Hearing the pitches after the end of the hackathon, I felt that the objectives of the day have been achieved. This was our first Open Innovation Hackathon that we participated in, and I think this will not be the last one. I think we have really seen the benefits of this tool and methodology during the hackathon. I know it's not easy to commit to disconnecting from all your other work for one full day, especially in the world we live in, where we are always dealing with ten tasks at once. Yes, a full day, it seems long. But at the same time, I feel that if we did not have the hackathon, it would have taken us three more months to figure out what we figured out in one day. So I think it's a good time investment and to have this space to really focus and build on the solutions together.

I think what is really great about the hackathon is the horizontal discussion type. We had a great mix of experts with very different kinds of expertise and we were able to exchange freely during the entire day in this safe space. It felt like going back to the university bench. I believe that those types of environments are really conducive to delivering an effective way to solving some of the issues around an innovation challenge.

I think it was a moment for us at the ILO but also for the challenge owners to reflect on a few essential questions. First, how can we guarantee that those innovations really meet the needs of child laborers and forced labor victims? Secondly, how can we ensure that we do not duplicate solutions and systems that are already in place in the target countries, the DRC and in Uganda? In our case, how do we also make sure that we truly understand the context and its sensitivities in which the solution will be pilot tested?

I think we also advanced a lot on this thanks to the many experts that connected for example from Uganda with their very specific experience and expertise that they were able to share. The hackathon allowed us to build this bridge to boost and identify innovative solutions, and to see how we can accelerate the progress towards the eradication of forced labor and child labor with digital technologies. The hackathon also enabled us to ensure that those solutions really meet the needs of our constituents on the ground, and that they are financially sustainable and fit the context. The next step now is to support the plans developed today and implement the solutions together with our partners in Uganda and the DRC. Thank you to the participants and experts that gave us some of their precious time during the event, and thank you to Open Geneva and Unitar for making us realize that hackathons exists and that they are an effective tool; and last but not least, thank you to the ILO management for supporting us with this ideas that sometimes looks a bit crazy at first.