Facebook launched the Bots for Messenger Challenge in February 2017. It covered the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Over 1000 submissions from 64 countries in the above regions were submitted, and from these only 60 managed to make it to the finalists' list.
The announcement was made yesterday through the challenge's official site. 30 Bots were selected from the Sub-Saharan region and 30 from the Middle East and North Africa region. Among these, there were 3 Ugandan bots.
These were Mama's League, Nutshell Bot and Daktari Health. Daktari Health and Mama's League were developed by teams from The Medical Concierge Group which is led by Dr. Davis Musinguzi, who took to Facebook to congratulate his team immediately he learnt of the results.
Mama's League, according to our interaction with it, is aimed at pregnant mothers. Nutshell, on the other hand, is aimed at giving you all the news taking place in Uganda - in a nutshell. Unfortunately, we didn't get any response from Daktari Health.
Could this be one of the reasons some of the participants think the entire process was unfair according to the posts and comments in the official Facebook group for the challenge.
From each region, Middle East and North Africa, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa, the 30 finalist teams will each win a Gear VR and mobile phone, one hour of Facebook mentorship, and up to $40,000 USD in tools and services from FbStart - a Facebook program designed to help early stage mobile startups build and grow their bots.
All student teams or individual student entrants who made it to the finals will win an additional $2,000 USD. Unfortunately - of the 12 students that made it to the finals - none was from Uganda.
There will be 6 overall winning teams, 3 from each region, and these will win $20,000 USD and 3 months of Facebook mentorship (1 hour per month). We wish the three teams luck!