The next wave of apps may not come out of Silicon Valley but places like Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda.

That’s what organizers of the Apps4Africa contest are hoping, anyway.

East African software developers are rushing to meet an August 31st deadline for the contest. It’s sponsored by the U.S. State Department as well as three regional non-profits. The winners will get money and gadgets for coming up with the best apps to solve problems in East Africa. But more importantly, organizers say, is that the competition has jump-started a dialogue between developers and NGOs in these countries. And some of the software platforms recently developed in East Africa like Ushahidi are already getting widespread usage around the world. Last week, we looked at that platform’s use in flood-ravaged Pakistan.

We speak with one of the contest’s organizers, Josh Goldstein of AppAfrica. And we hear from one of the judges, Anil Dash, about what developers in the West could learn from emerging tech scene in Africa.