Hasan Giire & Marlon Parker signing the agreement at the VC4Africa office
VC4Africa is pleased to announce a partnership between ExtendedBITS and RLabs. This partnership will see the first ICT Innovation Incubator launched in Somaliland. This will provide young people from Somaliland the opportunity to not just gain valuable ICT experience but also provide an opportunity to grow a new breed of African Technology Entrepreneurs.
Hasan Giire, the founder of ExtendedBITS explains in a recent VC4Africa published interview, ‘ExtendedBITS is an international enterprise with headquarters in the Netherlands and a software team in Somaliland. Our business model is providing Dutch (and later European companies) with extra IT-resources. Our office in Somaliland employs young IT-professionals. In this way we support the development of the local IT sector.’ For more information see the ExtendedBITS venture profile.
Many times the professionals working with ExtendedBITS have their own ideas and require support for them to be fully developed. The ExtendedBITS partnership with RLabs will build on this foundation and see additional support being put into place for ExtendedBITS entrepreneurs. RLabs (Reconstructed Living Lab) is an international network dedicated to supporting social entrepreneurs. The RLabs “main hub” is in Athlone, Cape Town with affiliate labs in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and Central Africa.
Through this partnership, the two teams will now be working towards setting up infrastructure in Somaliland. These are the first steps in a combined effort to drive innovation and seed a new social revolution in the Horn of Africa. At VC4Africa we look forward to following the teams progress and continue to lend our support.