Vote for the Innovation Prize Winner!

We are pleased to announce the shortlist winners of AfriTech XYZ's most recent Innovation Prize. All winners will receive in-depth support including access to experts and opportunities that will challenge them to think bigger, build quicker and more
sustainably. Through the prize, we also offer a small amount of cash to the winner to help them build out their innovative technology even further.

Your vote will decide who wins the financial prize of up to £1000.

The Innovation Prize is delivered by AfriTech XYZ and our expert partner at Hogan Lovells and seeks to select small groups of startups that have the potential to solve a pan-African or global problem. 

Sikadan Homes is a property management firm using technology and financial innovation to provide affordable housing solutions to the low-income population in Ghana. 

Started in 2020, it launched Smart Rent in 2021 as the tailored solution to the challenges confronting low-income households in the house rental space. It is a non-loan renting plan that offers renters a monthly payments plans using sustainable revenue models as many landlords only accept yearly payments in advance. 

Founder, Justuce Offei Jr is an award winning entrepreneur with a backfround in engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Ghana. 

Justice shares, "More than 1.5 Million low-income households are in need of an affordable housing solution in Ghana each month. These groups of people have to raise almost 1 or more years in advance to be able to have decent accommodation. This has also increased the number of slum dwellers in our major cities.  We are humbly calling on your support to help us win more grants such as this to support our goal of giving these low-income households a pay monthly renting plan via our product Smart Rent."

Find out more about Sikadan Homes.

ShortKode Technologies Limited was founded in April 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic by teachers, a school owner and a web developer out of a problem they saw as student's school performance in Nigeria kept getting worse as a result of poor teaching and student support given from teachers. 

Nigeria has more than 117,000 nursery to senior secondary schools, with private schools increasing from 55,000 in 2018 to 75,000 in 2022, the number of teachers in schools has not increased. This means that youths that were supposed to get jobs are not getting jobs due to the fact that schools are using costly consultants which extort money from youths just for a teaching job. 

Their ultimate goal is to make better teachers for better classes, helping youths get out of unemployment by giving schools access to quality teachers for one-tenth of the cost schools spend on traditional school consultants without charging youths any fees after employment.

ShortKode have been on this journey 2 years and watched as the education landscape changed, and they are grateful to play a part in Nigeria's education sector helping schools give teachers jobs and supporting teachers in the classroom after they are being hired. 

They have been recognised by Impact Hub Lagos, MIT Solv[ED] and most recently the prestigious Afritech XYZ. 

Propser UKachi of ShortKode says, "We plan to give more than 1,000 youths access to teaching jobs as a result of the Innovation Prize grant. With your vote of support, 1,000 new people will get jobs before February 2023. Join us to help more youths get access to stable teaching jobs today. Thank you very much for your support."

Find out more about ShortKode.

Bukyia (meaning stove) was created to empower local food vendors (popularly known as Joints in Ghana, Kibandas in Kenya or Buka in Nigeria) to deliver Africa’s authentic and budget-friendly meals online and expand to new neighborhoods through cloud kitchens.

Bukyia understands the technology literacy gap in the space and have developed a practical way that allows the so called ‘informal vendors’ which consist of 95% women to be included in the digital economy. 

They do this by:

• Turning delivery riders into assistive tech agents. 
• Utilising nearby riders who accept the order on behalf of vendors through web platform.
• Vendors are then prompted through SMS to know a rider is on the way.
• Riders are recognized by vendors through Bukyia branding and they familiarize for priority access.
• Meals are then packaged in ecofriendly paper bags and delivered (90% through bicycles) to customers in real time.
  
  

Bukyia has secured partnership with UN offices in Ghana (including UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, etc) for corporate food deliveries in an attempt to cement their position as strong supporters of local businesses, inclusion and sustainability and have delivered more than 20,000 meals to 3,000 customers in 10 months of operating. Bukyia's ultimate goal is to be the fullstack cloud kitchens service provider for independent restaurants and caterers in Africa.

Founder Nathaniel Konadu Opoku shares, "There is an urgent need to support local food entrepreneurs now more than ever. The AfriTech XYZ prize gives us yet another hope that we can save the restaurant and make it inclusive in such tough economic crisis smeared with rising inflation."

Find out more about Bukyia.

PharmaServ is a health-tech startup. Founded in 2021, they are on a mission to trigger high-performing supply-chain function, boost resilience, increase satisfaction and better position their customers to achieve their growth ambition.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 80% of healthcare sales orders are still made over phone calls and monitored manually. This has posed several challenges which includes, sales fraud by medical sales teams, inaccuracy of local purchase orders, loss of critical data, delays in delivery of essential medicines and debt challenges.

PharmaServ have set-out to solve these problems by building a SaaS product, which automates the process of sales orders, tracking sales team performance, reconciling incoming purchase orders, payments and invoices for health brands. This is a labor-intensive process that is still predominantly manual for most local companies in emerging markets. 

They are building a future where small and mid-sized healthcare brands can seamlessly manage their sales pipeline, have a better visibility of their product distribution in both urban, peri-urban and remote healthcare facilities. PharmaServ's story has been one of persistence on the course, and building alliances within the internal and external stakeholders.

Founder Emeka Anyaora shares, "Every day is a new day full of opportunities and learnings and we are glad to be supported by the AfriTech XYZ team."

​Find out more about PharmaServ.

In this month’s episode, our host, Tosin Omowole spoke to Wunmi Akinsola, Founder at Fashtracker, an African digital fashion marketplace. Wunmi Akinsola is passionate about African fashion and has used her experience to build a curated fashion marketplace that caters to the needs of African fashion designers.

House cleaning and technology - Fichaya is changing the game in this sector with their technology-enabled cleaning platform. While most companies have been relying on technology for years now, cleaning businesses have only started adopting tech recently, by helping simplify mundane processes for both the client and the customer alike.

Founded by Jim Ofodum and Steph Ogundoyin, Fichaya is a technology-enabled company that provides cleaning and organising services. They are super customer-focused and strive to create the best experience for every customer by using technology to streamline the process from enquiry to managing customers' homes and offices on a monthly basis via fichaya.com.

The company uses technology to amplify easy access for its customers to book and subscribe to monthly plans while providing a mobile application that enables its cleaning associates to view their cleaning schedules, see how much  they’ve earned each month etc - a first of its kind for any Nigerian company in the cleaning industry.