URBUNX is a startup and scaleup acceleration program designed to enable African entrepreneurs to create sustainable solutions to urban challenges. After a rigorous selection process of 600+ application submissions from all over Africa, here are the profiles of 12 startups using technology and business innovation to solve critical societal challenges across the continent.
The goal of the program, supported by World Bank & UN-Habitat and in collaboration with ecosystem partner XNode, is to support local African founders from diverse backgrounds (including young people, females and ethnic minorities) through the exchange of knowledge, network and resources from the active and well-established startup ecosystems in China where the track record of innovation and scalability can be a valuable reference to aspiring businesses in Africa. The initiative further helps investors to de-risk their investment choices with careful selection and training of the founders through the basecamp program.
Here are the profiles of 12 startups using technology and business innovation to solve critical challenges across the continent:
A digital platform that splits bulk rent into easy monthly installments. Affordable housing proves a problem to cities everywhere, particularly in Nigeria where tenants are required to pay 12 months’ worth of deposit before moving into a house, further limiting the general population in accessing affordable housing. Kwaba makes affordable housing more accessible to low and middle-income earners in Nigeria by filling the financial gap.
Kudoti is a digital platform that improves efficiency and reduces the cost of waste management operations in emerging markets through digitization and automation. The solution allows for efficiency and operational growth in waste management companies.
Smartcore is a social enterprise and a digital learning content development agency providing access to visual, interactive, and local relevant digital to 12 Million secondary school learners in East Africa. Smartcore aims to bridge the gap in the Secondary Education System in Tanzania and Africa as a whole and helps students to fall in love with what they learn.
Kusini water makes mobile, solar-powered water purification systems from locally sourced macadamia nutshells. The water filters help bring clean drinking water and water security within urban and township areas in Africa.
Nigeria’s first hybrid ad network to buy and track online/ offline ads across multiple platforms. Go Ads, a media buying platform that helps brands buy and track online and offline Ads. This is done using seamless processes at affordable prices.
Empowering small-holder farmers through financing, technology, and market access. Extramile Africa aims to revolutionize the offline-to-online market space by combining fintech capabilities with extensive customer engagement offerings. Extramile Africa births unconventional, flexible and seamless financial multichannel/interaction options to aid customers’ experience.
Point to point connections in a wi-fi enabled shuttles and vans for the daily commuter. Komiuta is a public transportation booking platform that offers an ‘over the bar’ travel experience for commuters, optimizing driver and vehicle utilization while conforming to set industry rules, all this done through digitizing the transport marketplace.
A smart cooking stove that generates electricity by burning specially designed wooden pellets. Powerstove Energy designs and manufactures clean cookstoves that self-generate electricity to charge phones and light up homes. Powerstove has combined clean biomass energy, IoT Technology and mobile phone technology to bring clean energy to people living in the Global South. The IoT Technology helps users to monetize their carbon offsets while cooking with the stove and a pay-as-you-cook energy home system provides 24 hours of emission-free cooking and electricity each day, also activates the charcoal bought back from customers and sell it back as fertilizers, water and air filters.
A distributed ledger to collect farmers’ data, do predictive analysis and process payments. Shamba Records is an ag-tech StartUp that digitizes the agriculture sector in Sub Saharan Africa. This is done by offering a platform that links farmers to markets, processes payments, perform a credit score and deploy sensors to monitor crop/livestock production. The company leverages cutting edge technologies such as blockchain to ensure a transparent value chain.
Africa’s first e-bike with quick-replace battery available on a lease-to-own finance model. Ecobodaa is building Africa’s first affordable electric motorcycle taxis for the mass market by reducing operational costs for riders and reducing emission rates.
A digital wallet to help businesses get online, process bills and collect payments with ease. Digiduka is building a platform that empowers businesses to sell online through social commerce in Africa. The approach is to build up the underlying digital infrastructure needed to answer immediate customer needs i.e. digital payments and bill payments, before introducing the digital storefront.
A leading health-tech firm in Ethiopia is spearheading efforts to transform healthcare delivery in the country for the last four years. Through a digital platform where clientele can access bookings, medical records, data analytics and more.
If you are interested to learn more about the startups and their progression through the Basecamp, tune in on the ‘URBUNX Demo Day’ taking place on the 19th of November 2020 between 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm.