Startup North-East

Startup North-East Virtual Incubation Program is a 4-month entrepreneurship program designed to help startups solve prevailing problems that affect aid distribution and data management in the North-East.

About Startup North-East

This project seeks to identify and support innovative and technology-focused startups whose activities can create solutions to the problems in northeast Nigeria, and especially address gaps in areas of aid distribution and data management.

Successful participants will be supported to deploy their applications to increase the availability of solutions that will support community, government and donor initiatives in rebuilding the region.

BENEFITS

Why you should apply

Grant – Business equity-free funding up to $3,000 each for 6 startups

Business Advisory – Get access to a pool of mentors and business experts

Partnerships – Access to network of partners

Key areas of interest for your solution

Applications should focus on the following areas:

• Poor Data Management
  This blindsides the aid organizations from knowing the actual gaps in the northeast, which mitigates the efforts of aid distribution and hampers accountability in the region.

• Misappropriation of relief materials and funds
  Local leaders sometimes divert and sell these relief materials, are nepotistic and bring only their family members to benefit from the aid provided by development organizations.

• Lack of insight
  Non-consultation with local communities to determine actual need

• Insecurity
  Fewer organizations are willing to move outside the capital cities of the Northeastern states, to deliver aid to other areas. This poses a challenge for many organizations to find implementing partners and delivering programs outside of the city

• Unqualified personnel
  The lack of trained personnel in handling aid distribution

• Extortion
  Sex for cash, food items and non-food items with vulnerable women and girls in the IDP camps

• Poor coordination and lack of good communication
  There is poor coordination and lack of good communication among disaster management stakeholders

• Poor data collection
  Poor identification of households that require these relief services

• Mishandling of equipment
  Physical cards provided to IDPs for identification, sometimes get missing or is reprinted so many times to enable them to collect the relief materials multiple times

Eligibility

In order to qualify for this funding, The following criteria have to be met:

• You must be operating in Nigeria
• The startup is in idea-stage or early-stage
• Can demonstrate the potential for future scale
• The solution must be a solving problem around the key area of interest
• Startups should have a well-rounded, complementary team i.e. in-house capacity for product vision (what to build), technology (how to build it), and business (how to make money from it)
• Founders should have some unique insight or compelling worldview deep domain expertise and/or a strong grasp of the landscape an eye for detail tenacity, high conscientiousness, and a bias towards execution
• Solution should leverage technology

Program Timeline

– Call For Application: 2nd Nov – 2nd Dec 2020

– Build Phase: 11th Jan – 19th Jan 2021

– Virtual Incubation: 25th Jan 2021 – 25th May 2021

– Demo Day: 27th May 2021