Pan-African startup competition AMPION has announced nine winners of its Venture Bus competitions in Morocco, West Africa and East Africa, with the winning startups to become part of the AMPION fellowship programme.
Disrupt Africa reported last year AMPION ran buses in West, Southern, East and North Africa between October and December 2014, with the first two years of the AMPION Venture Bus programme producing over 30 tech startups.
Each tour is a seven-day full-immersion programme for developing entrepreneurial skills and creating new ventures in a team-based competition set on a bus. This year the buses have been operating in partnership with Microsoft 4Afrika.
The first bus trip of the year took place in Morocco, beginning with an event at the Université Internationale d’Agadir. The bus has subsequently been to Taliouine and Marrakesh, with the final stop Casablanca. Three of the startups born on the bus were named winners – wearable tech bracelet for prevention from harassment Securella, family card game El-Robat, and digital platform connecting SMEs and students M’Scroufy – and will now enter the fellowship.
Meanwhile, the West African leg of the Venture Bus passed through Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria, arriving in Lagos in time for DEMO Africa, Another three winners were awarded fellowships – digital application tackling waste management Coliba, smartphone navigation service FindMe, and textbook platform AfriRead.
A trip also took place in East Africa, ending in Kigali, Rwanda. This Venture Bus created seven e-health startups, three of which were chosen by an investor jury to be part of the AMPION fellowship. These were Mitambo, which provides a solution for poor maintenance of medical devices through a software that monitors, educates and connects technicians, The Waiting Line, a technical solution that makes use of time spent at hospitals to educate patients and gather data, and mOkoa, a digital alerting system.
The final AMPION Venture Bus of the year leaves Windhoek, Namibia, on November 13 and culminates in Cape Town, South Africa, on November 19.
