BRCK Often technology is transported from the western world to Africa. But even the cell phone signal sometimes is a problem. These are the challenges you face in Africa that we have to design for. If we show the capacity to produce high quality hardware here in Africa, we can start opening minds. (Mark Kamau, User Experience Designer)
Ushahidi We are working with the ordinary citizens, to be the ones who are sharing first hand reports about anything that’s happening around them. Having them feel empowered, telling us what they think, telling us what they see. (Angela Oduor Lungati, Director of Community Engagement)
AB3D That is the general mentality here: People don’t give up on things once they break down. It has to break down like fifty times before you surrender it. 3D printing in Africa could solve local problems. We have such challenges with getting things or producing things locally. Now you can produce your unique things easily, faster and less expensive. (Roy Ombatti, Founder)
PayGo Energy Our customer segment uses a lot of fuel. Most people are cooking three times a day. So it’s a very viable market segment to target. It’s kind of funny that most people are staying away from it. (Laura Talsma, Co-Founder)
iHub Nairobi You cannot exempt impact in Africa. Because the majority of problems, that we have here, they are social types of problems. If it’s education for instance, if it’s health, if it’s even logistics and utilities, it’s just all around that. E-commerce is huge, but if you look at the things people buy at the platforms, it’s not entertainment based stuff. (Sheila Birgen)
Gearbox Innovation needs to come from inside. You need to be authentic if you are coming up with new ideas. (Kamau Gachigi)
Eneza Education Our dream at Eneza is to unlock the potential of young people and I think how we can do that is very much making sure they are not limited to information. (Kago Kagichiri, Co-Founder)
Charis UAS You are able to detect diseases in your farm before time, you can detect any side of the farm that has a problem and you can take action immediately before something wrong goes on. And it can give you a continual monitoring of how your fields are. (Teddy Segore, Technical Director and Drone Pilot)
ARED I think social enterprises is the next step to NGOs. I think NGOs have a short term approach and I think social enterprise are more long term and I think that’s the buffer that is needed to solve some of the biggest problems in the world. (Heny Nyakarundi, ARED,Rwanda)
SafeMoto The idea to start safe moto started when me and Nash we were just sitting in a bar having a conversation and we discussed that every time you would get on the back of a moto cycle within the first 10 sec you could tell if the driver was good or bad. So we had an idea, that what if the customer could be able to know if the driver was safer beforehand. (Peter Kariuki, Co-founder and Head of Software)
Bisa The magic of Bisa is: We are connecting you to doctors. And we are giving you a chance to speak up. So we are giving a voice to the voiceless. (Raindolf Owusu, Founder)
Kumasi Hive What I want for Africa would be that, in the next years we become more of not just consumers of technology but more sort of producers. (Jorge Appiah, Director)
Dext Every student in Ghana should have a science set in their bags, they should take them to playgrounds, they should take them to classroom, they should play with it in their houses. We want every student to have one. (Charles Ofori Antepim)
Farmerline Coming from a community where you see a lot of people suffering with agriculture. Being able to use your knowledge and technology to support them. That is the key! (Farmerline Staff)
MobiRecs It was very interesting to be able to see how blockchain is being used in health. A lot of time it’s been used for health records. Because it is incorruptable. Because it can’t be tempered with. So it is a safe way of storing patient informations. That’s how we got familiar with it. (Rhonda Boateng, Co-founder)