Grace Ashiru
The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) of the United Nations has announced the establishment of its first Tech African Women program in cooperation with Betacube. The program is open for applications from female-led idea stage firms from Tanzania, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Senegal.
TAW, an acronym for Tech African Women, is a program that has been developed to encourage female founders to use their skills to build successful tech firms from scratch, speed the development of project ideas into validated business models, and build alliances between various African ecosystems.
The initiative will begin in August 2022 and continue until December 2022. It will be divided into three primary phases:
- In conjunction with key stakeholders in the local ecosystem, intensive training boot camps and pitching competitions will be hosted over three days in Tanzania, Tunisia, Senegal, and Ethiopia. A cash prize of $2,000 will be awarded to the winning team in each Bootcamp.
- An online incubation course of two months’ duration, open to the top two startup companies from each nation to bring them to the point where they are ready for the market and funding.
- After the program, a ceremony will be held in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa, at the ECA Conference Center. At this event, eight different startups will compete for the program’s grand prize, which is a cash grant of $7,000 to be awarded to the business that proves to be the most successful. TAW aims at tech companies that are led by women and are in the concept stage and provides teams with the unique opportunity to acquire new entrepreneurial skills, establish partnerships with their peers in Africa, boost regional business awareness, and gain access to funding; It helps ideas that address Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by building the skills of female entrepreneurs who want to learn how to play a role in the development of the continent and want to learn more about how to build startups that have a big impact.
During the incubation program, teams would have access to many tech designers and developers who will build their minimum viable products (MVPs) at no cost. Teams will also have the opportunity to collaborate closely with leading experts in marketing and finance, and they will participate in individualized webinars led by international instructors.
Application Procedures
To be eligible for the program, applicants must be citizens of Senegal, Tunisia, Tanzania, and Ethiopia and have a proposal for a technology firm that is addressing at least one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG); you need to be a woman aged between 18 and 35 years old, and you need to be able to converse clearly in either English or French.
On the program’s official website (www.techafricanwomen.com), applications are now being accepted from candidates residing in the four African nations from the 10th of August 2022 for Tunisia until the 17th of August 2022 in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Senegal, respectively.
