PreAP - African Innovators

Onyeka Akumah - helps small farmers

Investing in agriculture has been touted as one way to diversify Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy. But apathy, especially from a middle-class disinterested in farming, has hampered that possibility.

That’s gradually changing thanks to Onyeka Akumah’s agribusiness startup, FarmCrowdy. The startup’s “crowd-farming” model allows Nigerians to sponsor smallholder farmers—who make up 80% of the country’s farmer population—for a share of profits upon harvest. Farmcrowdy serves as a crucial conduit between middle-class Nigerians with capital and smallholder farmers who want to expand production.

Farmcrowdy is the first African startup to be accepted into Techstars Atlanta’s accelerator program and has been backed with $1 millionfrom investors so far. The company may provide a lasting fix for boosting Nigeria’s agricultural output, but Akumah prefers a simpler view. Farmcrowdy’s proposition, he says, is simply to provide “guidance” to Nigerians who are interested in agriculture, but unsure how to get involved.

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf - increases access to African literature

It’s not enough for Bibi Bakare that Africans tell their own stories: they should also own the means of their distribution. Bakare founded Cassava Republic in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja in 2006 to meet this goal.

Since launching, Cassava Republic has discovered now internationally known writers including Teju Cole, author of Every Day is for the Thiefand Elnathan John, author of Born on a Tuesday. The publishing house has also expanded to Europe and the US. In March, Cassava Republic won the Independent Publishers Guild Alison Morrison Diversity Award.

Cassava Republic is part of a broader goal to re-imagine Nigeria. “Nigerian literature, like any other literature, adds to the global bookshelf with stories that are rich in content and in form. Sometimes, Nigerian literature may get there first,” Bakare-Yusuf said

Tania Douglas - free, online journal to increase medical knowledge

Africa’s health burdens won’t be eased by more medical staff and hospitals alone. Across the continent, innovative young minds are working on technological solutions that revolutionize care. At the University of Cape Town’s biomedical engineering division, professor Tania Douglas supports Africa’s best minds as they innovate for health—from mobile applications that can detect diseases to non-tech strategies aimed at tackling the stigma of hearing loss.

“It is important to make sure that new ideas become innovations that are implemented and improve health, and that technology is applied in ways that make sense for the particular environment of the end-user,” Douglas says.

With that goal in mind, Douglas created UCT’s MPhil in Health Innovation, and launched the Global Health Innovation Journal, a free, online journal aimed at promoting research from developing countries.

Kamau Gachigi - helps inventors create prototypes

In the race for development, African countries will need as many engineers as possible. To ensure the next generation of innovators can deliver on their promise, Kamau Gachigi set up Gearbox, a hardware accelerator which empowers aspiring inventors to create prototypes of their inventions. The Nairobi “maker space” gives inventors—including those without formal engineering training—a supportive space to create, test, and iterate on their ideas.

Gachigi’s work spurring Kenyan innovation predates Gearbox. He previously headed the University of Nairobi’s science and technology park, which serves as an incubator for technology businesses. He also established the university’s “Fabrication Laboratory,” part of an international network of digital workshops started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When he’s not encouraging the next bold prototype at Gearbox, Gachigi works as an evangelist of success stories from the maker space.

Brian Gitta - invented an easier test for malaria

By 2020, eight African countries could be on the world’s malaria-free list, thanks to increased financing for preventative measures and improved medicines. But while malaria deaths have been reduced by 66% since 2000, according to the World Health Organization, the continent is still home to 90% of global malaria deaths.

Brian Gitta, a computer science graduate, was given an impetus by those statistics to invent Matibabu, a device designed to test for malaria without needing blood samples, making the process greatly more efficient. His quest was also personal: Gitta and several of his friends had missed lectures at Uganda’s Makerere University after suffering from bouts of malaria. “We became determined to turn what was a challenge to us for a while into a solution,” Gitta says.

The malaria parasite significantly changes the concentration, shape and color of an infected person’s red blood cells. Matibabu, which means “treatment” in Kiswahili, scans a person’s finger to detect these alterations and sends the test results within a minute to a mobile phone linked to the device. Matibabu is undergoing further clinical trials in Uganda and Gitta hopes it will be market ready in 2020, for between $100 and $200. The invention netted Gitta 2018’s Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation.

Dieuveil Malonga - promotes African cuisines and chefs

Dieuveil Malonga is on a missionto “write a new story of African gastronomy.” He founded Chefs in Africa in 2016, a business platform used to train, promote and connect culinary talent in Africa.

More than 4,000 chefs from across Africa have joined the network, which has support from UNESCO and the World Tourism Organization. This year, Malonga made it onto the shortlist for the Basque Culinary World Prize for “improving society through gastronomy.”

Malonga was born in the Brazzaville, Congo Republic and moved to Germany as a teenager. It was here that cooking became his choice of self-expression. After honing his skills in Michelin-star restaurants and refining his take on Afro-fusion cuisine, the gourmet chef appeared in the American competitive culinary show Top Chef in 2014. His early elimination did not undermine his ambition.

Malonga, 26, has just co-launched the world’s first African Gastronomy MBA course in Paris alongside the chairwoman of Chefs in Africa, professor Sissi Johnson. He tells Quartz he hopes to take the course and African gastronomy across the globe.

“Five years from now, I envision opening a physical destination where chefs from the diaspora and continent come for residencies to groom their culinary, business and STEM skills,” Malonga says.

