Denis Opudo
During the just concluded DEMO Africa Uganda Innovation Tour, TIFAT emerged the winners courtesy of their farm technology of connecting farmers to a buyer’s marketplace. During this award ceremony, TIFAT managed to beat other major startups across Uganda in a competitive two-round contest held at the Hive Collab in Kampala. This competition involved 30 startups pitching their products and services to a panel of three renowned judges, Patrick Ngolube from Hive Collab, Dustyn Winder from Prehype VC, and Kenneth Legesi from the Kampala Angel Investors Network (KAIN).
This competition is conducted annually, and the high turn up from the Ugandans over the years has been evident of creativity of entrepreneurs in solving day-to-day challenges and how the Ugandan Innovation and Entrepreneurship environment is developing. This year’s winners – TIFAT – have been able to offer insights on reducing post-harvest loss, creating marketing opportunities for many Ugandans. The organization utilizes real time as well as prediction of the future market information in supporting the beneficiaries of their technology. Therefore, the farmers, as well as buyers within a market, are able to make informed decisions and planning regarding their agricultural businesses.
TIFAT’s winning of the DEMO Africa Uganda Innovation Tour will offer them an international opportunity where they will face off with other national winners from Kenya and Rwanda’s innovation tours. Consequently, this faceoff between the participants will be able to declare the regional representative for East Africa launch event, to happen in Morocco between 18th and 19th October. As a result, the emerging winners in every region will be qualifying to be part of other 30 successful startups who will have resources worth over US$150,000 inclusive of US$120,000 software tools from Microsoft and USD$15 000 from AWS which will be used to build and develop their businesses.
