NSK AI · The Udara Project · 2026

The
Build.

Six weeks. Strangers across a continent. One product, shipped in public.

6

Weeks

$2,000

Prize Pool

3–5

Builders

30+

Countries

Not a hackathon

“A hackathon asks what you can fake in a weekend. The Build asks what you can keep alive for six weeks while the world watches.”

A hackathon is a room. The Build is six straight weeks in public.

01 · Premise

What it is

  • A six-week programme following the main Udara week.
  • Open-ended — crews choose the problem, the stack, the audience.
  • Strict cadence — public deliverable every week, hard deadline every Sunday at 23:59 WAT.
  • Public by default — every member posts video on LinkedIn every week.
  • Free at the point of use. Students spend no money to participate.

What it is not

  • Not a hackathon. The word is never used in any communication.
  • Not a pitch competition. Crews build products, not decks.
  • Not graded on polish — graded on what was built and whether it shipped honestly, week after week.

02 · The Distributed Crew

The team is the hard part.

The single rule that makes The Build unlike anything else: every member of a crew is from a different country. No two builders share a nationality. The crew cannot share a room.

A crew is 3 to 5 people. Every member is from a different African country. Everything happens remote-first. They have six weeks to turn strangers into a company.

Crews learn to coordinate across borders, write things down, trust people they have never met, and ship despite the distance. No other programme on the continent is built this way.

“Your co-founder is a stranger in another country. You have six weeks to become a company. Then you ship.”

03 · The Plan

Six weeks. One product. No extensions.

Submission window closes 23:59 WAT every Sunday. A missed week is a permanent, public blank on the tracker — seen by every other crew and by anyone watching.

01

The Problem & The Blueprint

Form, find the problem, commit to the architecture. No application code is judged this week.

  • "Who hurts most" one-pager — who the user is, where they are, what hurts
  • 5+ validation conversations — audio clips, screenshots, or transcripts
  • Architecture diagram — system design, data flow, infrastructure, auth
  • Public GitHub repository — initialised, README, license
02

First Cut & Go Live

Something runs on the public internet. It can be ugly. It cannot be a slide.

  • Live product link on a free subdomain — anyone on the internet can reach it
  • Continuous integration configured — tests run on every pull request
  • Real commits distributed across the crew. No single-commit dumps.
03

The Hard Part

MIDPOINT

Technical depth is pushed. The first real testers arrive.

  • Non-trivial agent workflow, hard integration, or original model work
  • Feedback from 20 testers — verbatim, with context of what they were trying to do
  • Observability proof — error tracking, basic analytics
04

The Noise

Market the product without spending money. Distribution is earned, not bought.

  • Distribution log — what was tried, what worked, what flopped, with numbers
  • 3+ distinct organic distribution experiments — communities, content, referrals
  • Public analytics link the panel can open — real session data
05

The Hardening

Harden against real use. Deepen relationships with the people already using it.

  • Updated body of user feedback — what changed because of it
  • Bug-bounty round with documented fixes, or a load test with results
  • Security pass — no hardcoded secrets, basic OWASP checklist completed
06

The Ship

FINAL

Production-grade. Every member reflects on camera. Closes Sunday 28 June 2026.

  • Production-grade product — deployed, stable, handling edge cases
  • Tester videos — real users on camera, candid and genuine
  • Postmortem document + final architecture diagram + investor one-pager

04 · What It Teaches

The four loops.

01

Building

Taking an idea from problem to deployed product, in public.

02

Marketing

Putting that product in front of strangers without spending money.

03

Iterating

Listening to testers, breaking things, rewriting, hardening.

04

Communicating

Explaining what you built, on camera, every single week.

05 · The Rules

Short list. Public.

Acknowledged on registration.

  1. 01

    A crew is 3 to 5 people. No solo founders.

  2. 02

    Every member from a different African country. No two share a nationality.

  3. 03

    Crews choose their own problem. There is no brief.

  4. 04

    Free tiers only. No money spent on infrastructure, tools, or distribution.

  5. 05

    Every member posts a video update on LinkedIn every week, mentioning NSK AI and The Udara Project.

  6. 06

    Submissions close at 23:59 WAT every Sunday. No extensions.

  7. 07

    No crew is evicted. A missed week is recorded and shown publicly.

  8. 08

    The word "hackathon" does not appear in any participant communication.

06 · Disqualifiers

What gets a crew cut.

Disqualification is reserved for dishonesty or abuse — not missed weeks. A missed week is public and costly, but it does not remove a crew.

  • Falsified tester counts, performance numbers, or evidence
  • Two or more crew members from the same country
  • Spending money on infrastructure, tools, or paid distribution
  • Builds that are no-code only, with no original logic
  • Single-contributor repositories — one person doing all the work
  • Hardcoded secrets left in the public repository

07 · The Panel

Who reviews the work.

Kola O.

GOOGLE

Sumeya Hussein

NSK AI

Henry Mojekwu

CARDPLOT

Ifeanyi Okala

NSK AI

Vitali

ANTERIOR

Sai

ANTERIOR

The top three crews are announced on or around 5 July 2026.

08 · Timeline

14–19 May 2026

The Udara Project main week.

20 May 2026

The Build begins. Week 1 opens.

28 June 2026

Week 6 closes. 23:59 WAT. No extensions.

Week of 29 June

The panel reviews all final products.

~5 July 2026

The top three crews are announced.

NSK AI · The Udara Project · 2026

Six weeks.
One product.
Ship it.

Crews from across Africa. Remote-first. Free to join.

$2,000 split across the top three crews.

The full operating document is distributed to registered crews.