Denis Opudo
Application for Autumn 2018 Westerwelle Young Founders Program is open and it will come to an end 25th June this year. The program is run by Westerwelle Foundation from Berlin. The initiative targets youthful entrepreneurs from emerging and developing economies. The program will give 25 innovators a chance to take part in the Young Founders Conference that will happen from 16th to 20th October in Berlin.
According to Christoph Rohde the Westerwelle Foundation programme manager, the program targets to support youthful founders in improving their startups. It also aims at linking them to other outstanding entrepreneurs if not the German startup scene. This will then help in speeding up their success. The one year program will also offer participants a chance to be linked with mentors apart from accessing entrepreneurship conferences. They will also get an access to the program’s network of alumni.
According to the foundation, its last cohort, 19 countries that took part in the program brought the total of 23 participants. The countries included South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco, Ghana, and Uganda. The 23 participants were selected from 1,500 applicants globally. The participants from Africa included Brenda Katwesigye the CEO of Wazi Vision, Emma Dicks, co-founder of CodeSpace, Kenneth Nelson the CEO of QualiTrace, Nayrouz Talaat the CEO of Direxion, Ogunlana Olumide co-founder of Prepclass, Samuel Bediako Waterberg CEO of People’s Pension Trust, Samia Haimoura the MD and co-founder of Securella and Timothy Kotin CEO of SuperFluid Labs.
The recent Young Founders Conference took place between 10th to 14th April this year. During that event, 23 participants got the chance to meet Erik Yong the CEO of GreenTech Capital Partne. They also met Mark Penkala, the investment director of Mountain partners for Latin America and Robert Lacher co-founder of La Famiglia VC. All the meeting took place during the workshop that was held between 10th and 14th April 2018.
