Nigerian startup failed to win $25,000 Africa-wide competition

Nigerian rep in the MTN Entrepreneurship Challenge, Pass.ng, did not win the $25,000 Africa-wide competition held last Friday in Cape Town at the MTN Entrepreneurship Festival. Pass.ng was among the three finalists from Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania; they faced a panel of experienced business leaders.

The three finalists had to pitch their unique digital application or smart solution to combat a challenge faced in Africa and it was Victoria Acheampong, Hayford Brako and Yannick Kabu Bosomprah from team MedRX from Ghana who received top honours. The judges concurred that MedRX had the best online to offline capability, meaning that one can go online to get services offline. “We really were impressed with the width of their functionality and the depth of the integration of the application, handling a very complex challenge that actually delivered astonishingly great human value,” said Herman Singh, Chief Digital Officer from the MTN Group.

The winning application aims to connect patients, doctors and healthcare professionals like it has never been seen before. The application is an interactive health platform for all users who have health needs and it connects all users to health personnel from various fields of practice including hospital, pharmacy, laboratory and academia. “It’s like having a pharmacy on your phone and having access to medication,” says Victoria Acheampong from Team MedRX.

The winner also walked away with a year-long partnership with Jumia, a Facebook Start Program to the value of US $15 000 and the opportunity to be incubated at the MTN Solution Space at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and at Jumia. Team MedRX will have access to world-class marketing teams, mentors to help them along and the environment and structure to be successful.

Bankole Cardoso, the Head of Communications at Africa Internet Group added, “MedRX is a very exciting business model and the team members complement each other very well. This business is going to be an African success story.”

The runners up, team Pass.ng from Nigeria received US $5 000 towards their business. Their solution is a web, desktop and mobile-based application based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that focuses on examination preparatory and testing that will assist candidates to excel in all the major Nigerian Examinations and tests. Samson Abioye from Pass.Ng added, “We have always wanted to scale our presence across Africa. While we did not win the prize, this challenge has given us the exposure and the access to key partners who will help us make our presence felt in more countries across Africa”.

This ‘first of its kind’ challenge in Africa aimed to boost entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as stronger and more sustainable businesses on the continent. It involved a total of 26 countries, 61 Universities and 1529 applicants across the African continent, which included 734 big ideas, 30 hours of live pitching over seven days in 11 countries, 411 hours of judging to determine the finalists and the winner of the MTN Entrepreneurship Challenge