Startups From Nigeria And Ghana Hold The Centrestage At The Digital Africa Conference 2018
In today’s fast-evolving world, there is hardly any impediment to new stuff coming up and transforming the planet for good. The Digital Africa Conference is Africa’s popular consumer technology show which is held every year, providing the right platform for brand showcasing and reputation enhancement. The participants, which are usually startups, are at this exhibition presented with the significant opportunity for unrivaled networking and a much-privileged passage into the crib of strategic partners, investors and prospective customers.
The 2018 edition of this conference and exhibition focused on the substantial achievements in Science and Technology of the African terrain as well-formed a course for the future. Africa boasts of the oldest record of human technological progress in the world, but, unfortunately, only a handful is informed of these accomplishments. This owes to the most glaring fact that the history of Africa, beyond ancient Egypt, is seldom publicized.
With the theme “Africa’s Tech Renaissance” this year’s Africa Digital Conference held from 5th through 7th of June, and West African startups made us proud by emerging as winners of the startup pitch with one year of mentorship from the Digital Consult. The winners were Hubs.ng, a Nigerian startup and FarmCap, a startup from Ghana. These startups were curated by Network of Incubators and Innovators in Nigeria (NiNe) to pitch their ideas.
Hubs.ng is the first digital ecosystem to emerge in Nigeria, tailored to suit the daily physical system of the country with a focus to creating a digital environment with the kind of services that every Nigerian citizen uses on a daily bases. The platform is set to form a free digital ecosystem with shared resources for improvement and the freshest of opportunities. This startup provided more than 70% solution to the bottlenecks discussed by the panelist at the conference. Their growing enterprise is building a digital platform with services birthed from the inspiration by the natural ecosystem, hence, making provisions for tech tools and services that will go in nautical miles to foster better life and all-round development.
Farmcap, on the other hand, is a Ghanian Agritech platform from smallholder farms in Africa. The resolve behind this startup is to promote agriculture as a viable career option as well as a new class of assets. The platform affords users the ability the browse through a list of farms and opt for the ones they mostly find interest in, and commit finance to it. Once these funds are invested and used to further real-time cultivation, with the use of state-of-the-art internet of things (IoT) devices for data collection, investors at the end of the harvest season get their returns upon the sales of the yields. They also provide the perfect market to farmers to easily connect with right buyers at competitive market rates while being in the reception of their returns on investment (ROI) either as cash or farm produce.
The event was held in Abuja, Nigeria and the third phase kicked off with a digital faceoff which featured tech-and-mobile-app-friendly startups from Nigeria and across Africa. Amongst other startups such as Lattafi, Ubytz, and Foodgatsby, these two West African enterprises pulled through and brought it home. This elicits some pride for the two neighboring countries, Ghana and Nigeria and the whole of West Africa, as they are being represented as significant contributors in the continent and the world at large.
