Tuopsy’s Enterprise

Temituokpe Esisi, Award winning founder of Tuopsy’s Enterprise:

2009 Global Leadership Awards - 10,000 Women Entrepreneurial Achievement Video
Unlike many Nigerian women who have chosen to follow a traditional path to economic success, Temituokpe Esisi chose to look past that low-hanging fruit of economic progress and aim for the higher branches of capitalizing on her own creative talents. After graduating from university in Nigeria and launching a career in the law, Temituokpe Esisi decided to make a career change. In 2005, Esisi launched her own tailoring company, Tuopsy’s Enterprises, but by 2008 recognized that she needed further assistance if her company were to succeed. “I ran this business for three years solely on passion and creativity, but I didn’t make any money. I was ready to throw the towel in.”...[continue reading]

via Bella Naija

Edna Hospital-Somaliland

Founded by Edna Adan Ismail the "...Edna Adan Maternity Hospital seeks to fill not only the urgent need for health care but also to provide training for a new generation of nurses and midwives qualified to provide reproductive health care throughout Somaliland...The idea of building the hospital was conceived because Somali women and children have the highest maternal and child mortality rate in the world...",Hospital website.

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• Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health at a Crossroads (one.org)

Solar Installers-Nigeria

The business of renewable energy installation continues to grow, newer firms range from:

Consolar which is collaborative partnerships;Ecosolar whose tagline is supplying power "when it is NEEDED";Alphatech which installs integrated and reliable solar systems and Royal Power and Energy whose product offering includes their 'Home Inverter Solution'

photo courtesy of Alphatech

Frugal Innovators - India's Healthcare Providers

The Economist reports:

As the patient was chatting away, Vivek Jawali and his team had nearly completed his complex heart bypass. Because such “beating heart” surgery causes little pain and does not require general anaesthesia or blood thinners, patients are back on their feet much faster than usual. This approach, pioneered by Wockhardt, an Indian hospital chain, has proved so safe and successful that medical tourists come to Bangalore from all over the world...This is just one of many innovations in health care that have been devised in India. Its entrepreneurs are channelling the country’s rich technological and medical talent towards frugal approaches that have much to teach the rich world’s bloated health-care systems...[continue reading]

NasecoSeeds

A portfolio company of African Agricultural Capital covered earlier Naseco Seeds:

...is one of the larger seed companies operating in Uganda. It is located in Hoima district in Western Uganda and produces and trades in hybrid rice and maize seed. Additional products include groundnuts, sorghum, soya beans, beans and sunflower. Seeds are marketed to stockists and numerous NGOs operating in Northern Uganda, Southern Sudan and Eastern Congo-AAC

Native Green

Imagine Cup participant Native Green has developed a system which allows:

Users send views on a particular environmental topic through their phones, and the text messages are displayed in the system chronologically. A user can send a text message to a particular person, and the addition to the discussion is received by everyone on the discussion. Radio stations can air the program, and the rural population can access the discussion and information presented. Our system is very appealing and far more effective in reaching a wide population than current systems.

via Startups Nigeria

Quick Hits

More on South-South collaboration Third World Tech highlights Brazilian "direct seeder" technology.
Tackling infrastructure development-AIDG
Making Tin Can Antenna's
Targeting small-holder farmers-African Executive
Breathable fabrics from Breathtex.
Betcy real estates,Lekki Nigeria.
Exporting cassava crackers-Spore

African Street Food etc.

From AlJazeera a report on 'Street Foods' and the re-emergence of 'Traditional Foods':

It continues with a spotlight on the role of informal sector producers within formal supply chains.

via Africa is a Country

Makerere Nano

Ben Mack at Wired reports:

Eleven Ugandan college students believe they can bring affordable transportation to rural Africa with a home-grown, dirt-cheap car assembled from farm equipment.The prototype of the "Poor Man's Car" isn't much to look at, fashioned as it is from sheet metal, wood seats and a diesel engine pulled from a corn mill, but the design and materials would be refined should the car ever see production. Moses Sebulime and his classmates at Makerere University believe the utilitarian runabout could bring mobility to the masses, much like the Tata Nano...[continue reading]

Photo courtesy of Yasin Naku Ziraba

Bamboo Bike Project

Make Blog highlights the Bamboo Bike Project:

