The largest telecommunications company in Kenya – Nairobi – is sponsoring a competition that aims to use youth’s technological innovations and help young people develop the ideas into working moneymaking Mobile applications.

Taking into consideration the success and missteps of the Safaricom AppStar Challenge of last year this year’s AppWiz Incubation Challenge has partnership with different telecommunications and technology companies to help top developers deploy their Mobile Applications to the market.

Among the partners of this year’s Safaricom Developer Challenge are Samsung, iLabAfrica – a research centre in Nairobi, and Invested Development – an investment management firm based in the USA and Nairobi.

Bob Collymore, Safaricom chief executive officer, said that there are many young talented developers in Kenya with bright ideas but who have no opportunity to make these ideas come true. So, he added, that the competition aims to help the young developers turn the ideas into real working products.

Kenya is considered as the leading country on the continent in the sphere of mobile phone usage but there was a lack in developing their own applications for mobile phones. And the winning concepts may be transformed into commercially viable projects.

The Safaricom Development Challenge will offer a grand prize of $ 17.900 to the individual or team that presents the best concept for a mobile application focusing on one of seven categories: health, finance, education, utilities, entertainment, transportation, public safety and security. The prize for the second position will be $ 11.900 and the winner in each of the seven categories will receive $ 2.380.

Though candidates can participate as individual mobile developers they are encouraged to form teams of three people and apply for the competition on Safaricom’s portal by June 29th. The judges will evaluate the entries and select 18 applicants to participate in three-month development phase.