Spring 21 Capstone 640pm

Share246TweetShareWhatsAppEmail246 SharesCairo-based fintech Dayra has won $15,000 grant from Y Combinator’s Startup School, becoming the first startup from the Middle East & North Africa to win it. The winners, most of which were from the United States, were announced by Y Combinator on Friday. MENAbytes also understands that there are at least three startups from the region that have made it to Y Combinator’s current accelerator batch (Winter 2020) that YC will reveal at its demo day in March 2020 – good few months for MENA at YC.

In January, Flutterwave announced a takedown of US$35 million to boost its expansion into sub-Saharan Francophone markets and North Africa. A month later, Jumo pushed its cumulative fundraising since 2015 to nearly US$150 million with a successful plea for cash to back its initiatives in Côte D’Ivoire, Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent.

The remittance market in Africa has for too long been monopolised by companies imposing very high fees that are on average three times those charged on remittances to Asia. They combine a pricing structure that imposes extortionate minimum charges with consistently poor services.

This has its roots in Western Union’s early activities in the African continent. As the first formal mover in the money transfer market, it worked to establish long-standing exclusivity agreements with all major African banks and money transfer agents, barring them from working with competitors. Such exclusivity agreements have propelled Western Union to a near-monopoly position in key African corridors, and have prevented the industry from being competitive.

World Remit. Starting from 2016, it is now possible to use World Remit website and mobile app to send money from Algeria to Malawi and other 150 countries. You can load your World Remit account through World Remit cash collection points, or some local banks in Algeria. Advantages of using World Remit: It is safe and secure.

PayPal. It is not possible to send directly to Malawi using this service with a normal account balance. The balance will need to be withdrawn from a linked bank account. DZ Bank and its branches do issue VISA/MasterCard cards that you can then link to your PayPal account. From there, you can load your PayPal account and send it to anyone in Malawi. 

Zeepay’s objective is to include about 50% of the unbanked population and to ease payments and collections for the banked population in Ghana through the provision of mobile financial services with retail enablement.

Takyi-Appiah says he saw opportunity in the fact that customers had to wait for days and queue up to obtain remittances sent to banks. Foreign expansion soon followed, and Zeepay now counts Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe as its second- and third-largest markets.

Ghana’s Zeepay plans to raise $10m in equity funding to support the creation of new mobile-money hubs in East and Southern Africa, Andrew Takyi-Appiah, co-founder and managing director, tells The Africa Report. The new hubs, which will include processing centres and back offices, are likely to be in Rwanda and South Africa, says Takyi-Appiah from Accra. He adds that the use of Swahili in Rwanda makes it a good platform from which to reach out to other markets in the region.

Lumkani functions as a social enterprise that aims to diminish or lessen the loss of life and property caused by potential shack fires in the township areas across South Africa and the world. 

Lumkani is a small fire alarm that registers the rate at which heat rises within a small residence indicating when there might be a fire risk. It then connects with neighboring devices, setting off a chain of alarms so that neighbors can intervene. Newer versions also communicate with home owners via SMS, as well as with local emergency services.

Lumkani is a tech company and social enterprise that delivers insurance services dedicated to customers who suffered loss of property or life following slum fired in South Africa and beyond. The company got its name from local Xhosa language, “lumkani” meaning “be careful”. Their main product is a small blue box fire alarm that responds to a rise in temperature rather than smoke with the aim of decreasing false alarms. Its associated network alerts houses within a 200 foot radius if the alarm is not shut off within 30 seconds. In 2014, the company reported having distributed 7000 of these devices across slums in South Africa, and 5000 in 2015 to its highest fire risk neighborhood in Cape Town.

Lumkani is a social enterprise known for its fire detector and system designed to overcome the shack-fire challenge in urban slums in South Africa and across the globe with the use of a heat detection technology. It measures the incidence of harmful fires and alert families inside the shack of the danger, using the rate-of-rise of temperature

Lumkani is commercialising an early-warning system to reduce the damage and destruction caused by the spread of shack fires in urban informal settlements. Many cooking, lighting and heating methods used by people living in informal settlements produce smoke.

Tailored Insurance For Almond FarmersWe have applied our argonomic modeling expertise to develop a specialty product focused on protecting almond growers against increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. Either as an alternative or supplement to your existing insurance, CropAssure Almond provides easy to understand policies, and pays out automatically when your covered risks occur.

The blockchain technology allows peer-to-peer transactions to take place transparently and without the need for an intermediary like a bank (such as for cryptocurrencies) or a middleman in the agriculture sector. By eliminating the need for a central authority, the technology changes the way that trust is granted – instead of trusting an authority, trust is placed in cryptography and peer-to-peer architecture

BelCash has an estimated 300 employees and an estimated annual revenue of 25.0M.

AgroTrade makes managing pre-harvest and post harvest activities a breeze. It is effortless monitoring farmers activities right from planting till when commodities get to the warehouses of off-takers.

AgroCenta is an agricultural technology platform that provides an end-to-end solution for smallholder farmers in the post-harvest value chain from farm to market, leveraging on technology to create impact. AgroCenta focuses on 4 key areas in the agricultural value chain namely market linkage, access to real time market information, access to on-demand trucks and logistics services and financial inclusion platform all targeted at the smallholder farmer

Azimo is a payment processing company that provides internet and mobile-based inter-country consumer money transfer services. Its solution allows users to send and request money domestically or across borders using a phone number.

As part of Lumkani’s mission to mitigate the loss of life and property caused by fires in South Africa and across the globe, we implement large scale roll-outs of our fire detection system into urban informal settlements and townships.

Before Lumkani introduced Fire Cover in 2016, there was little hope for households and businesses that had been excluded from insurance cover, to quickly rebuild, refurnish and return to a state of dignity.