Europe’s largest tech trade show, Vivatech, which runs until June 17, is also hosting the AfricaTech Awards for the second year. It must be said that the presence of Africa has grown over the years. This year, AfricaTech brings together eight country pavilions (Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Senegal, etc.) and more than a hundred start-ups, in a dedicated space.
For the second year, the AfricaTech Awards, a Vivatech initiative co-organized with the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank) rewards the start-up considered to be the most innovative in the sector of the environment, health and finance. The African ecosystem continues to attract attention for its dynamism and inventiveness, with African entrepreneurs developing smart solutions that meet specific needs.
Invited to Paris, the nine selected start-ups were able to benefit from a great exposure but also the opportunity to build relationships with potential partners. Like last year, three sectors were selected, climate Tech, Health Tech and Fintech, but in the years to come, the IFC does not rule out opening a fourth category reserved for start-ups in tech-education. This year, the file selection work was much more difficult, with nearly 400 files submitted. The success of the first edition motivated many start-ups to try their luck.
The winners were announced at an official ceremony on June 15. In the “Climate Tech” category: Kubik is an Ethiopian start-up that turns hard-to-recycle plastic waste into sustainable, low-cost building materials. For Kubik, which started in 2021, this is a great success and a guarantee of rapid growth. “Our core business is building affordable homes for everyone. We do this with recycled plastic. We remove plastic from the environment to turn it into a brick. We provide a solution that lowers the cost of construction. Between the roof and the foundation, you can replace everything with this type of brick. There is no need for cement,” explains Mickael Tekebe, Kubik’s operations director. The resulting buildings are more climate friendly, more sustainable and more affordable than traditional solutions. With increasing urbanization and a rapidly growing population, Africa can benefit significantly from Kubik and other similar technological innovations that promote sustainable urban development.
“Selected and invited here, we seek to build good relationships with partners, but also to meet other start-ups in order to learn from their experiences. In Ethiopia, our ecosystem is relatively undeveloped, but growing. On the African continent, we represent the second population as a country. But if we look in terms of investment and start-ups, in fact, we are at the bottom of the table. Between $10 and $20 million was invested in start-ups in Ethiopia last year. Our neighbor, Kenya, gets roughly $700 million, for a population half the size of ours,” he continues.
Winner of the “Health Tech” category: Waspito, a Cameroonian start-up created in 2020, offers video consultations with doctors, mobile laboratories and pharmacy services, all connected by a social health network. “We have around a hundred consultations a day in Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire and we will be present in Senegal at the end of July”, explains Jean Lobe Lobe, the founder of Waspito. On this telemedicine network, there are 800 doctors. “At the start, the most difficult thing was to recruit talent around me, but also to raise funding. We are now looking for more senior talent, engineers and an administrative and financial director. Fortunately, we were able to raise almost $6 million, which we have just completed here with commitments from the World Bank and Proparco (AFD subsidiary dedicated to the private sector). The World Bank helps us with financing and connecting with insurers in the field of health. Only 3% of the population in Cameroon has health insurance. Insurers are now targeting a less affluent clientele. With technology, we are creating a lot of more interesting and cheaper products, in partnership with insurers,” says Jean Lobe Lobe. About 50% of the African population does not have access to the health services they need. Start-ups specializing in health technologies, such as Waspito, are helping to bridge this gap to expand access to services among the most disadvantaged communities.
FinTech Category Winner: Curacel a Nigerian company provides easy-to-use technology solutions to help insurers distribute their products, automate claims, processes and drive insurance inclusion across Africa . Its goal is to build the foundations that will make insurance more affordable and available to the next billion people in emerging markets. She raised $3 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Tencent, Blue Point Capital Partners, Pioneer Fund, Olive Tree Capital, Y Combinator and AAF Management and Elefund). Curacel continued to roll out its services in Egypt and Morocco.
“Last year with Vivatech, we had this idea of ??creating the AfricaTech Awards to highlight the innovation and the fantastic dynamism that is blowing in Africa. The objective was also to bring some of these brilliant African entrepreneurs to the most important European tech scene, here at Vivatech, in order to allow them to expose their innovations in front of other entrepreneurs and investors in order to show the capacities of Africa and the opportunities,” said William Sonneborn, Director of Disruptive Technologies and Funds at IFC. IFC has invested and leveraged over $3.4 billion in the African tech ecosystem (digital infrastructure venture capital) over the past eight years and growing. From a global perspective, African start-ups raised a record $5.4 billion in 2022, but this is still far below other regions of the world. Total venture capital funding in Africa represents just over 1% of global venture capital funding in 2022.
“As the leading tech investor in Africa, we are passionate. We give a trophy to the winners, but also we open our network of investors which is the largest in Africa. We can sometimes invest in award-winning start-ups but also integrate them into our network to help them accelerate their growth,” concludes William Sonneborn.
