Mr Theo van de Sande, IATI Governing Chair, said the institution was doing its best to make their efforts worthwhile in order to help achieve the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda.

Mr van de Sande said this at the product presentation of finalists of the Hackathon competition in Accra.

Hackathon is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software projects.

The event was organised by the Africa Open Data and Internet Research Foundation, in partnership with the IATI and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The event follows a hacking competition that was launched last month, where young Ghanaian ethical hackers were tasked to make use of, and analyse open data that could affect decision making in the country, positively.

Competitors were in groups of four and made use of open data available online, on various sectors in the country including the agriculture and energy sectors by making projections and developing problem solving applications based on their analysis.

The finalists were judged based on innovativeness, uniqueness, how user friendly their inventions were, as well as how they considered data protection issues.

Mr van de Sande said the only way to reach anywhere near the SDGs or improve situations was to enrich and strengthen standards all the time."We have done a good job over the last 10 years and we can do better," he said.

He said the AITI would cooperate with other suppliers of data to see whether it could strengthen its platform.Madam Radhika Lal, UNDP Economic Advisor to Ghana and The Gambia, who chaired the function, charged the competitors to make the data they gather and analyse, speak.

‘It is important to combine different data sets to make them speak, thereby giving a clear visualization of the issues," she said.She added that there needed to be much more dialogue with the municipal and district assemblies, as regards feedback on issues bothering on open data.

The teams were tasked by a panel of three judges to take to gather data from different sources and put them to use to get the most efficient and supporting solutions possible. Which means that if adequate data was gathered, computing resources and algorithms can be used to transform them to be meaningful to decision makers.

The first team analysed open data on the Electricity Company of Ghana’s electricity usage by regions, deducing that the Western Region had the lowest number of customers, but the highest number as regards consumption.

The second group look at the agricultural sector, focusing on how waste from harvested plants could be recycled and used for animal feed and manure.The Third group also analysed open data on the agricultural sector but focused on how farmers and farms can be beneficial to each other, hence being interdependent.

The three teams were each awarded a prize of GH¢1,000.00.