About the challenge:

Our Giant Leap Hackathon 2022, aims to bring people from all disciplines and backgrounds together, to work on the next best idea for gender equality. The event is going to be held the 14th & 15th of August in the Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). 

About the problematic:
"How can space technology and know-how help make a leap forward towards gender equality? Build solutions for your communities main challenges to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, using Space Tech."

Possible issues to address:

1. Gender equality in farming: Women make up nearly half of all farmers (possibly more), yet they have less productive fields than men. Why? Gender disparity. Reports show that women have less access to critical tools and resources like fertilizer, seeds, training, and farm labor. Even when they receive equal access to these resources, it often doesn’t lead to equality of income. As the primary caretakers of children, women struggle to get their goods to market, particularly in rural areas. [ 1, 2]
   
   

2. The high price of collecting water: More than 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to clean water at home. According to UNICEF, women and girls spend a collective 200 million hours collecting water every day. This is time that they could spend studying in school, in employment, or running their own business. One study shows that school attendance increased by as much as 12% when water was available within 15 minutes of home. For every minute that a woman spends collecting water, a minute that could be used to earn and save money is lost. [1]
   
   

3. Child marriage and other forms of gender-based violences: According to UNICEF, today, more than 700 million women were married before they turned 18. More than a third of them — about 250 million — were married before the age of 15. Compare that to 156 million boys married before the age of 18, and it’s clear that child marriage affects girls much more than it affects boys. But how is child marriage linked to poverty? Girls who marry young are less likely to receive a complete or quality education, and child brides often suffer from higher discrimination, violence, and increased maternal mortality rates. [1, 2]
   
   

4. Lack of representation for women and girls at the policy level: Keeping women away from the decision-making table means that legislation and public policy is unlikely to be created equitably. Consider, for instance, the lack of recognition for unpaid care and domestic work. Or consider, at a higher level of severity, the threats that women face every day based entirely on their gender. [Source 1]
   
   

5. Better access to public sanitation and healthcare: Some communities in the world suffer from lack of sanitation and unequal access to public sanitation and healthcare. This endangers women’s health, and in some particularly challenged places it even grows into a life-threatening safety issue. [3]
   
   

6. Lack of sex-disaggregated social protection data [5]
   
   

   Certain keywords or sections of this topic are very important, and must be defined in order to better understand the scope of our hackathon.
   

   • space technology : by that, we mean all technologies developed for the space sector or in the space sector such as launcher technology, astronaut sport equipment, space suits, laser-communication systems, etc.

   • space [...] know-how : by that we mean all that is not science-related, such as space law, space short development cycles, space methods, etc.

   • gender equality: why focus only on gender equality and not diversity as a whole? For our first hackathon, we wanted to focus on a very specific aspect of diversity. At DGE PG, it is very important for us to separate the notions of diversity (as a whole) and gender equality, because women represent more than half of the world's population and gender is one of the first (if not THE first) trait people are discriminated against in the world. In addition, since gender equality is a specific pillar of the United Nations (UN), Sustainable Development Goal #5,  we believe it deserves its own focus group.

   • make a leap forward: in what ways do we understand "make a leap forward"? We encourage hackers to come up with a great idea to progress on gender equality, in society as a whole. Since the space sector is part of society, hackers could choose to work on a specific gender equality issue within the space sector, but they are also absolutely free to work on any other gender-related issue they want to tackle (as long as space technology, or space know-how areas, are at the core of their solution)!

    

    

• Original idea (20%)
  
• Is the project financially viable? (20%)
  
• Achieving Goal #5 (20%)
  
• Using space technology (20%)
  
• Impact for gender equality by 2030 (20%)