As you’ve probably seen in our events calendar, Apps4Africa 2012 is here. Like the previous one, the sub-Saharan funding competition challenge is split into three regional competitions for East Africa, West & Central Africa, and the Southern Africa region which Zimbabwe falls under. Unlike the 2011 edition though, the competition is not about coming up with three winners and honourable mentions; Apps4Africa has a new model where they will not select a strictly defined number of winners but will review all applications based on a given criterion.
The focus of the competition this year is on apps that promote job creation, help businesses connect with potential employees, and tackle other challenges faced by young African job-seekers. The applications will be judged based on their sustainability, scalability, profitability, and social impact. The new model, according to the Apps4Africa website, has been necessitated by feedback from participants in the challenge. Emphasis is also going to go to follow-on support for their various initiatives following the competition.
Winners of the 2011 edition included a Zimbabwean agriculture professional, who came third in the Southern Africa region for an application concept called UnsApp. You can read an interview we had with him here.
The Zimbabwe brainstorming session for the 2012 competition will be held tomorrow (8 November) at the Rotary Center in Harare. The brainstorming session will be facilitated by Coordinator of the competition, Marieme Jamme. The purpose of these sessions is to help prospective applicants understand the requirements of the challenge and to discuss possible problems and solutions, as well as to meet other entrepreneurs and developers they can team up with for the challenge.
Similar brainstorming sessions will also be held in Zambia, Uganda, DRC, Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria. The competition is open to any company, startup or innovator living and working in Africa.
We’ll obviously be attending the session, so, see you there!
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