The winners of the 7th Orange Social Entrepreneur Prize 2017 in Africa and the Middle East have been announced.
Orange through this program gives prize rewards to innovative startups with ICT solutions that digitally improve their immediate community. The prize is awarded to innovative ICT solutions within the fields of healthcare, farming, education, mobile payment, and sustainable growth. This year’s winners were as follows:
1st Place Winners: Manzer Partazer from Madagascar
This startup has come up with an ICT solution to reduce food waste; because there is always someone somewhere with too much food and looking to a place to throw it away, yet someone in a different place is starving and is looking for food in vain. Partazer’s solution links the two. On one end you will find restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets while on the opposite end you will find orphanages and people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The platform matches the two and ensures no food goes to waste.
2nd Place Winners: City Taps from Niger
People living in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Niger have trouble getting clean taped water supply. Reason being they cannot afford to meet the monthly bill payment on the post-use payment plan. City Taps has come up with a prepaid plan for such citizens and supplies the water using a smart water meter and billing software. This mode of payment has proved to be affordable to disadvantaged neighborhoods, as the user load up credit to their meter using mobile money at any time from any place. The user can also load up any amount; smaller units being more readily affordable for most households.
3rd Place Winners: eFret.tn from Tunisia
eFret.tn is a site matching up people looking for means to transport their cargo from point A to B, and owners of trucks, pickups, and other cargo transportation vehicles. The person in need of the service simply logs into the site and publishes an advert describing the nature of package they have and destination point(s). From there, different companies and individual will send their quotes. Users can find freight service by carriers, movers, and international transport companies, and even customs forwarding agents.
There was also the Special Content Prize awarded to Genie Edu from Cameroon. This startup has come up with an e-learning platform that aims at helping students through online video courses. The startup also takes into consideration students in the rural and remote areas in their outreach program, to ensure all students in Cameroon do get high-quality education affordable and at any time from anywhere.
There was also the ‘User Favorite’ project, Majika. They garnered 2,800 votes out of the total 12,242 votes cast online. It is a social-entrepreneur startup geared towards facilitating economic development of rural areas. It does so through providing access to renewable energy and nurture entrepreneurship in rural areas.
