Supporting impact-driven entrepreneurship: ICUBE and the African Impact Challenge
Initiatives such as the African Impact Challenge are now gaining momentum, and support, from partners and organizations which support social impact. Now in its fourth year, the Challenge, which aims to “build the Africa we want to see, by investing in our continent’s early innovators” is working to help African entrepreneurs “tackle their country’s biggest challenges with technology” by providing the “capital, resources, and guidance necessary to build viable solutions in the market”. IMI’s ICUBE, home of social entrepreneurship and early-stage start-ups at UTM, is working with The BRIDGE and Health Innovation Hub (H2i), to support the participants of the African Impact Challenge.
Dr. Ann Armstrong (Director, ICUBE) and Ignacio Mongrell (Assistant Director, ICUBE) are working with the winners of the Challenge to help enable their success. Startups in this cohort are innovative, and work across various challenge areas including sustainability, healthcare access, big data and artificial intelligence, wearable technology, mobility, and more. For instance, Lima Technologies is linking smallholder farmers with larger markets, solving a Rwandan food supply chain challenge. Atradezone, also based in Rwanda, is using blockchain and AI to create a novel e-commerce platform. Another startup, Moto, is leveraging local mobility services to provide life-saving transport options to patients in Mauritius. ICUBE offers “one-on-one mentoring to the startups that were part of the challenge in 2022 in addition to sessions on how they can fund and pitch their businesses”, says Mongrell. By drawing on local talent and experts, ICUBE is supporting the entrepreneurs by supplying them with practical skills, guidance, and mentorship they can use to carry their innovations forward.
Over the course of ten eight-hour sessions, the entrepreneurs “receive teaching about market research and market validation” says Mongrell. He adds that the “founders are going to be working on a market research project with their own startup on an issue that they want to dig deeper into or they're going to be working on a market research project that is related to an ICUBE startup.” The program is intensive - “but in a good way!”, he adds.
Some African Impact Challenge initiatives have been absorbed into the Health Entrepreneurship (HENT) Collaborative of which ICUBE is a member. The HENT Collaborative is a worldwide network of predominantly African universities focused on “strengthening and connecting health entrepreneurial ecosystems through knowledge exchange and collaborative practice on a global scale.”
Says Dr. Armstrong, “health is not defined in a tight, limiting way... it also encompasses wellness in some of its modern sense.” Within the HENT program, people “come up with neat ideas to provide better health.” She states that some of these enterprises are "more for-profit while others have more of a community impact.” Despite this distinction, she notes that “in the space in which they're working, it's most likely there will be sort of spillover community impact even if the focus is not foremost on community impact.”
Reflecting on the diversity of the cohort of African entrepreneurs ICUBE is hosting, Mongrell remarks on their excellence. He notes how the diversity of these entrepreneurs is evident by the assortment of African countries from which they originate, as well as “the universities they attended, and the nature of their businesses. There are lots of great and inspiring ideas and I am very excited to learn from them as much as I am excited to try to teach them something!”
Learn more about the visiting cohort of entrepreneurs and their innovative ventures on the African Impact Challenge 2022 website.