Lilia Lobato was the first Mexican to win the Technovation challenge with her OOL app. OOL focuses on social development and is the first mobile bridge to connect non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the community.
From Animal Poltico
For the past six months, Lilia Lobato slept less than five hours a day and drank more than five cups of coffee daily to stay focused. Her goal: to become the first Mexican to win the Technovation Challenge – an event that promotes entrepreneurship and the participation of girls and young women in technology through the creation of applications – and she succeeded.
At the age of 18, Lilia designed and developed OOL, an app that promotes volunteering , which earned her first place in the High School category and won a check for $ 10,000 , boosting her project.
Lilia explained that the award is a recognition for her team, made up of her teachers Erika Susana Durán González and Lourdes de Abigail González Chávez.
“What I want is that every person who hears OOL knows that we are a bridge between passionate people who want to change the world, ” she said.
When it won first place, the Mexican student’s app surpassed the Sniper teamwith the M-Safiri project and the New Dork team with the GroGreen app from Kenya and New York, respectively.
The OOL application focuses on social development and is the first mobile bridge to contact non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the community, explained Lilia Araceli Lobato Martínez.
At the moment, OOL is only available for devices with Android operating system.
“OOL is the first application in Mexico focused on volunteer work and social development, it aims to encourage people to appropriate their cities and be the difference that is needed. (…) This application allows Mexicans to be able to face the cruel reality that they live. Enforced disappearances, drugs, delinquency, lack of basic rights and services such as water and electricity, corruption and injustice; OOL is based on the theory of “Appropriation of Public Spaces” that allows citizens to improve their quality of life, simply by taking to the streets and helping in their community “, indicates the description of the app in the Google Play online store .
From Reuters
“A lot of people were constantly complaining everything’s wrong, but I found that no one was going out to the street to volunteer,” said Lobato. “So I decided to develop an app that’s a compendium of all the non-profit organizations, so we can learn what Mexico is building.”
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