MEF is proud to be a supporting partner of the annual AppsAfrica.com Innovation Awards 2017, celebrating the best in mobile and tech from across Africa and held tonight in Cape Town.
Now in their third year, the awards supported by Boomplay Music, Basebone, BBM, Content Connect Africa and Mobile Monday South Africa (MOMO) attracted over 300 submissions from across 31 countries, and are judged by an independent panel of leading industry experts from across the ecosystem.
For the full list of finalists check out the AppasAfrica website – but now lets take a closer look at the finalists from last group of categories – good luck to all the finalists!
Some of the 2016 winners
Fintech Award
NetPlus / Mastercard – SA
NetPlus is a digital payments solution for e-commerce, that attempts to help users move away from cash payments to fully online transactions.
Consumers can pre-authorise a payment when placing orders for goods online, and the amount in held until delivery is completed – giving peace of mind and convenience to customers and vendors alike.
Visit NetPlus
PesaChoice – Rwanda
PesaChoice provides FREE money transfer and international bill payment services to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Using PesaChoice’s mobile app, African immigrants in North America and Europe can send money and pay bills for their loved ones back home. The sender and receiver are notified instantly.
Their mission is to empower the African diaspora to access financial services, such as bill payment, on behalf of their families back home by leveraging the latest technology and mobile financial inclusion.
Visit PesaChoice
WeCashUp – Africa
Wecashup allows vendors to accept cash and mobile money solutions from all over Africa via web or mobile app, all via a simple, single API.
The universal mobile payments solution provides seamless, secure payments for end users while vendors benefit from the simplicity of being able to take payments from customers from right across Africa all in one place.
Visit Wecashup
PiggyBank NG – Nigeria
Piggybank is an online savings platform that securely makes saving possible by combining discipline plus flexibility to encourage users to grow their savings to reach a well defined saving goal.
By automating the process of saving tiny amounts daily, weekly or monthly; and then allowing users to withdraw for free at certain user-defined times, a practical barrier to the savings is established, eliminating the temptation to dip into savings unnecessarily.
Visit Piggybank
Flutterwave – Nigeria
Flutterwave is a payments platform that is attempting to create a robust digital payments infrastructure across a continent that has been largely cut off from the global digital economy until now.
The platform allows its users to safely make and accept payments from cards, mobile money wallets, and bank accounts seamlessly, facilitating groeth for banks and businesses across Africa.
Visit Flutterwave
Social Impact Award
What3Words – South Africa
what3words is a really simple way to talk about location. The world has been divided into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique 3 word address, allowing anyone to accurately find any location and share it quickly, easily and with less ambiguity than any other system.
Without an address, people struggle to access health and education services, register land and vote. Many of these people live in rapidly expanding cities, or informal settlements – what3words allows them to have access to all these services and more.
Visit what3words
Flare – Kenya
Flare is an emergency response startup that provides new software infrastructure and operational support for emergency response teams, both government and private.
Flare aims to improve response times for emergency teams by putting available providers on the same network, making their services available to all and giving more people access to critical life-saving information and resources that might otherwise be unable to reach them.
Visit Flare
Vodacom e-School – SA
Vodacom e-school is a learning platform that provides access to education content for African learners.
With easy to follow video lessons developed by expert teachers for grades R-12, the platform allows users to learn anywhere on smartphones and tablets, with interactive quizzes, homework and intuitive and gameified tracking of progress.
Visit Vodacom
WeFarm – Kenya
WeFarm is a free peer-to-peer service that enables farmers to share information via SMS, without the internet and without having to leave their farm.
Farmers can ask questions on farming and receive crowd-sourced answers from other farmers around the world in minutes. With WeFarm small-scale farmers can learn how to improve crop yield or how to start a micro-business, enabling them to increase household income.
Visit WeFarm
Medsaf – Nigeria
Medsaf makes the process of buying and selling medication in Nigeria’s complex health system easy and efficient.
Supplying medication directly from local and foreign manufacturers, Medsaf ensures quality and price, delivering to hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics all over the country, while providing robust inventory management with real-time stock details, order reminders and alerts, and historical sales data for forecasting.
