Eight African companies will hear this week if they are winners of the 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Week Startup Open. Results of the annual contest are to be announced on Thursday, November 21, as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week activities that kicked off in 139 countries on November 18 and will continue through November 24.
The eight African participants in the Startup Open are among 50 companies from around the world recognized by the Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) organization as the world’s most innovative new enterprises this year. Their selection was based on the concept and growth projections for their businesses, knowledge of their industries, and on a required “startup moment” that showed the company to be “open for business,” such as becoming incorporated, completing a first sale, or securing outside funding.
The eight African companies are:
1. ArabSkills.Com (Algeria), which offers badly needed interactive e-learning programs in the Arabic language. The flexible courses allow Arab youth and adults to acquire more skills and knowledge in a relatively short time and at a relatively low cost.
2. E-Lab (Kenya), which addresses Kenya’s pervasive electronic waste problem by transforming this hazardous e-waste into innovative products, including art pieces and sculpture for the art industry, jewelry and shoes made from rubber and recycled plastic found in electronic devices for the fashion industry, and “juakali” or metallic money boxes from copper and other metals.
3. Gigwapi Limited (Kenya), a listing service that leverages existing technologies (data mining) and Facebook graph to automatically mine content from its users, thereby ensuring a constant supply of events to the Gigwapi application. The application then uses social interests to match events with users.
4. Karibu Solar Power (Tanzania), which makes high quality solar lighting and mobile phone charging affordable through a patented modular solar lamp (solar panel, rechargeable battery with mobile phone charger, and light). An innovative business model allows consumers to pay in small increments.
5. SilvaSantana (Cape Verde), which specializes in the installation of smaller scale renewable energy devices targeted directly at individual consumers. New legislation in Cape Verde allows any person or legal entities to produce electricity using renewable energy sources, a move aimed at reducing electric bills by about 85 percent.
6. StartupHub (Ghana), a business development and equity-crowdfunding company that provides a platform to connect entrepreneurs and investors in a bid to raise seed capital.
7. Telehire Partners (Nigeria), which has built a massive database of skilled technical workers participating in online skill-based communities, such as like GitHub and StackOverflow, who have shifted their energy from looking for better work to making their work better. Finding top technical talent such as experienced software engineers, network professionals, graphic designers and IT professionals, is a major challenge for recruiters and hiring personnel.
8. Zimbabwe Entrepreneur Zone (Zimbabwe), which organizes affordable events and various campaigns to educate average Zimbabweans about the benefits of creating a sustainable business over taking a job, and provide them all the necessary information to start such a business.
A ninth GEW 50 company, Niaj Workman LLC, is based in the United States, but seeks to organize West Africa’s huge, fragmented informal economy. Founded by Bassey Bassey, of Nigerian origin, Niaj Workman is an online and mobile marketplace that connects consumers who need a service to qualified providers in their area. The platform effectively turns the manual, time-consuming process of finding and booking a local service provider into an efficient e-commerce experience.
Global Entrepreneurship Week was founded in 2008 by Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a U.S.–based organization that champions entrepreneurship; Carl Schramm, Kauffman’s former president and CEO; and Gordon Brown, former prime minister of Britain.
