I was selected to be judge for a startup competition; the Ghana Startup Cup over the last weekend, it granted me the opportunity i have always wanted to ask startups the hard questions and to put aside dreams and face realities as business people and entrepreneurs for that matter. There were many startups on exhibition during the festival and many of them were either in their ideation stage or some who had moved on to their implementation stage. A general bell rang through their tongues “funding”.
I wasn’t necessarily surprised at the good number of startups and consumers who had thronged the British Council to celebrate and witness first hand the products and services that the Ghanaian Startup ecosystem was churning out; from technology to agriculture, to education then health. I shared a few pleasantries with known faces and decided to walk to the stands and find out more about these startups, I took a quick stroll and identified some promising startups that were exhibiting at the fair (happening simultaneously with the workshop) a few caught my attention and i am well convinced that the Ghanaian youth is ready go the extra mile to solve one if not many of the challenges we face in Ghana.
Below are three of the Startups i felt proud of in no particular order:
ZaaCoal
The CEO of Zac coal caught my attention with his poise, at the time i met him i was actually walking to a juice stand just by his stand to grab a drink, i saw him in a passing glance and the charcoal displayed on his table got my attention i thought to myself what on earth could this guy be selling at this kind of gathering? Coal? i forgot the drink and went straight to his stand. then i was greeted with all these statistics on how Zaacoal burns at 7,000 kilocalories.
With relatively stable heat created over approximately 2 – 3 hours duration, family cooking/barbecuing becomes more convenient, enjoyable, and more economical as less charcoal is needed for replenishment during cooking.
Additionally, cooking/barbecuing with Zaacoal , which has a very low content of volatile matter, ensures that soot formation, if any, will be minimal. This in turn reduces the cleaning time considerably.
ECampus
The CeO at ecampus was one with a lot of energy he was very busily pitching his startup to another attendant when I saw him from a distance and the jokes they were cracking about Ghanaian education drew me to eavesdrop, I walked towards them and then struck a conversation and ended up spending some 10 minutes.
Primarily ecampus is a self preparatory and self-paced education portal. Ecampus hopes to improve retention and recall rates by 95% with help from their simple user interface (UI) and user experience. The CEO told us stories about how he failed woefully in his high school exams and how he was ridiculed by friends he then though about this idea so as not for candidates not to go through the same.
Kawamoka
I didn’t see a Kawamoka stand (don’t know if they even had a stand) but go to know of it when the pitching started and the graceful CeO; Emi-Beth Quatson took the stage. I mean who would have thought vending coffee could come in any style and especially in Ghana.
I wasn’t really moved by the sheer sale of coffee rather the cause tied to it. Making communities better while drinking coffee seems like a good strategy. Kawamoka wants to build a community of coffee lovers who have a passion to bettering their communities. As a percentage of proceeds are used to affect a community.
The general landscape in Ghana has changed drastically Ghana is bustling with startups, from technology, to agriculture, through energy to fashion, we have never lacked the ideas neither have we had problems finding solutions to our challenges, even in agriculture we are seeing an upsurge of young graduates from the universities interested in starting and running farms as their business something that was not normal a few years past.
