Eastern Partnership Civic Tech Hackathon 2026 announces its winners

Sixteen teams of civic activists, developers and designers from across the Eastern Partnership countries worked to turn their innovative ideas into practical solutions to civic challenges in the region during the EaP Civic Tech Hackathon in Chisinau, from 17 to 19 April. On Sunday, five top-scoring ideas were selected to compete for EU support to bring their products to life.

Organised by the EU-funded Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility, the hackathon built on a three-week online incubation programme, during which the selected teams worked with mentors to refine their ideas, strengthen their concepts, and prepare for the offline event in Chisinau.

This year’s teams worked on a wide range of civic tech ideas: from AI-powered tools that detect disinformation, political manipulation, and hate campaigns to platforms that strengthen the resilience, cybersecurity, and well-being of civil society organisations(CSOs). Other teams developed solutions to support refugees and internally displaced persons, to promote media literacy and dialogue, to support women in vulnerable situations, and to help citizens better understand what is happening in their communities.

The following solutions were nominated for the 2026 EaP Civic Tech Award:

• An online system for Ukrainian CSOs providing services to find potential partners to implement citizens’ requests for support and generate reports on the completed requests.
• An AI-powered system for fact-checking the consistency of politicians’ public statements.
• An AI-powered system for CSOs to self-assess their capacities and receive recommendations for strengthening their organisations.
• An AI-powered platform to monitor cross-border spreading of pro-Russian narratives.
• An online platform allowing scholars and researchers to verify published academic articles and research papers for the correctness of the information and citation, and to detect AI-generated content.

The nominated teams will now be invited to submit detailed applications for the next stage of the competition. One or more winners of the 2026 EaP Civic Tech Award will receive financial and expert support from the European Union. The winners are expected to be announced in June 2026.

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