By Florence Afriyie Mensah, GNA
Kumasi, Nov. 05, GNA – InnoFemme, a women-led non-profit organisation, will host a three-day Mobile Money Fraud Hackathon at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi from November 26 to 28, 2026.
The hackathon, organised in partnership with the KNUST College of Engineering Innovation Centre and the KNUST Engineering Education Project (KEEP), will bring together about 50 young people aged 16 to 35, at least half of them women, from different disciplines to develop solutions to mobile money fraud.
It will open on November 26, 2026, with a session open to the public, at which former fraudsters who have left the trade are expected to join other stakeholders to explain how the scams are planned and carried out, giving teams an inside view of the problem before they design their solutions.
Teams may build a technology product, a tech-enabled service, a community programme or a non-technical solution, provided it can be demonstrated to the judges.
They will work under four tracks: fraud detection, customer education, stopping fraud at the moment of payment, and community warnings.
Ahead of the opening, participants will take a five-day online bootcamp, delivered with InnoFemme’s learning partner, the 100 Million Learners Program at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, to prepare people from different backgrounds to work together.
The bootcamp will include a session from the GSMA.
After the opening session, the teams will spend two days building and testing their solutions before presenting them to a panel of judges.
“Mobile money fraud is not a problem that one institution can solve alone.
It affects traders, students, parents and businesses, and it will take all of us working together to stop it,” Ms. Ruthie Armah, the Executive Director of the InnoFemme, explained this to the Ghana News Agency.
The hackathon comes as fraud on electronic payment platforms continues to rise in the country.
The Bank of Ghana’s 2025 Fraud Report shows that fraud cases at payment service providers, which include mobile money operators, rose by 54 per cent in 2025, while the value at risk increased from GHS19 million to GHS37 million.
Much of the fraud involves social engineering, where fraudsters manipulate people into revealing their PINs or approving payments themselves through fake prize messages, calls from people posing as telecommunications staff, or requests to refund money supposedly sent by mistake.
In July, the Cyber Security Authority said tackling mobile money fraud required collaboration among regulators, telecommunications companies and law enforcement agencies, and urged customers to report suspicious transactions.
Ms. Armah indicated that the hackathon was not limited to coders.
This is because social engineering targets people as much as systems, therefore software and artificial intelligence engineers will work in the same teams as participants from psychology, social science, finance and business, as well as market traders and merchants.
“We want the strongest ideas from this hackathon to live beyond the three days.
Our hope is that telecommunications companies, banks and fintechs will take them up and put them to work,” Ms. Pearl Frempong-Smart, Director of InnoFemme’s Hack4Equity Program appealed.
Partners of the hackathon include the GSMA, CapitalPlus Exchange, the law firm Gyan, Sam & Opoku, MTN MoMo, the Data Protection Commission, Developers in Vogue, Mac Bennett Hotel and Didi Foods, with TechLabari as media partner.
GNA
Edited by Yussif Ibrahim/Benjamin Mensah
Reporter: Florence Afriyie Mensah
Email address: [email protected]