Ghana’s teamMedRX was last week named winner of the inaugural MTN Entrepreneurship Challenge powered by Jumia winning a year-long partnership with Jumia, a Facebook Start Program to the value of US $15 000 and incubation at the MTN Solution Space at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.
Founded by Victoria Acheampong, Hayford Brako and Yannick Kabu Bosomprah, MedRX is a health platform that aims to connect patients to doctors and healthcare professionals in one single place via their mobile phones.
Nigeria’s Pass.ng and Tanzania’s Vicoba were the two-runners up and received US $5 000 each for marketing and further development of their websites.
Pass.ng is an edtech platform for examination revision in the country while Vicoba is a tool aimed at increasing financial inclusion in Tanzania by connecting users to informal investment groups and investment tools to help them manage their funds.
Launched in February 2016, the competition aims to nurture entrepreneurship on the continent, create jobs for the youth as well as solve major challenges in the society. The three winners all solve a major need in their countries and MTN and Jumia will help them expand to reach more users with a variety of services.
In a statement, Bankole Cardoso, the Head of Communications at Africa Internet Group said: “We recognize that the best way to have an impact in Africa is by investing in and promoting entrepreneurship. With that in mind, we launched this challenge with the simple goal to support the network of quality entrepreneurs around Africa and to help these entrepreneurs interact with accelerators/incubators and investors in their local countries and across the Continent.”
Now in its first year, the challenge involved startups from a total of 26 countries, 61 Universities and received 1529 applicants across the continent.
