Canterbury student Hannah Duder will develop her youth voting app concept into reality with a $10,000 seed grant awarded by US-based Kiwi entrepreneur Derek Handley.

The grant is part of Handley’s Shoulder Tap initiative, where he’s seeking a right hand operator to work with him on globally impactful ideas in social enterprise.

Duder’s app is targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds and brings together party policies so users can swipe left or right for those they like and dislike, as they would with the Tinder dating app. “It will match what they’re passionate about with certain political policies you might want to look into a bit more,” says Duder.

“If you’ve used Tinder, you swipe left and right for certain policies, but you won’t now which party’s policy it is. It’s presented in an unbiased way from the start.”

She and Handley will plot future development in coming weeks and recruit people from among the Shoulder Tap community to help, she says. Duder was one of 100 shortlisted to work with Handley as part of The Shoulder Tap.

They sent video submissions which focused on issues like child poverty, financial literacy, education, innovation, health and wellbeing, and increasing voter participation.

That list of 100 has now been narrowed to five, of which Duder isn’t one. More than 1000 people from 30 countries initially applied. Duder is a former leader of the Student Volunteer Army, which mobilised support for those affected by the February 2012 Christchurch earthquakes.

She previously developed the Suggestion Box app, which organisations can use to bring together feedback from customers.

Suggestion Box won the apps section in the Entre student entrepreneurship competition at Canterbury University last year.