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Students develop App to trap human traffickers

Following the successful 2019 event in Lagos, the 64 Nigerian students were brought together by Facebook, Andela and UNODC with the aim to spark their creativity whilst pushing their coding capabilities...

Following the successful 2019 event in Lagos, the 64 Nigerian students were brought together by Facebook, Andela and UNODC with the aim to spark their creativity whilst pushing their coding capabilities to find technological solutions to tackle crime, uphold justice and promote the rule of law.

After two days of compelling creativity, four students of the Team Predex were declared the winners. The winning project was an application that used artificial intelligence to send warning signals to users of chat applications if the conversation had indications that they might be recruited for human trafficking as well as other forms of sexual abuse. The team trained their model based on existing datasets of conversations between victims and recruiters for human trafficking or perpetrators of sexual abuse against children.

As a prize, UNODC’s Education for Justice (E4J) initiative will bring the team to the 14th United Nations Congress on Crime prevention and Criminal Justice, to be held in Kyoto, Japan, from April 20 to 27, 2020, where they will have a chance to present their application.

This year’s runner up was an application by the team e-Recyclers. Their project focused on developing a network aimed to inform consumers on how to legally recycle e-waste and hereby to keep it away from the domain of organized criminal groups. The application would help users to determine how and where to recycle e-waste, as well as provide incentives for the lawful recycling of e-waste, with the sponsorship of technology companies.

This activity is a part of UNODC’s Education for Justice (E4J) initiative, the objective of which is to educate youth on crime, justice and rule of law issues. The Hackathon4Justice event showcases how young people can play an active and creative role in promoting the rule of law, while learning about the issues that affect them. The E4J initiative is part of the Global Programme for the Implementation of the Doha Declaration of UNODC.

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