Koketso Moeti - app-creator promoting democratic values

When Koketso Moeti’s small community in South Africa’s north west, Rooigrond, faced being evicted from the local municipality in 2014, she used her cellphone to connect with people who could help. In the process, she created a campaign much larger than she originally envisioned. The eviction was halted, and Moeti was inspired by the success of her outreach to found amandla.mobi.

Moeti describes amandla.mobi as “a community of over 200,000 people working to turn every cellphone into a democracy-building tool.” The app connects communities who are fighting issues like eviction, gender violence, and high data costs, and creates a formal campaign around them, all by mobile phone.

Members join the community through WhatsApp message, SMS, or a free text message service that prompts a call-back, making it accessible to the disenfranchized communities most in need of advocacy.

One of Moeti’s biggest achievements so far has been a campaign that compelled the South African government to pay for poor households to make the compulsory switch from analogue to digital television.

Tshepo Moloi - group bank savings

South African collective savings schemes called stokvels have been around since at least the 19th century, allowing poor and working class black South Africans shunned by commercial banks to pool funds. Like many of his neighbors in Soweto, Tshepo Moloi has long participated in and benefited from the stokvel system, but he saw a missed opportunity in the fact that its format hadn’t changed much since its invention.

Moloi, a trained engineer with an additional degree in finance, has found a way to bring that tradition into the 21st century with theStokFella app. The app allows stokvel groups to monitor their capital savings, emphasizes accessible tech, and aims to increase financial literacy. Moloi wants to develop StokFella into a standalone financial entity that caters to this collective savings model, one which banks have typically ignored.

Moloi, however, doesn’t see his innovation and the ensuing success as unique. Rather, it’s a testament to an open financial secret his mother and grandmother have always known about: that a community united in its goals could change its destiny.

Moinina David Sengeh - encourages other African innovators

When he’s not strategizing with Bill Gates on how to reduce extreme poverty, Moinina David Sengeh is being mentored by former US president Barack Obama. The Harvard and MIT graduate has come a long way from the city of Bo in southern Sierra Leone, to being appointed the country’s first Chief Innovation Officer.

“My role is to look at how we can [apply] science, technology, and innovation towards national development priorities and thus support the government to think about how innovation as a platform can be used to drive our development agenda,” Sengeh says.

Sengeh’s doctoral studies research focused on making prosthetics more comfortable, a subject close to his heart as both his country and adoptive city, Boston, have suffered tragedies that left victims limbless. His prosthetic prototypes have been tested by US veterans and survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings, work that won him the $15,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in 2014.

Sengeh is also the co-founder of Innovate Salone, a social action project to nurture creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit among Sierra Leonean youths.

Mamadou Gouro Sidibe - voice-based social media network

After postgraduate studies in mathematics and IT in Russia and France, Mamadou Sidibe returned home to Mali, where he hoped to create Africa’s answer to the instant messaging app Viber. The attempt failed, but it taught Sidibe what type of communication technology the continent was most in need of.

Many Malians struggle to read on their smartphones due to low literacy rates. When a merchant asked him to read a message on Viber because he couldn’t, Sidibe realized he had to build a messaging app that could communicate in the same way most Malians did—verbally.

Sidibe created Lenali, a voice-based social network in 2017. The app sends and receives messages in Bambara, Soninke, Wolof and French and Sidibe plans to add more African languages. It allows users to create a spoken profile page, and save their contacts orally. Downloaded by more than 40,000 people, the latest version also allows for notes and GPS location tagging. The app even comes with a verbal installation guide.

For Sidibe, Africa’s oral culture shouldn’t exclude the continent from technological innovation. Instead, it could aid it.

Sherrie Silver - dance choreographer

Choreographer Sherrie Silver took to the stage at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards to accept an award on behalf of actor Donald Glover’s musical alter ego Childish Gambino. It was a crowning moment in a blossoming career.

“It means so much for me to see African dance celebrated on such a platform,” she told the crowd, and the world.

At only 23, Silver has already achieved much of what she’d set out to do. Born in Rwanda and raised in the UK, Silver’s choreography might address global themes, but it is firmly situated in Africa.

Her choreography for Childish Gambino’s culturally seismic videoThis is America drew on the dance moves of African youth, seen in the viral videos of dancing African children, optimistic in spite of their circumstance. This created a powerful visual tension when paired with the song’s focus on gun violence and racial justice.

Silver has already made philanthropy a key part of her success andher brand as a rising star of the dance world, holding dance workshops for African children, and even starting homes for at-risk youth in Lagos and Kigali.

Conrad Tankou - fighting cervical cancer

Cervical cancer is the second leading cause of cancer mortality among Cameroonian women, with 30 cases and 17.5 deaths per 100,000 people every year, according to Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Service. Scientists, however, suggest current figures may be understated, given the lack of country-level data on screening and absence of a national cancer registry.

Conrad Tankou, trained at the University of Yaounde, has tackled that problem with increased access to tests and screening, and as the inventor of GIC Med, a portable digital microscope that connects to a smartphone to remotely scan for cervical and breast cancer. Data from scans are uploaded digitally to allow doctors, possibly miles away, to conduct an analysis. For hundreds of women in Cameroon who live far away from health centers with test capabilities, GIC Med could be life saving.

Tankou’s invention was rewarded with the top health award—and a $25,000 prize—at the Next Einstein Forum in Kigali, Rwanda earlier this year.