evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Pulse-Rescue AI — Digicel Foundation's Girls in ICT Hackathon Turns Hurricane Trauma into AI Innovation in Jamaica

Jamaica · Montego Bay · See the Jamaica profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 56% 47/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

After Category 5 Hurricane Melissa, girls at Jamaican high schools built AI tools for disaster response in a Digicel Foundation/STEM Spark Solutions hackathon. Montego Bay High's six-student team won with 'Pulse-Rescue AI', an instant location-sharing app for storm emergencies.

6
Students on the winning Pulse-Rescue AI team
3
Schools participating in the hackathon series (April-May 2026)
Pulse-Rescue AI — Digicel Foundation's Girls in ICT Hackathon Turns Hurricane Trauma into AI Innovation in Jamaica

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
Digicel Foundation, STEM Spark Solutions
Period
April–May 2026
Keywords
AI literacy, girls' STEM education, disaster resilience, hackathon

Context

After Category 5 Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica in October 2025, Digicel Foundation and STEM Spark Solutions ran a Girls in ICT Day-linked AI and Climate Change Hackathon series across Jamaican high schools in April-May 2026, marking International Girls in ICT Day 2026.

Activities

Sessions ran at Denham Town High and Tivoli Gardens High in western Kingston and at Montego Bay High School for Girls, where students learned to apply generative AI to climate and disaster challenges -- forecasting extreme weather, early-warning systems, evacuation planning, emergency-response coordination and community rebuilding.

Results

Montego Bay High School for Girls' six-student team won with 'Pulse-Rescue AI', an app that instantly shares a user's location with first responders during a storm; a grade 9 participant from the Denham Town/Tivoli Gardens sessions said the hackathon sparked her interest in building AI systems for disaster prediction.

Conclusions

Reported evidence is limited to hackathon outputs, organiser statements and student quotes across two independent news outlets; no independent, structured learning-outcome evaluation has been published.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — A short hackathon series across three schools, run by a corporate foundation and a specialist delivery partner, implies a modest, event-scale cost rather than a sustained programme budget.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Ran as a bounded hackathon series across April-May 2026, timed to International Girls in ICT Day -- a short, single-cycle event rather than an ongoing course.
Staffing & skills
Digicel Foundation programme staff, STEM Spark Solutions facilitators

Conditions for success

  • framing the technical challenge around a shared, recent trauma (Hurricane Melissa) that participants had direct experience of, giving the work immediate relevance
  • targeting schools in storm-affected and inner-city areas specifically to reach girls underrepresented in tech
  • pairing a corporate foundation (Digicel) with a specialist STEM delivery partner (STEM Spark Solutions) rather than running the programme in-house

Common failure modes

  • no pre/post AI-literacy assessment or follow-up outcome data has been published, so skills gained cannot be measured
  • no data-protection, safety or judging-methodology framework for the hackathon is publicly documented beyond organiser statements

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful