The winner will be the one that receives the most public votes. Entrants submitted video pitches on their business in order to be awarded a consultation with GSMA’s start-up experts, one-to-one introductions to investors, enterprises and peers, and a pitching slot on the AHUB start-up stage. The winners will be given two all-access passes to AfricaCom 2019, as well as AfricaCom’s official networking party, AFest.
The five innovators competing for top honours comprise the following (in no particular order). To cast a vote in support, simply click on the link embedded in each name:
Greenfingers Mobile (GFM): a SaaS company that enables transparency in the vale chain and digital IDs for small farmers. GFM replaces traditional pen and paper-based farmer management systems with a platform that collects farm and farmer details, baseline and household data for impact measurement, records yields and commercial transactions in order to build credit worthiness, monitor field extension staff activity, and to ensure that effective and timely assistance is provided in the field.
GFM allows agri-businesses and co-operatives to meet the criteria of food corporations, and ethical standards for different stakeholders. It allows integration of APIs and is crop agnostic.
MiMi Money: a peer-to-peer mobile/blockchain technology company that reduces Africa’s high cost of remittances. Remittance costs range from as high as 14% to 7% for flat or even 2% (with Exchange) or 0.5% (without Exchange) of the remitted amount. MiMi Money is especially useful and relevant for millions of unbanked Africans, while at the same time, creating a multitude of jobs for computer and smartphone literate African youth, as end process agents.
One Kiosk: reshaping retail across Africa by matching customers and merchants together in geographical locations that make it easier to deliver the goods. One Kiosk is a safe, fast and secure platform leveraging GPS, AI and Machine Learning to match customers to merchants within a 1-2KM radius and bridges the delivery dilemma through their community One Kiosk Pros for timely delivery (ideally within 59 minutes).
Rainmaker: changing the way destinations do business in the tourism industry and allowing more money to flow to the destination instead of losing, sometimes up to 60% of revenue, to channel partners. The VISTA Destination Network Open Platform and Ecosystem is an award-winning one-of-a-kind supply site platform. It seamlessly connects all hospitality and tourism businesses (among other stakeholders) with each other. It creates competitive advantages for all hospitality and tourism businesses in the destination, including local tour operators, gaining back control of the visibility, reputation and distribution for the entire destination and related businesses to become less dependent on market-dominating value chains.
WIPO: Wireless Power (WiPo) cuts the power cord enabling autonomous operation for ultra-high-powered industrial equipment. WiPo provides wireless powered solutions for drone, electric forklifts and factory robots, allowing automatic charging using wireless power. They have developed a drone port solution that enables the autonomous operation of drones whilst automating charging of drone batteries without the need for human interaction.
Voting will close on 18 October at midday South Africa time, and only one vote per valid email address is permitted.
* Visitors can register for a FREE AfricaCom 2019 pass here. For more information, visit the AfricaCom website.