11 African startups will join 9 others to form the 20 startups participating in the Norrsken Impact Accelerator 2021 in Stockholm for an 8-week sprint together with unicorn founders, mentors, and advisers.
The 20 startups will receive $100,000 upfront investment, and an opportunity to pitch to 150 investors at demo day.
The 11 African startups include:
Many African economies suffer from high levels of youth unemployment. In parallel, the data labeling sector is in significant need of low-income workers, but there is a lack of remote work infrastructure that is required to enable this work.
Enabling remote, data-labeling workforces with low-skilled workers in Africa by decentralizing online work outside cities, and equipping community organizations to train their local community. Jijenge sets up Cloud Labs with computers and wifi in underserved communities, trains low-skilled workers in advanced 3D data labeling, and using a virtual franchise product can train partners and facilitate data labeling processes online.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, 80% of the economy is informal, which represents 150 million of small and medium-sized businesses. 90% of informal traders use pen and paper to run their business. The lack of consolidated business data excludes them from formal financial services.This financial exclusion limits the ability for the region to achieve sustainable economic growth.
A digital tool to facilitate informal traders’ transition to digital. Asilimia is a fintech startup that empowers African small businesses by giving them a very simple and intuitive digital tool to manage their business via their mobile phone. They can record all their business transactions, pay their suppliers while saving 90% of their monthly transaction fees, and access to financial services to be more resilient. Asilimia aims at building the first operating system for informal businesses in Africa.
Complete Farmer is a cutting-edge technological farming protocols and innovations with a unique business model and logistics that are revolutionizing farming and creating an end-to-end digital marketplace that enables global industries to source agriculture commodities, grown to their specifications, by users from all over the world using IoT, big data, and blockchain technology.
The Nigerian health care system is in shambles, rife with fraudulent doctors and counterfeit medications and less than 5% of Nigerians have health insurance. Those who cannot afford private care seek treatment from different facilities that are either poor-quality (public facilities), prohibitively expensive (private HMOs) or limited in coverage (telemedicine platforms).
A user-friendly app that connects patients to low-cost health insurance options and doctors. With only a phone and an internet connection, users can have access to a team of over 5,000 medical professionals spread across the globe. CribMD aims to improve access to high-quality, low-cost care in Nigeria, and reduce financial instability due to health debt.
About 200 million students in Africa (9 out of every 10 students in primary and secondary schools) are in school but not learning. One of the root causes is learning gaps not being detected early. Report cards come when it’s too late while homework is mostly manual and does not afford teachers real-time or targeted intervention.
Gradely offers students personalized and curriculum-aligned practice, video lessons and on-demand tutoring. Based on performance on diagnostic or homework assessment, students get learning recommendations daily. Parents and teachers are able to track improvement and mastery on a topic-by-topic basis.
Informal logistics providers in the construction, mining, and oil & gas industries work on lucrative projects but are also some of the poorest people in the country, because they do all the work but capture very little value.
Empower informal logistics providers to earn more, get paid quickly, and grow their business to help get more assets on the road to power infrastructure development in Africa. Ghana’s Kadi Africa aggregates short-term and long-term haulage projects and provides an AI/ML-based cost/risk prediction algorithm, payment API integration, and access to working capital to help them lower operating costs, reduce payment default risks, and speed up financial transactions.
3 billion people are not profitable for fair capitalism, so they are un- or under-banked, leaving them vulnerable to predatory digital lenders, high risk pricing (justified by their thin credit files), data privacy abuse and public debt shaming.
A digital banking platform for credit unions that turns any financial cooperative serving the unbanked into a digital bank, offering modern financial services at the last mile. The platform is cloud-based and is built specifically for credit unions, guaranteeing near-perfect availability and a superior user experience.
8. Nash
Businesses and individuals in Africa have many payment collection and disbursement channels, which leads to redundancies, obscurity, and downstream disruptions. For example, micro-financing schemes, which play a key part in financial inclusion, have to absorb huge costs in order to manage all the disbursal and payments channels for their relatively poor clients.
Enabling the ability to make and receive payments as though there were no borders, no currencies, and no constraints within, into and from Africa. To remove borders Nash digitizes core financial services infrastructure, builds rails where these are non-existent and unifies all existing payment rails. To remove constraints Nash provides targeted financial products (credit, investments, insurance) to individuals & businesses and provides a single view of their financial health.
Consistent salary payments do not match the unpredictability of expenses which is a problem for people that don’t have health insurance and where access to capital is scarce. When a relative or family member falls ill or gets in an accident, families need to find a way to raise money to take care of them.
Rwanda’s PesaChoice is an all-in-one software solution that offers fast, affordable salary advances with low monthly fees using artificial intelligence to calculate credit scoring based on salary data. Users can request a cash advance and receive the funds within minutes.
In Africa, 50% of medical cases requiring blood are unmet, resulting in unnecessary death. Research shows that about 27% of all maternal deaths in urban Ghana are a result of postpartum bleedings. Maternal mortality in Ghana is currently 300 per 100,000 live births. This is a challenge throughout the African continent and developing world.
Wala is a digital platform enabling easy, quick blood supply & sharing critical for lifesaving transfusions. First, we tackle the blood supply problem using existing social networks to build a “tribe” of committed and repeated blood donors. Donors receive “digital tokens,” which can be exchanged for medical services. Our software is a digital platform that connects hospitals to meet demand shortfall. A digital marketplace to manage, request, and share blood.
Across Africa, 70% of people are paying out of pocket for their healthcare, which leads to a delay in accessing care and in turn has huge ramifications on public health. Hundreds of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa die of malaria each year and although tests to detect the disease can lead to effective treatment, most never get tested because it’s too expensive and they have no insurance.
