Team Vomo wins 2026 MTN T3kyer3ma Pa Hackathon

Team Vomo has won the 2026 edition of the MTN T3kyer3ma Pa Hackathon held at the University of Ghana after beating other teams in a fiercely contested digital and innovation battle. Team Vomo won with an application that enables persons with disabilities, especially the visually impaired, to send and withdraw mobile money and perform other digital transactions.

The team received GH¢70,000. Team Code Craft placed second and received GH¢20,000, while Team Kasapon took third place with GH¢10,000. Senior Manager for Digital Analytics and Monetisation at MTN Ghana, Kwame Manu, urged Ghanaian students to build homegrown digital solutions, saying MTN’s ambition to lead digital solutions for Africa’s progress requires people to build the solutions.

He noted that global AI platforms such as Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude were all developed by people. He said the hackathon was organised to encourage Africans, particularly Ghanaian students, to build solutions that address local challenges. “We want to reach a point where we can refer to their innovations just as we do today with global platforms,” he said.

Mr. Manu said students from the University of Cape Coast, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and other universities participated in the event. He urged them to stay in school, join hackathons and collaborate to develop their ideas. He said inclusion is a key focus of the initiative, explaining that solutions must be accessible to everyone, including persons with disabilities.

He said the name T3kyer3ma Pa, which translates to “Good Tongue”, reflects the emphasis on communication and inclusion. He cited participants building applications that allow users to buy airtime or data through voice commands. “A person with visual impairment could speak to their phone and say, ‘Can you buy me GH¢10 worth of airtime?’ without having to navigate the screen,” he said.

Mr. Manu added that MTN will partner with teams behind promising solutions and support them through incubation, mentorship and industry exposure to turn their innovations into practical household solutions. The main objective of the MTN T3kyer3ma Pa Hackathon is to empower communication through technology for Ghanaian languages and bridge digital gaps for local language speakers and persons with disabilities.

Emerging from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab at the University of Ghana and sponsored by MTN Ghana, the hackathon focuses on promoting digital inclusion and accessibility, supporting Ghanaian languages and local culture through AI and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies for languages like Twi, Ga, and Ewe, and solving real-world challenges in sectors including mobile money and financial services, healthcare, education, customer service, speech translation and emergency safety information.