The 20 startups will receive $100,000 upfront investment, and an opportunity to pitch to 150 investors at demo day. The 11 African startups include: Many African economies suffer from high levels of youth unemployment. In parallel, the data labeling sector is in significant need of low-income workers, but there is a lack of remote work infrastructure that is required to enable this work. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 80% of the economy is informal, which represents 150 million of small and medium-sized businesses. 90% of informal traders use pen and paper to run their business. The lack of consolidated business data excludes them from formal financial services.This financial exclusion limits the ability for the region to achieve sustainable economic growth. 3. Complete Farmer Complete Farmer is a cutting-edge technological farming protocols and innovations with a unique business model and logistics that are revolutionizing farming and creating an end-to-end digital marketplace that enables global industries to source agriculture commodities, grown to their specifications, by users from all over the world using IoT, big data, and blockchain technology. The Nigerian health care system is in shambles, rife with fraudulent doctors and counterfeit medications and less than 5% of Nigerians have health insurance. Those who cannot afford private care seek treatment from different facilities that are either poor-quality (public facilities), prohibitively expensive (private HMOs) or limited in coverage (telemedicine platforms). 5. Gradely NG About 200 million students in Africa (9 out of every 10 students in primary and secondary schools) are in school but not learning. One of the root causes is learning gaps not being detected early. Report cards come when it’s too late while homework is mostly manual and does not afford teachers real-time or targeted intervention. 6. Kadi Africa Informal logistics providers in the construction, mining, and oil & gas industries work on lucrative projects but are also some of the poorest people in the country, because they do all the work but capture very little value. Empower informal logistics providers to earn more, get paid quickly, and grow their business to help get more assets on the road to power infrastructure development in Africa. Ghana’s Kadi Africa aggregates short-term and long-term haulage projects and provides an AI/ML-based cost/risk prediction algorithm, payment API integration, and access to working capital to help them lower operating costs, reduce payment default risks, and speed up financial transactions. 7. Kwara 3 billion people are not profitable for fair capitalism, so they are un- or under-banked, leaving them vulnerable to predatory digital lenders, high risk pricing (justified by their thin credit files), data privacy abuse and public debt shaming. 9. PesaChoice LLC 8. Nash Businesses and individuals in Africa have many payment collection and disbursement channels, which leads to redundancies, obscurity, and downstream disruptions. For example, micro-financing schemes, which play a key part in financial inclusion, have to absorb huge costs in order to manage all the disbursal and payments channels for their relatively poor clients. Consistent salary payments do not match the unpredictability of expenses which is a problem for people that don’t have health insurance and where access to capital is scarce. When a relative or family member falls ill or gets in an accident, families need to find a way to raise money to take care of them. 10. Wala Digital Health In Africa, 50% of medical cases requiring blood are unmet, resulting in unnecessary death. Research shows that about 27% of all maternal deaths in urban Ghana are a result of postpartum bleedings. Maternal mortality in Ghana is currently 300 per 100,000 live births. This is a challenge throughout the African continent and developing world. 11. Wellahealth Across Africa, 70% of people are paying out of pocket for their healthcare, which leads to a delay in accessing care and in turn has huge ramifications on public health. Hundreds of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa die of malaria each year and although tests to detect the disease can lead to effective treatment, most never get tested because it’s too expensive and they have no insurance.
