South Africa is currently chair of the G20 group of countries. They hosted a G20 Open Innovation Demonstrator Project on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) from September 2 to 5, 2025.
The hackathon "...forms part of one of the proposed deliverables for the G20 Research and Innovation Working Group (RIWG) in 2025, namely to implement a Demonstrator Project under the broader theme of Disaster Risk Reduction using Open Innovation (DRR-OI). The G20 DRR-OI initiative aims to harness digital technologies, shared data systems, and collaborative problem-solving to enhance global resilience to disasters, particularly in water-stressed and climate-vulnerable regions." (G20 Hackathon Organizer's Concept Note)
Team MapleByte, representing Canada This is our team blog providing an overview of our hackathon results, and a log/deep dive of the issues and challenges we encountered. Our members:
Benedicta Antwi Boasiako
Heather McGrath
Mikhail Sokolov
Nicholas Kellett
Yosef Gonzalez Samudio
Area of Interest We selected an informal settlement centred on Quarry Road / N2 Interchange Umgeni in Durban, South Africa. Picture of the area shown on Google Maps
We used this as our baseline because an excellent article, "A Perfect Storm" published in the Outlier gave us great insight into the suffering and issues caused by a historic April 2022 flood.
We could therefore compare our research efforts and findings against this real world example, in the hopes that future refinements of our results might one day help people living in informal settlements and affected by flooding - like those near Quarry Road. Workstreams
We divided the work up into parallel streams of activity, each led by a team member:
0: Overall Approach & Results
1: Settlement Detection (Mikhail)
2: Settlement Growth (Benedicta)
3: Flood Risk (Heather)
4: Stakeholder Policy, Awareness & Outreach (Yosef)
5: Team blog / websites (Nick)
Results This repository contains or findings and results. You can also view a team blog here at https://g20hack-maplebyte.climatechange.ca/