Supporting Businesses and Telling Africa's Stories
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. On November 8, 2018, MEST Africa and Innocircle organized an Airbus Bizlab Aerospace Challenge Meetup in Abidjan to spotlight the budding aerospace industry in Francophone Africa, answer questions about launching a startup in the space, and introduce the Africa4Future initiative by Airbus to aspiring entrepreneurs. We were lucky to have Marouane Jebbar, Founder […]
Published on iAfrikan, TechNova and Top Farmer Kenya. I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no organic food. Do you? Listen, We will need to produce 70% more food than we do today to feed 2.3 billion people that will be added to the world’s population by 2050. And we will have to […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Mercy Orangi is the Technology Evangelist at Andela. Here, she talks about Andela’s pan-African expansion plans and platforms they’re building to support more female technologists on the continent. Earlier this year, Andela held its Women In Technology (WIT) Summit in Nigeria. What was the motivation behind that event? This was the first WIT […]
“Nigerian (tech) entrepreneurs need to show traction”…. I hear this all the time and whilst it is true, it still irks me when I hear it. They compare Nigeria to America and forget the myriad of problems that exist here. This diagram below shows a little bit of how tech entrepreneurship works in America. The […]
Published on iAfrikan, Business2Community and TechNova. Meet Kiah. Kiah is a 25-year-old freelance writer and graphic designer who spends most of her time on her smartphone. She, like the average digital consumer, spends up to 3 hours in the day on social networking and instant messaging. Kiah loves watching videos on YouTube and scrolling through […]
Published on Techpoint and Tech Nova. Too many times, when we speak about the future of Africa or the future of technology in Africa, we do so with an air of ignorant homogeneity. We speak of Africa like we speak of one country, and in so doing we [sometimes] forget that there are 54 countries […]
Published on TechNova, iAfrikan, Business2Community. While population growth determines the socio-economic prospects of a country, the age structure of the nation is just as crucial. By 2025, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will be home to almost a quarter of the global population aged 24 and below. And by 2035, SSA’s population will become the youngest in […]
Published on Business2Community. Care, Computers and Clean Energy If you’re thinking 2026 is still far away, stop and think again. It really is less than 10 years away, which means we are as close to 2010 as we are to 2026. Let this sink in; it will be useful as you read through this forecast. […]
I wrote this piece (in quotes below) a while ago and didn’t have the guts to share it. It was an expansion of a social media conversation I was having and I must say it was undoubtedly a difficult conversation to have. However, after recently being the only male on CNN’s #MeToo panel at social […]
A summary of my notes from the recent Women Techmakers Leads and Google Developers Groups (GDG) Summit held in Lagos, Nigeria. I woke up on Monday morning to an invite to the Summit from my friend, Aniedi Udo-Ubong, Developer Ecosystem Manager at Google (Sub-Saharan Africa). It was to a two-day gathering of Women Techmakers Leads and […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. He is referred to as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, one with no intention of starting a business who saw a problem and set out to fix it. Introducing… Sesinam Dagadu, the founder of a Solutions Company called tinyDAVID. tinyDavid was set up to develop solutions for the developing world, and SnooCODE, their first […]
In this video, I share info on how to get equity-free seed funding for your business idea or startup. I also share a list of accelerators around the world to help you get started on your journey. https://youtu.be/1jnqvbZDgdU < p style=”text-align: left;”>List of Equity-free Accelerators Around The World Ready to take a bold step into […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… Kelvin Nyame, one of three Ghanaian entrepreneurs, (including Rashad Seini and Kofi Amuasi), who founded MeQasa after receiving US$90,000 seed-funding from Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in 2013. MeQasa went on to raise US$800,000 from Frontiers Digital Ventures, a global VC firm in 2015, and is rising to be the […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… One of the stars of Nigeria’s recent startup success stories – fintech startup Paystack. Paystack was admitted into Y Combinator’s (YC) accelerator programme in winter 2016, making them one of the first Nigerian startups to join the programme. This was no small feat and it ushered in an era of international exposure […]
Published on MEST Africa Blog. Popcorn, big screens, and good conversation afterwards! On Friday, 21 April, join us for a special one-time screening of this new empowering documentary on female entrepreneurship titled: She Started It. She Started It aims gives a new face to the popular image of the tech entrepreneur: a female face. This documentary / film follows […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… Nana Agyemang Prempeh, one of four co-founders of Asoriba, a startup on a mission to revolutionise churches in Africa. Asoriba has been voted Best Startup in Ghana twice by Seedstars and Ringier/Pulse, Best Startup in Africa by Seedstars, and were participants in Techstars’ first cohort in Africa. How would you describe […]
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. Starting in January this year, Ashwin Ravichandran resumes his new role as the new MEST Accra-Incubator General Manager. Ashwin joined the MEST team in July 2015 as a Technology Teaching Fellow niched in design, scale/strategy and innovative technologies. Fast-forward to 2017, and he joins the MEST management team […]
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. Dziffa Akua Ametam is one of MEST’s new Communications Fellows. She’s also an entrepreneur, founder of Dziffa.com, a social enterprise that increases the global reach of local businesses by providing them with branding, marketing, and distribution services. Dziffa was awarded the 2014 Entrepreneur of the year by African Youth […]
Originally published on True Africa. ‘There’s definitely no pampering’ – how women in tech drive each other to achieve more Beavly is an online platform that connects people who want to learn skills with professionals who want to teach these skills. Run by Ijeoma Oguegbu and Barbara Okoto, it is one of two African startups accepted […]
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. This month, we are welcoming the newest member to the MEST family, Neku Atawodi, who is our first hire in Nigeria and will serve as General Manager for MEST’s Lagos Incubator. In this position, Neku will oversee incubator operations and strategy, startup support, stakeholder engagement, business development and fundraising efforts for MEST. She’ll […]
Originally published on True Africa. Tress is a hair inspiration app targeted at black women. It was created by Priscilla Hazel, Esther Olatunde and Cassandra Sarfo in Accra where they came together due to their shared love for dreaming, learning, building, traveling and innovating. This June Tress, which was founded at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), was accepted to the Y-Combinator fellowship, […]
Originally published on True Africa. To run a profitable business or startup, you need steady electricity, something most African countries lack. You need the internet if you work with technology… or are in 2015 with the rest of us. You need a good transportation system, investors, a healthy financial system. You need a support system… people […]
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. Hosted at the Meltwater Incubator, MEST Talks brings together skilled business and technology personnel, global capital investors, and budding entrepreneurs to share lessons learned, new trends observed, and actionable advice to tackle the rough terrain of the startup scene. This month’s Talk themed “Preparing for the global stage” […]
Published on the MEST Africa Blog. Hosted at the Meltwater Incubator, MEST Talks brings together business professionals, skilled software and technology personnel, and budding entrepreneurs to share lessons learned from their experiences, new innovation trends, and actionable advice to tackle the rough terrain of the business world. This month’s Talk was themed “An Intro to […]
