The rules for eligibility are the following:

1. The code base should be open source and should be submitted to GitHub.
2. The project can be developed on any platform
3. One participant can submit one entry per category
4. The team size should be 3 or 5
5. It is mandatory that one person from the team be a resident of KPK.

If you fulfil the eligibility criteria to enter KPApp, you have to do the following steps:

• Register on DevPost
• Create a GitHub account
• You can use the DevPost discussion forum to clarify your doubts by posting questions to the organizers, search for teammates and specify your interest in mentoring
• All submissions need to be completed by March 14th

More Guidelines

Once the above process has been completed and you are a part of the race! You must follow the guidelines below to successfully reach the final demo stage:

• A link to a functional prototype of the final product needs to be submitted
• If there are more features that can be integrated but have not, the team needs to create screenshots and mockups and present these extensions that were not implemented
• If the teams need to interact with mentors, they can use any public communication tools of the event as often as they wish

The judging panel comprises of:

• Anna O’Donnell of World Bank
• Abdullah Ejaz of Tech Valley Abottabad
• Salman Zafar of PTA
• Owais Anjum of eMumba and OPEN Islamabad.

The judging criteria for the winner is:

• Quality
• Novelty
• Learning aspect
• Ease of use
• Sustainability

The final Demo Day for KPApps has been scheduled for 25^th March. On the Demo Day, five teams from each category will present their solution in Abbottabad after which the winners will be announced.

In our opinion, the KPApps is a very good initiative to promote young talent and groom them for the industry and we look forward to other provinces launching similar initiative.