Startups from the African continent squared up shoulder to shoulder with counterparts from other parts of the world at the Seedstars World pitching competition on Sunday, 12 April and impressed big.
AgroCenta, a Ghanaian agribusiness platform that connects smallholder farmers directly to the market online market was crowned the global winner of the pitching competition which comes with $1 million in equity investment prize. Nigeria’s Edves – a digital teaching and training platform, went home with the prize for Transforming Education in Emerging Markets.
Seedstars World, now in its fifth year, is a global startup competition event that focuses on emerging fast-growing markets. Every year, it hosts around 80 local competitions, organises five regional summits before convening in Switzerland for the global competition.
Seedstars World 2018 was the largest to date, welcoming over 1,000 participants, investors, enthusiasts and over 65 selected startups from Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and Africa gathered at the SwissTech Convention Center in Lausanne, Switzerland for a chance to win the $1 million in equity investment. Twelve startups were chosen to present their final pitches during the day for the chance to win the prize.
The startups covered a wide range of industries including financial technology (Fintech); Education technology (Edtech); medical and bio technology (Med/BioTech); Insurance technology (InsurTech); clean energy technology (Cleantech); and nano technology.
Africa’s representatives at the Seedstars World included Medsaf (Nigeria), a health tech startup that won the regional competition in Lagos State, Solar Freeze (Kenya), which pioneered mobile cold-storage units powered by renewable energy, EMGuidance (South Africa), a healthcare startup; AgroCenta (Ghana) and Edves (Nigeria).
Michael Ocansey, a co-founder of AgroCenta, explained that “The northern part of Ghana is less developed than the southern part so a lot of the farming communities are really underdeveloped and a lot of the farmers are poor and do not know how to read or write.
“Last year, we gave them (farmers) seeds, fertilisers, and other services. The vision of AgroCenta is to improve the financial livelihood of every farmer and help them move from one to three or more acres and have more commodities to sell.”
