WoeLabs

Installed in August 2012, WoeLab is the first free laboratory of social and technological innovation of Togo, set up within the framework of the urban utopia “Lomé HubCité Africaine”​ developed by the platform L’Africaine d’Architecture and its creator Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou.

HubCité is an alternative and participative urban planning project that questions the classical regulatory and elitist approaches by proposing a model where the townspeople themselves take charge of the destiny of their neighborhood. This is thanks to the installation in a given territory of a network of proximity hub-hubs, easily replicable, open to all, promoting the spirit of sharing and incubating a technology #LowHighTech that can easily permeate the most modest layers of the population. The small people having recovered, thanks to the frequentation of these places, the springs of the collective mobilization, reconquered on the duration, the ability to think, project and manufacture by themselves the city of tomorrow.

The ambition is to think about the African city around these places of innovation and make it “make”​ by companies that come out of it. The 11 collaborative startups created and incubated at WoeLab under the SiliconVilla program are built on the intuition that the entrepreneur has to replace the architect, urban planner or decision maker in the production of the city. They all work on one of the urban themes: waste management, mobility, the question of resources, etc.

WoeLab Zero is the first space configured to test this utopia and therefore above all the HubCité project’s parent laboratory.