After starting Appfrica in 2008, founder and CEO, Jon Gosier introduced a competition, Apps 4 Africa, to go along with the technology firm which continues to push awareness of the bright minds in Africa — along with investing in them. In Apps 4 Africa’s first year, the accelerator received about 50 applications, which has heightened to more than 300 entrepreneurs expressing interest in recent competitions.
Three innovators are selected by a board of official judges who help create a gateway for technological mentorship and funding. Gosier’s passion for creating such a platform came from living in Uganda and seeing an immediate need to create opportunities for the people living there who were interested in technology.
“When it comes to Africa, no one talks about the value of the people, their ideas, creativity, tenacity, and entrepreneurialism,” Gosier said. “I think that needs to change and there’s a huge opportunity for anyone who recognizes the next big economy is going to be there.”
Both Appfrica and Apps 4 Africa are growing in their pursuit to invest in great talent and sustainable ideas coming out of the continent while bridging connections with big companies, nonprofits and government officials seeking to enter the technology sector within the African market.
AFKInsider: How did Appfrica and Apps 4 Africa come about?
Jon Grosier: Appfrica came about in 2008 when I moved to Uganda. I was working with lots of young people and saw an immediate need to help them find opportunities in a technology space. There were tons of young technical people I would meet [who] were interested in pursuing a technology career, but there was just a huge lack of opportunity. Organizations didn’t understand that there is talent locally that we could hire; whether they were somewhat bias against working with local talents or whatever the reason. There was a lack of opportunity for all these young technical minds who were doing everything they could to pursue.
I started Appfrica to create opportunity for young technical Africans to invest in the African technology sector and to genuinely help bring African technology to the world and both introduce the world to African technology.
One of the programs we decided to start in 2010 was Apps 4 Africa. When we started the company in Uganda we had a very local focus — we were only doing stuff in Uganda and the East African region with Apps 4 Africa. The goal was to really scale what we were doing across the continent. So, Apps 4 Africa is a competitive funding program that allows anyone on the continent to submit what they think is a good idea for a technology driven project, and they can apply for funding from our organization. We work with partners like U.S. Department of State, corporations, and non-profits like TED to provide them opportunities that help scale and create.
AFK Insider: How did you go about getting partners like TED Talks and the U.S. Department of State?
Jon Gosier: Each partner is gonna be different. It’s really about the relationship and building a relationship. Finding out what your mutual interest and what the mutual opportunities for working together are. With the U.S. Department of State they were looking for a regional partner to help them with new strategies creating social impact and so while I was living in Uganda I ended up meeting them and we just found a mutual interest.
What they wanted to do was to change the way they carried out diplomacy. What we offered was we were a local organization, we were established in Uganda, and we helped them do some grassroots efforts that they wouldn’t have the credibility of doing on their own. The areas that they work in is politics, NGO (non-government organizations), and government but they didn’t have an idea of what students needed, what young entrepreneurs needed, and what the private sector needs which is also expertise we can brings to the table.
With Ted Talks it was a completely different relationship. Ted is an organization that wants to share, help spread great ideas that are related to technology and entertainment. With that relationship it was more about my particular role with Ted. I’m a Ted fellow so I’ve been involved with them.
AFK Insider: How did you get to Africa?
Jon Gosier: It was happenstance; I was dating someone who was working for an international non-profit that was doing work in Uganda. She was going to be based there for three years and so I just followed her to support her career. When I got there I discovered all these things. I wanted to put my technology skills to use and discovered all these opportunities to pursue. Over time Appfrica developed into what it is today.
AFK Insider: What makes you passionate about what you do?
Jon Gosier: It’s truly the last frontier when it comes to where economic growth is going to come from in the 21st century. You have a billion people, many of whom are moving out of poverty everyday; 315 million Africans who were once considered poor are now considered middle class.
What that middle class economy wants and needs is something no one else in the world is addressing and taking seriously. That is an opportunity for investment in my opinion. When it comes to reinvesting in Africa or investing and leveraging Africa as the resource it is, you don’t see enough of that coming from the Diaspora and I’m passionate about changing that.
AFK Insider: Tell me about Apps 4 Africa 2013.
Jon Gosier: Apps 4 Africa 2013 hasn’t started. One of the reasons why the Apps 4 Africa competition has changed is it’s grown quite a bit. When it started it was really about coming up with great ideas and supporting the ideas. Now, its more about coming up with great ideas that are more implemental and scalable. One of the problems with app competitions is that they have a constant churn of great ideas being created and some duplication. [There’s] all this innovation that’s occurring post competition [which] nobody pays attention to. What happens after all the press?
We don’t think of [Apps 4 Africa] as a competition anymore. We think of it as a funded program in a sense that anyone can apply at anytime during the window of applications — and we’re not necessarily looking for winners or a prize. We’re looking for opportunity to invest, to help something get started that’s going to last — or help something that’s already been started grow and become even better than what it is. That’s where we see Apps 4 Africa going; we’re doing a lot more mentorship and more in terms of financial and business training and business developments.
AFK Insider: Which two apps have been the most impressive so far?
Jon Gosier: Minishop from Tanzania has been one of the standouts. They raised just shy of $400,000 a couple months ago in Tanzania. The founder, Eric Mutta, is a very savvy and sharp guy who’s been able to take his $15,000 investment and really turn it into a staggering amount for a start-up.
What Minishop does is [address] one of the challenges across Africa —although you have all these consumers who are coming out of poverty, not all of them have computers. There’s just not the infrastructure there to have widespread computers: one because they’re costly, two they’re not manufactured locally so they’re hard to get, and three the infrastructure for the internet is almost non-existent, especially in rural parts of Africa. Minishop, [which is] accounting software allows Africans to use either their mobile phones or computers to do their accounting.
That’s significant because many of the small businesses across Africa do their accounting in a very haphazard manner. They do it on paper, napkins, whatever and with this he is helping formalize an informal economy that’s losing billions of revenue every year per country.
Another company that has done really well is Farmerline from Ghana, founded by Alloysius Attah and Emmanuel Addai. They are two bright entrepreneurs from Accra. What they’re doing with Farmerline is helping fish farmers in Ghana formulate the best practices, share, and receive their yields from fishing and creating a virtual marketplace for fish farmers. They’ve found a great deal of support from USAID who has a huge interest in the fish farming community there because it represents so much of the livelihood of Ghanaians. Minishop represents a financial business success story for the Apps 4 Africa program whereas Farmerline represents a good social impact for the program.
AFK Insider: As a whole what are you looking to expand on with Appfrica?
Jon Gosier: We help foreign technology companies in need of companies to be specifically based in the African market. We help African technologist and entrepreneurs enter foreign markets and we invest in African technology sectors. Those are the three things Appfrica does to make money. We’ve been incredibly successful at all of those and what we would like to do in the future is just scale up our efforts. We’re now doing work with bigger companies who have interest in coming to the continent and reaching African consumers. We’ve worked with companies like Google in the past where they entered Africa.
AFK Insider: What should people and businesses interested in entering the African market know?
Jon Gosier: The biggest opportunity in Africa right now is in collection and dissemination. There’s just a huge absence of information in African market opportunities for consumer goods. You have all these big analytic companies and they struggle to quantify trends of the African market.
I think there’s a huge opportunity for someone to provide some sort of solution in that space whether it’s market research reports, an app, something that collects information automatically or some process for getting this info — I think that data is the new oil, whoever figures out how to mine that oil.