For young African entrepreneurs and changemakers, nothing is as fulfilling as the work they do to transform their communities and change the continent for the better. However, bagging a major accolade such as the King Baudouin Foundation African Development Prize is always a welcome validation.
Each year, Belgium’s King Baudouin Foundation awards outstanding African entrepreneurs who use technology to drive social change on the continent. This year saw three winners from Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda jet off to Brussels, Belgium to each receive the coveted €75,000 prize. The winning businesses – Barefoot Law, Kyatabu, and Farmerline – hail from the legal, educational, and agricultural sectors, respectively. This is the first time that the Foundation has awarded the prize to three winners.
Read further to learn more about the companies that are using technology to make a difference on the continent.
Barefoot Law
In Uganda, and many other African countries, fair access to legal services is but a dream for the underserved and poor. This issue troubled Gerald Abila to the point that he decided to do something about it. In 2012, the then-law student started sharing legal advice with strangers on social media, and from that simple act of selflessness, his social enterprise, Barefoot Law, was born.
Today, the venture is a thriving non-profit organisation with more than ten staff to include volunteer lawyers dedicated to helping Ugandans understand the law and become aware of their legal rights. The organisation delivers its free services via various online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, as well as through face-to-face meetings at their office in the capital, Kampala. The team also engages in community outreach programmes to help people who are living in rural communities to understand the law.
“We realise that access to legal services is not only necessary to resolve legal disputes, but it’s essential for the country to be able to achieve many goals, including sustainable development goals,” says Gerald Abila, Founder and Executive Director of Barefoot Law. The company’s Head of Projects, Peninah Naikula Igaga, adds: “In a country where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line, and where speaking to a lawyer for an hour costs many people what they would earn in a year, we found it right that everyone should have access to justice and legal information.”
Barefoot Law has grown impressively over the years, now with a monthly reach of over 450,000 people, and more than 3,000 solved queries a month. The organisation’s popularity has soared beyond Ugandan borders, attracting inquiries from social media users in neighbouring countries and as far as India. Peninah explains, “We get a lot of people from Malawi and Zambia writing to us because we have a similar background when it comes to our laws. We also get quite a number of business law-related queries from India because so many of them want to come do business in Uganda.”
Kytabu
One of the main challenges facing underprivileged students in Africa is a lack of funds to buy textbooks, and Kenyan startup, Kytabu, has set out to solve this problem. Founded in 2014, the Kytabu is a textbook subscription platform that provides low-cost digitalised books to over 11 million students. The platform allows users to rent textbooks, chapters or pages on a low-cost Android app and make payments via M-Pesa, the largely popular East African mobile money transfer service.
“We’re just here to solve a problem. Mobile penetration is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world, so it made sense not only to take financial services and healthcare services to mobile phones, but education as well,” explains Anthony Ndungu, Co-Founder and Chief Information Officer at Kytabu.
With digital learning reshaping education across the world, Kytabu is taking this concept to another level by combining text with visual, audio, and kinesthetic media for a more immersive learning experience. This enhances students’ learning capabilities by catering to their individual learning needs and styles.
While Kytabu is currently operating only in Kenya, the company is looking to soon spread its wings to several other African countries. “We have few countries in our sights simply because the publishers we’re working with are in those countries,” reveals Ndungu. He also adds, “We’re looking at Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.”
Farmerline
Fresh out of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Alloysius Attah and Emmanuel Owusu Addai combined their entrepreneurial minds and founded Farmerline in 2011. This startup connects farmers to services as such as access to markets, financial information, weather forecasts, and farming tips and techniques. Using voice and text messages in local dialects, Farmerline helps over 200,000 smallholder farmers in Ghana and across West Africa to be more productive and get the most out of their produce.
“There’s loads of literature available about agriculture, but most people in the rural areas don’t have access to it, so Farmerline gives them that access, which translates to better opportunities to be able to grow their farms beyond subsistence farming to a business,” explains Emmanuel Owusu Addai.
In a country where small-scale farming accounts for 80-percent of domestic food production, Farmerline plays a significant role in boosting food security in Ghana.