Peter Wachira of Kenya and Ezinne Uko of Nigeria have emerged as the winners of the Kwese #GoGettaz entrepreneurship contest during the final phase of the competition held in Nairobi on Friday January 26, 2018. The two will now share the US $200,000 prize money – with each getting US $100,000 – in terms of new investment to boost their business ventures.
Peter Wachira is the founder of A Remote Youth Venture (ARYV), a startup which manufactures ceramic water filters enhanced with colloidal silver particles. The filters are made from local materials, they are low tech & low cost, and they eliminate approximately 99.88% of all waterborne disease agents. Peter believes ARYV can save at least 3,000 lives yearly here in Kenya and create hundreds of jobs for the youth.
“As a child growing up in the slums of Nairobi, one of the biggest challenges Peter’s family faced was inaccessibility of clean and drinkable water. As a result, he lost some of childhood friends who succumbed to water borne diseases… Today, 19 million Kenyans are unable to access clean and drinkable water, and 5,000 Kenyan children die yearly from waterborne diseases. Peter believes this should not be the case, and that clearly an affordable solution is needed,” states his pitch profile.
Ezinne Uko is the founder and CEO of Contrail Stores, the developer of iMonitor app which provides real-time sales and stock tracking, real time business performance analysis on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The iMonitor also provides users with sales notifications, access to business from any location as well as out of stock alerts.
Contrail Stores is managed by a team of three individuals whose goal is to provide flexible solutions for effective business management.
“A lawyer by training, with Contrail Stores, Ezinne saw the need to provide businesses with an effective and cheap business management tool, hence the iMonitor app was born. iMonitor app is an alternate by product technology that uses a mobile device to provide inventory, sales, business performance analysis, customer and business management solution. This solution is also a means of providing business owners that are otherwise unable to afford computer hardware an opportunity to run their businesses technologically and efficiently. All these is done in real time using cloud technology,” states her pitch profile.
A total of 12 semi-finalists of Kwesé Inc #GoGettaz entrepreneurship competition pitched their ventures to a panel of judges and a live audience in Nairobi, Kenya on January 26, 2018. The team had been selected as the best from over 4,800 entries.
Out of the 12, the top 6 finalists (three men and three women) then proceeded to the Strathmore University to take part in a grand finale pitch contest to win two US $100,000 (Kshs 10.3 million) in investments and a two-week mentorship programme with Econet Global founder, Strive Masiyiwa at Kwesé offices in South Africa.
The 12 semi-finalist entrepreneurs included both for-profit and not-for-profit businesses drawn from six African countries: DRC, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Kwesé Inc kicked off the inaugural #GoGettaz contest on August 18, 2017 through its portal and the Facebook page of Masiyiwa.
The top 12 finalists initially won a cumulative total of points in four Kwese’s online quizzes. The top scorers were then asked to submit written pitches. Winners of that phase then progressed to a social media voting phase where the 12 semi-finalists made their own online pitches and then used social media to lobby votes for their ventures from the general public globally. This stage of the contest closed on November 30, 2017 with over 50 million combined votes tallied.
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