World of Apps

Can mobile phone apps be designed to help make a better world? Life Apps challenges young software developers from around the world to visit remote communities, to experience their everyday hardships and create app solutions to improve their lives – a ‘life app’.

In the final episode of Life Apps, we look at young people around the word who are developing apps to solve problems from reproductive health care in South Africa to helping young minority adults in London who are “stopped and searched.”

Nanziwe Mzuzu works for Bozza, a social enterprise in South Africa, which reaches people through mobile technology. Nanziwe is researching an application to help young people with sexual and reproductive health information and advice.

From the streets of Soweto, Life Apps travels to London’s Shoreditch, an inner city district which until recently was blighted by decay and social exclusion but is now undergoing a renaissance as the UK’s own digital industry hub. It is otherwise known as ‘Silicon Roundabout’.

‘Apps for Good’ is an organisation which originally started in Brazil to harness young people’s ideas and energies to develop apps that could benefit local communities.

A young entrepreneur has developed an app that helps young minority adults who are ‘stopped and searched’ by the police, recording their locations and their accounts of the treatment they receive. 

We also meet a young Muslim school girl from Central Foundation Girls’ School who has developed an alarm clock with a twist.

So what have the Life App developers from around the globe achieved? And can mobile phone apps help make a better world?