Visit Medsaf
mCommerce
Farmart – Ghana
Farmart is an online farmer’s market that links farmers to homes by sourcing fresh local produce and groceries from farmers and delivering them to homes and businesses when an order is placed online.
Customers can shop all their fresh produce and cooking ingredients right online at the comfort of their homes and have them delivered by trained shoppers and paid for with cash or though mobile payments.
Visit Farmart
VConnect – Nigeria
VConnect is a networking platform that helps users hire local professionals for all sorts of jobs and services.
From car repair to planning weddings VConnect can connect individuals with the best businesses to suit their needs, delivering great value through easily accessible information and connections with the right service businesses.
Visit VConnect
Jumia – Nigeria
Founded in 2012, with a presence all over Africa Jumia has been creating a sustainable ecosystem of digital services and infrastructures through online and mobile marketplaces and classifieds to expand user’s horizons.
Jumia’s mission is to connect African consumers and entrepreneurs to do better business together – providing numerous online storefronts for all kinds of goods and services including shopping, jobs, holidays, housing and car rental to name just a few!
Visit Jumia
Mazady – Egypt
Mazady is the region’s first interactive mobile-based auction service, which offers bestselling consumer products at huge discounts.
Mazady maximizes the m-commerce opportunity for operators in the MEA region allowing subscribers to send bids on products through a premium shortcode, and receive live updates throughout the auction until the outcome is announced – a gameified auction experience.
Visit Mazady
DressMeOutlet – Nigeria
Dressmeoutlet.com is a foremost etailer for high-quality fashion products, health & beauty products and home-goods.
With up to 10,000 products to shop from, the site specialises in sophisticated styles from premium designers globally with over 40% of products online, manufactured within Africa.
Visit Dressmeoutlet
mCommerce
Jumo – Africa
JUMO is the largest scale, lowest cost financial services platform for emerging markets.
Using only behavioural data from mobile usage to create financial identities for MSMEs, Jumo customers – for 80% of whom it is the first time interacting with a bank – can access a world of choice where Banks compete to provide the best savings product or working capital to grow their business.
Visit Jumo
Mwabu – Zambia
Mwabu is an educational tech company for African markets specialising in providing a fresh approach to education away from traditional “talk and chalk” techniques and leaning more towards an open approach where the learners explore and learn through a range of curriculum-aligned teaching and learning resources, assessment tools, smart devices and hardware.
African economies are modernising and growing rapidly but many communities are still unable to access quality education and remain cut off from the benefits of growth, wasting human capital and undermining national development. Mwabu seeks to change this, creating rapid improvements in education standards by bringing highly effective e-learning resources into communities and classrooms.
Visit Mwabu
RippleNami – Kenya
RippleNami is a cloud-based, device-agnostic and cost-effective platform that can be customized to control access to valuable data with specific profiles and permission levels.
The only mapping solution of its kind, RippleNami helps deliver real-time information on any device, allowing users the power to easily solve problems, make critical decisions and collaborate like never before.
Visit RippleNami
Vodacom Mum & Baby – South Africa
Vodacom Mum and Baby provides customers with stage-based pregnancy information and advice in the form of educational articles, videos and more.
Customers also get three weekly SMSes to keep them updated on their pregnancy – and there’s information and guidance for care givers too with useful info about taking care babies and toddlers or preparing to take care of a newborn.
Visit vodacom
Vodacom e-school – South Africa
Vodacom e-school is a learning platform that provides access to education content for African learners.
With easy to follow video lessons developed by expert teachers for grades R-12, the platform allows users to learn anywhere on smartphones and tablets, with interactive quizzes, homework and intuitive and gameified tracking of progress.
Visit Vodacom
Join us tonight in Cape Town for the AppsAfrica Innovation Awards 2017
MEF supported by Basebone and Content Connect Africa are delighted to once again be partnering with AppsAfrica and MoMo South Africa to bring together over 250 senior industry executives for an evening of networking, awards and music.