A few weeks ago, Micah Foundation hosted Harare DEMO Africa Innovation tour and SMART Connect an Agri-Tech startup emerged the winner. DEMO Africa hunts for innovation ideas that can be converted into business ventures, all across Africa. Prior to the final event, DEMO Africa conducts innovation tours across the continent of Africa in selected major cites where entrepreneurs with ideas that can be converted into business ventures are awarded a chance to pitch their ideas at the final competition. This year the final competition will be held in Morocco and these are some of the finalists from across the continent of Africa who will battle it up in Morocco in October.
Johannesburg, South Africa
3rd July 2018 – The South African innovation tour held by DEMO Africa in partnership with Legazy saw a surprising turn of events having two teams qualify for the second round to compete for South Africa’s national spot. The amicably start-ups Get Hosted and Loyall came first in an event that took place at the Office Hub, Parkhurst Johannesburg.
GetHosted has built an application that provides access to spaces for all types of events ranging from work desks, themed parties and formal functions. GetHosted has adopted an AirBnB model for space rentals. Loyal1 is an end to end rewards application and have partnered with retailers in using Bluetooth beacons to send push notifications for consumers to use reward points. Additionally, Loyal1 is creating algorithms to analyse and understand the user buying behaviours of consumers and make recommendations to them and also to sell data to the retailers
Casablanca, Morocco
4th July 2018 – DEMO Africa in partnership with Technopark held its first Northern African innovation tour and team MOLDAIG are the pronounced winners of the Casablanca chapter. MOLDAIG is a healthtech startup that produces affordable diagnostic kits to detect diseases and viral infections.
A total of 13 teams showed up at the Technopark space all prepared to showcase their products in front of Khalid Machchate, Omar EL Hyani, Zineb Mazhar and Zouheir Lakhdissi who were the distinguished judges for the event. MOLDAIG emerged winners after a challenging second round finale where they battled it off against four other teams that had made it to the top five. The other finalists teams were Break, Nuppio learn, Interactive Rh and BIG4COM.
Lagos, Nigeria
6th July 2018 – Techpoint and CcHub in collaboration with DEMO Africa kickstarted the Western African Tour seeing Lagos tripling the number of winning startup teams. Accounteer, E-pump and Termii emerged top of the pool other country champs in the semi-final battles for regional representatives.
Accounteer is a smart cloud accounting platform that allows SMEs to create invoices, track expenses and receive online payments. Termmi helps other businesses stay profitable by driving customer loyalty across multiple marketing channels. E-pump is a solution that allows users, usually car owners and fuel station owners, to take complete control over every equipment on the filling station. With a proprietary hardware device, they can monitors product movement and ensuring volume integrity from the depot to truck to filling station tank to pump nozzles
