Under the framework of International Women’s Day with a specific focus on gender equality, this global app competition targets women and young people by empowering them to develop mobile solutions for social good. Young people interested in learning about App development can apply what they learn from the free MOOCs offered on the MiríadaX platform and gain the necessary skills to produce their own App.

For the creation of the Apps, participants must use AllJoyn™, a free and open source software project by the AllSeen Alliance and the Qualcomm® Vuforia™ platform as well as the applications-development environment  App Inventor for Android devices.

“With this initiative we want to support app developers that are looking forward to using their talent in addressing a social welfare issue", says Sergio San Martín, project leader at Telefónica Educación Digital. We expect all submitted mobile applications must be aligned to the competition’s theme of social and environmental change, which includes education, entrepreneurship, healthy lifestyles, art and creativity, environmental sustainability, public safety, social inclusion, and empowerment of women.”

UNESCO’s patronage affirms Telefónica Educación Digital’s initiative, which upholds the important use of mobile technology to promote the building of knowledge societies and the participation of young people for achieving the upcoming new Sustainable Development Goals.

“UNESCO is confident that this event will contribute to the aims of its YouthMobile Initiative,” says Davide Storti, Programme Specialist of UNESCO. “The YouthMobile Initiative empowers young people all across the world to create mobile applications to address sustainable development challenges facing their communities, such as illiteracy and unemployment.”

The competition has a general category and two special categories, one dedicated to Apps aimed at the empowerment of women and the other for young people between 18 and 25 years of age. Each category will have five finalists, of which three will be prize winners. The first prize in each category is attendance at a VatorSplash event (including air travel, accommodations, and a financial award of 1,500 Euros), where the winner can learn from the best and exchange experiences with international investors. In addition, the winners will be supported with computer equipment and training.

Mobile for Change is expecting to attract over 3000 people with a minimum of 300 actual competition apps submitted. Participants will be mainly residing in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, but other language speakers are welcome to enter, too.

It is still possible to register online on the competition’s official web page. The 25^th of March begins the period in which each participant can upload his or her App. The voting begins on the 16 of May and the winners will be announced on 26 June in a final event.

About Telefónica Educación Digital

Telefónica Digital Education is part of the Telefónica Group company specializing in providing online learning solutions for Education. It is the company of Telefónica that specializes in online training solutions and Digital Education. It has 400 Professional Digital Education programs in five countries:  Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, as well as more than 300 customers across Europe, Latin America, Central America, and North America.  Telefónica Digital Education provides training to 4 million students across platforms and has a content factory with more than 20,000 hours per year of production.

About UNESCO YouthMobile

The global objective of YouthMobile is by 2017 to have empowered at least 25,000 young people worldwide, particularly young women, with both the high-level skills and confidence to develop, promote, and sell at least 5,000 locally relevant mobile applications (apps) that solve local issues of sustainable development, and provide self-generated, viable employment opportunities in the mobile/ICT industry.