GOGOAFRIKA , a crowdfunding platform launched June this year in Nigeria hoping to a go-to platform for startups in Africa has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds from friends, families and lovers of tech worldwide.
Terry Nyikwagh, founder of GogoAfrika told TechMoran,” We have just launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign this afternoon and we plan to raise just $15,000 to help us build a standard crowdfunding platform for the African market.”
In the campaign he adds that apart from Africa, the rest of the world has a stable credit card system, the rest of the world have banks for loans and grants and family and friends are part of the ecosystem making it an environment hard for startups, and ideas dieing with no hope of funding.
Nyikwagh however sees hope in crowdfunding.
“With the rising degree of internet penetration in African as well as the global acceptance of the Crowdfunding concept, we believe that these developments are the very hope that African Startups have been waiting for, he said.”
Agreeing that Africa already has some crowdfunidng platforms and that GogoAfrica won’t be the first. He said research on such platforms indicate they are regional in a way and most backers want to understand and connect easily with ideas that they are familiar with to support them.
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“African campaigns have not been really successfully on global platforms because of their local nature. Africa therefore needs a platform that will be majorly patronized by African backers or people who understand Africa,” he added.
Another problem he sighted was the lack of a standard payment system for the whole continent. PayPal, the most commonly used, is yet to sign up as many African users as possible, “With a lot of African countries off the list, it makes it difficult for Africans to donate to campaigns. We want to build a platform with a multiple payment system so as to ensure that both the banked and the unbanked demography is able to participate in the crowdfunding exercise.”
To him GogoAfrica is not competition with bigger crowdfunding platforms such as Indiegogo but it will simply be a bespoke Crowdfunding Platform with features that resonate with the realities of the African market such as multiple Payment System with Credit Card online payment system, MobileCash: Using phones to support campaigns and Direct Bank Deposit: Using the bank system to support campaigns.
He expects them to build a platform that can also support project categories such as startups or SME’s, Community projects and Charitable causes and open to both donations or lending.
This guys are at the moment looking for $15,000 to run a well equipped office donated for a team of 5 volunteers/2 Co-founders. $10,000 will cater for the office and equipment and $5,000 for meetups and initial awareness campaigns.
Apart from money, one can give their time to mentor, blog about their projects or give trainings to up founders skills so as Gogo-Afrika becomes the leading crowdfunding platform for African ideas, creative projects and business startups to come to life.
