During EU Code Week, the IT Girls initiative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, organized the largest and first-ever female hackathon with over 80 participants, split into 18 teams. The project was supported by the EU in Bosnia and Herzegovina, UN Women, UNDP, UNICEF, and the event was held at HUB387. The fact we are proud of is that our two scholars not only participated in the hackathon but have shown outstanding performance. Dženita Đulović was the part of the winning team and Mersiha Ćeranić was their mentor on the competition.

Here is what Mersiha said:

“I am so proud to be part of this story. These girls encountered real-life problems, so they decided to take matters into their own hands and make a better reality for all of us. Some of the problems were the struggle with introversion, a large number of hungry people in our country, trash in the streets, ... Ten ladies, including me, had a chance to mentor participants of the hackathon, and to help them to express (presentation and implementation) their ideas in the best way. Some of the ideas are turned into applications, and I'm very proud of that! #CodeLikeITGirl hackathon is a great opportunity to express my commitment to convey the knowledge and technical skills I have acquired over the years to the girls, while also learning something new from them. Being one of ITGirls allows me to encourage girls to become more involved in the IT world, and to be aware that they can make a big contribution through their work because it's always the right time to do great things!”

Mersiha mentored our another scholar, Dženita Đulović, who was very excited about this win:

“It was a great pleasure to win among all other teams and their incredible ideas. While working on the idea, we wanted to focus on the quality education category, by analyzing the obstacles we face throughout the education. That is how Smart Buddy idea was born. Smart Buddy mobile application enables peer-to-peer education by creating a knowledge base. Students can find their nearby friends as tutors on certain subjects and they can ask questions and get answers from their peers in a fast and efficient way through our problems feed. I am especially glad that our mentors were women who are already building their careers in the IT field and who represented role models for all the girls included in the hackathon. Only through incredible teamwork of my colleagues: Azemina Čelebić, Lejla Omerović, and Amina Hodžić, did we manage to achieve such a result.”

At the end of 36 hours long hackathon, the history was written. We have supergirls from team Smart Buddy, which will be working on the further development of an application to help introvert people to make their life much easier, as winners of first-ever all-female hackathon in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We hope that these two fantastic IT Girls from our Foundation will serve as an inspiration to many young girls and spark their interest in this field.

Dzenita and Mersiha made history together!