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The Ethiopia-based Tech African Women program has initiated a bid to support and accelerate women-owned African tech startups, taking businesses from the idea stage to operational.
FREMONT, CA: As diversity creates more beneficial products for a significantly wider audience, women in tech should be included more. Moreover, gender diversity reduces the gender bias prevalent in industries and also leads to innovation and less employee turnover. The lack of women in technology jobs indicates female consumers' under-representations. Therefore, increasing women’s role in technology industries has a crucial impact on global economic growth. It enhances the new applications’ quality for companies and transforms how tech companies shift into a more gender-equal future that includes all customers.
With these ideas, the Tech African Women (TAW) initiative has officially launched in Africa, intending to provide support and acceleration to women-owned African tech startups. This program also aims at taking women's businesses from the idea stage to real-world operations.
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TAW is headed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in collaboration with Betacube and welcomes female-led idea stage startups from Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania, and Tunisia to submit their applications to participate in the event. The program empowers female founders to optimize their skills to build strong tech startups from the ground up, accelerating the transformation of project ideas into validated business models and fostering relationships between various African ecosystems.
Entrants in this program will have access to numerous tech developers and designers who will support and mentor their respective teams free of charge throughout the incubation program period. Additionally, they will have the opportunity to work closely with marketing and finance experts and participate in personalized webinars offered by international trainers.
The program comprises three primary phases: an intensive series of three-day training boot camps and pitching competitions conducted in Tunisia, Senegal, Ethiopia, and Tanzania in partnership with local ecosystem players. A cash prize will be provided for each boot camp's winning team. This will be followed by a two-month online incubation program for the two selected startups from each country to prepare them for market and investment readiness. Furthermore, a final ceremony will happen in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the ECA conference center, where the eight finalist startups will receive the program's winning final prize for the best startup.
As mentioned earlier, TAW targets female-led and idea-stage tech startups and provides an exclusive opportunity to achieve new entrepreneurial skills, build partnerships with African peers, augment regional business visibility, and access funds for every startup team. Moreover, it supports ideas tackling sustainable development goals (SDGs) by developing the capacity of female entrepreneurs who wish to understand how to play a role in the continent’s development and want to delve deeper into building impact-driven startups. Therefore, such initiatives will bring more women to the forefront, leading businesses with different perspectives, and introduce revolutionary ideas.
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