Sixteen students from the University of Juba are currently giving up a week of their school programme to develop mobile phone applications for peace building and literacy in South Sudan.

The Boot Camp is the brainchild of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – UNESCO and the United Nations Development Program – UNDP.

With support from Web Africa, a Nairobi based ICT organization; the Students are going through an extensive workshop on mobile app development. 

Awol Endris, UNESCO Education Specialist, said the students will be exposed to all aspects of developing applications that relevant to share peace messages through mobile phones.

“There are two applications that are being developed; the PeaceApp and the LiteracyApp and we decided to work on these two applications because the subjects of these two applications would help in spreading messages of peace,” said Edris.

He hopes that the apps will provide the youth with an opportunity to use their mobile phones to improve literacy and numeric skills.

UNDP’s Peace Building Specialist, Julia Odumuyiwa, explained that the apps are designed to support efforts to build a culture of peace in South Sudan and engage young people to learn more about peace building and what role they can play.

When completed, the apps will be uploaded on the internet and users will be able to download them on their smartphones.

“It is important the student here they improve their skills in developing those applications we want to bring out the content and we also want the wider community to benefit from this,” said Julia.

Sebit Clement Juma and Poni Wani, both fresh graduates of computer science from the University of Juba, believe that the peace and literacy apps will communicate information to promote the concept of peace in South Sudan.

“We hope that this technology will change the people, what we have in mind is to send positive peace messages using technology applications developed by South Sudanese.”