Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. We talk a fair bit about getting more girls to code.

And we wanted to hear about the issue from some hacker girls directly.

Hi, I'm Soma from Nigeria.

I'm Praise David from Karasheva State, Nigeria.

I'm Jacqueline and I'm from Recifee, Brazil. I'm Salma Hadaysham and I'm from India.

The voices you just heard are four high school girls representing some of the finalists

in this year's Technovation coding competition.

And as you'll hear, also representing the future of tech.

We had a chance to sit down with the jet-lagged software

engineers in San Francisco before their final presentations at the competition to hear about the

mobile apps they created, the culture of coding in their home countries, and what's coming

next for their nascent software empires. The apps themselves were designed and built by the teams to address a

particular problem that each of their communities faces. So the team from Nigeria tackled the

increasing trash in their home cities by building a mobile app that provides on-demand trash pickup.

You can think of it as a marketplace of trash haulers connecting to people that need their trash picked up.

So after a lot of brainstorming, we decided to come up with the app that would help users,

that to help people to sign up color cards to come to their different houses and pick up the trash.

The Brazil squad designed a game to teach kids better water usage habits for their

parched region of the country.

In our country, there's a lot of water, but in some states and cities, people suffer

with the lack of it.

In our group, one member of the group, she suffers with this problem every two days. So we decided

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