JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — South Africa’s fight against hunger just received a digital overhaul from the country’s youngest tech innovators. Sixty Gen Z developers spent a week harnessing artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data visualization to create breakthrough solutions for child hunger during The Biggest Hunger Hack, hosted by KFC Africa.
The challenge, which took place ahead of World Food Day, invited young digital natives to re-engineer the brand’s Add Hope open-source blueprint. The program, fueled by millions of R2 customer donations, already supports more than 3,300 feeding centers and reached over 154,000 children last year.
KFC Africa indicated that potential seed funding of up to R1 million (approximately $55,000 USD) could be allocated to develop the winning solution.
The overall winning team, Ctrl-Alt-Del-Hunger, created the Misfits Mzansi app, which turns food waste into a social impact opportunity. The app rescues “ugly” fruit and vegetables from farms and delivers them to food-insecure families.
The platform also generates donations through user engagement with short-form cooking challenges and edutainment content. “You become a philanthropist just by watching a video,” the team explained.
Other notable concepts included:
- Streetwise scripters built a social-media-first donation ecosystem featuring a real-time donor dashboard, a donation hotspot map, and a loyalty rewards integration that grants free KFC meals for good deeds.
- Bit Coders developed a chatbot ecosystem using the MTN MoMo API for seamless payments, offering AI-driven donor insights and tax certification downloads for large donations.
- Hack 4 Hope showcased a WhatsApp chatbot built on blockchain that allows customers to scan a QR code from a till slip to instantly donate. The system provides full transparency by tracking every R2 from the donor to the served meal and rewards repeat givers with “HopeCoins.”
Andra Nel, KFC Africa’s Head of Brand Purpose and ESG, praised the young innovators.
“The Biggest Hunger Hack showed what happens when young digital natives use tech for good,” Nel said. “They understand hunger because many have lived it and they understand technology because they were born into it. That’s the sweet spot for innovation with purpose.”
Stakeholders from business and civil society attended the event to see the pitches and explore ways to scale the ideas nationally.
Nel said the next step is to co-develop pilot programs with Add Hope partners, with the goal of showcasing results by the time the National Convention on Child Hunger convenes early next year.
“These Gen Z hackers showed how tech can supercharge reach and transparency,” Nel added. “Now the goal is to turn their best concepts into live pilots with our 128 feeding partners.”
