Good ideas, excellent execution, a growing market and good investment are the key factors that will move African start-ups to the next level – DEMO Africa started a project to put these tools together to create a world class product/business. They organized a round table meetingwith over 40 participants, from investor bodies to business owners and international brands, and discussed this issue.
After this, 40 out of 500 Tech start-ups were announced to be launched with DEMO Africa in an event which held from 24 October, 2012 in KICC Nairobi, Kenya. After the pitching sessions, the judges declared that Maliyo Games, mPawa, Flowgear, Qabila and Sasa Africa emerged winners. This qualified them for mentorship and exposure to potential investors
Maliyo Games was the only gaming entrant in DEMO Africa. Oluseye Soyode-Johnson, (Co-Founder, Maliyo Games), of the Lagos, Nigeria based company, says that Africans are in need of locally relevant multimedia content. This, he says, is evident from the multi-million dollar film and song industry in Nigeria. As a result, he believes that a casual gaming platform providing African themed games on mobile and PC has potential. Among such games is mosquito smasher, a game where players squash mosquitoes across various levels. This game also has multi choice quiz on mosquitoes and malaria in between levels as an aspect of its social impact. Maliyo games says the casual gaming industry is worth $20 billion; the startup is seeking $300,000 in funding.
mPawa is a job matching service that connects companies with blue collar workers. An application developed by, Innokiq, the overall idea of mPawa is to bridge the gap that exists in the current blue collar recruitment space by getting blue collar workers into a centralized location and allowing employers to easily reach them. mPawa is based in Accra, Ghana and co-founded by Maxwell Kofi Efrem Donkor, Anthony Agyekum-Mensah, Nancy Neizer and Shadrack Boadu. Maxwell says mPawa has already matched 2,000 job seekers in the last 3 months and has raised $90,000. They are now looking to raise $100,000.
Flowgear makes it possible for business applications to talk to each other. With Flowgear, there is the freedom to choose from almost any combination of software systems to run a business without worrying about how to share information between them. Flowgear was developed in Gauteng, South Africa and co-founded by Daniel Chilcott and JJ Milner.
Qabila is a multimedia content crowd sourcing platform based in Cairo, Egypt and co-founded by Mahmoud Elshafie, Perihan AbouZeid, Mostafa Saeed, Amar Abu Shady and Ahmad Fatehlab. Perihan says that Qabila came about as a platform to provide better content than what was being shown on Egyptian TV. The platform was founded around the Egyptian Arab spring and rose in popularity with their content being featured in Al Jazeera. Qabila currently has 20,000 contributors and current clients include the World Bank, UNESCO and UNDP. The start-up has funded itself to date and is looking for an additional $250,000 in funding.
Sasa Africa is an e-commerce platform connecting offline crafts persons to online consumers. Through the use of a mobile phones, craftspeople upload their products via SMS and MMS; consumers can then find the various crafts on sasaafrica.com. After a product is bought and paid for, the crafts person receives a text message. They then have 48 hours to take the product to a mobile money kiosk where they are also able to collect their payments. The start-up currently retails jewellery. Sasa Africa has so far been in testing and plans to launch in the coming week. Based in Nairobi, Kenya and founded by Ella Peinovich, Catherine Mahugu and Gwendolyn Floyd, the start-up predicts it will have 600 retailers and 3500 products by year end. Sasa Africa has raised $125,000 through grants and prizes and is looking at raising $500,000. SasaAfrica’s target is 84 percent of women in Sub Saharan Africa who, it says, work in the informal sector, hoping to serve 100,000 artisans by 2015.
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