AfricanStockPhoto has won the International region’s Technology prize in the Landrover BORN awards founded by Jean-Christophe Chopin eight years ago to celebrate creativity in design lifestyle combining functionality and desirability.

This year, the jury is celebrating products that demonstrate unrivalled, peerless design. The forty-two winners from each of the six regions will now compete in the Global Final. The six winners will be announced on October 4th at the Design Museum in London.

 There are 6 regional competitions (UK, Germany, US, etc, and one “rest of the world” or ‘International’) for each category.

“We won the ‘International’ region award for Technology category. There will then be an overall winner in each category, picked from the 6 regional winners. That overall winner will be picked in October,” said Sitati Kituyi, co-founder AfricanStockPhoto and an immediate former CTO at Frontline SMS.

According to Sitati and his co-founder Dicky, a former creative lead at Radio Africa Group,

Content about Africa is often portrayed with stereotypical visuals, partly due to the difficulty in finding imagery away from generic and repeated themes of tribesmen, savannahs, perpetual struggle and poverty.

AfricanStockPhoto’s ultimate goal is to create a platform that allows a more authentic African visual story to be told.

“The distinct lack and inaccessibility of authentic African imagery available for legal download and use. The African imagery that does exist on iStock, Shutterstock is limited and hard to find. There are plenty of talented African photographers who’d make excellent stock photographers, but not many with access to the payment methods supported on the large international platforms,” said the team.

As a multimedia designer for 10 years, Dicky  always found it unusually difficult to get great quality, authentic African images to use for various advertising efforts. This Is also clearly evident in the number of billboards around in Nairobi, using caucasian models instead of local models due to lack of photography.

Launched in February 2017, the platform is solving the accessibility problem for African photographers as well with flexible mobile-money payout options, giving them a way to sell their images through a stable and secure platform.

The platform works a lot like the established stock photography platforms: photographers upload imagery, people can search and buy it online, and we take a cut for every sale. Photographers on our platform keep up to 70% from sales, a lot higher than the industry average. Once a contributor has made some sales, they can cash out using mobile money platforms that are popular in Africa.

At the moment, the site has about 400 photographers from across the continent contributing imagery, and a database approaching 10,000 images and growing.