Despite the critical need for bicycle transportation in Africa, there are no bike-building businesses. All bicycles are instead imported, and these relatively few imported bicycles are designed for well-paved roads, inappropriate for rural transportation in these regions. The Bamboo Bike Project is filling that gap. Who would've thought, a bicycle made mostly out of bamboo?! But this plant's stalk is surprisingly very strong and shock-absorbent. Bicycles built with bamboo frames will allow Africans to use only a few pieces of imported parts, building the rest out of local and native bamboo...[continue reading]

via Third World Tech
photo courtesy of Third World Tech

Afrimesh

Startup Africa discusses wireless broadband,mesh's and the promise of Afrimesh:

One of the fundamental issues with connectivity in Africa, is the lack of fiber or copper cables in rural areas where a large portion of the population live. The mobile operators have stepped up to the challenge with their mobile broadband offerings. However the costs of mobile broadband are still comparatively high for the rural areas. Additionally, the roll out of a GSM based mobile network is costly due to the infrastructure costs. Almost all hardware and software systems used by mobile operators are propriety and costly

Possible alternatives such as wireless mesh's have hitherto been unwieldy to set up,Afrimesh intends to change that:

A new South African project called Afrimesh aims to solve this problem of complexity by making setting up a wireless mesh network as simple as buying a WIFI router and switching it on, with a few minutes of configuration. Afrimesh will be a simplified dashboard for network management and configuration. The project was founded by Antoine Van Gelder with assistance from the Meraka institute at CSIR and is based on the work done with the B.A.T.M.A.N project.

ArtHouse

Arthouse Contemporary is conceived as an international auction house with its greatest level of expertise resting in the Art of West Africa and its greatest effort focused on the parity of international recognition towards the talented artists who are from or are based there.The success of auctions focused on works from a specific region, as in the art of South Asia, China or Southeast Asia, is a benchmark for Arthouse Contemporary. These auctions help create awareness of the scope of that regionalized art, passionate interest in individual artists, and serve as a working database to be used for fair, market oriented valuations-Company Website

International Energy Academy

The Internatonal Energy Academy seeks to a address a deficit in the availability of renewable energy tradespeople and engineers:

Our multi-location training centers expose our students to real life situations while our workshops allow them to integrate laboratory and lecture components of their work, this allows our instructors to include the students the design, installation and troubleshooting of Renewable Systems.

Supporting Growth Finance

From Altassets:

The CDC has joined forces with the Shell Foundation and African SME finance and development company GroFin to highlight the potential of growth finance to become a multi-billion dollar industry within the next decade...[continue reading]

One Mango Tree

From the Mango Tree website:

One Mango Tree provides the foundation necessary for achieving sustainable peace and development...income generating opportunities for women in impoverished and conflict-ridden areas of the globe We have two bottom lines - profit and social impact. Unlike regular for-profit businesses, 100% of One Mango Tree's profits are reinvested in the company - to expand and grow the business - with the ultimate goal of making an ever-increasing social impact through our work.And, unlike typical non-profits or charities, we strive to achieve full-cost recovery from our operations.That means we don't need to raise outside funds from donors for our operations. We accomplish our social impact through investing the revenues from the sale of our beautiful products and investments from individuals looking to earn back their money while making a positive social impact.

Mimi

MIMI is a lifestyle magazine that addresses topics ranging from style to politics from the perspective of the African woman-MIMI blog

Ghana's Materials Industry

Kwadwo Osseo-Asare at AqueouSolutions writes an illuminating series on the Materials Industry in Ghana:

If you had come to me in February and said "Okay, so you are a professor of materials science and engineering in the new Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Ghana: tell me something about the materials industry in Ghana," I would have had to pretend that I was deaf and dumb. I knew nothing about the industry.
That's why I proposed to my young colleagues that we undertake a project to identify some of these companies in the Accra area, visit them, and educate ourselves about their activities...[continue reading and take a look at parts 2,3 and 4]

Image: photo of Metalex Ghana courtesy of AqueouSolutions

Sweet Cactus

Spore reports:

The arrival in 2000 of Chinese remedies and cosmetic products based on Aloe vera set agronomists and biologists thinking in the Béni region of eastern DR Congo. "We saw that most of the products were based on Aloe vera, a plant that grows well here", explained Kato Ndako, a chemist and pharmacist from Beni. "Since then, we have been encouraging farmers to grow more of it, before starting to process it"...[continue reading]

GardenAfrica

GardenAfrica equips communities to plant and harvest their gardens without relying on foreign aid and inputs. GardenAfrica's role is to set up the projects, train community leaders, support and capture data for 3 years and then withdraw. Each project should ideally have the capacity to grow into a small business, and support continued training within each community. Thus the gardens are sustainable in every sense of the word-website

Quick Hits

Human resource development consultants-2hats network
Providing smoked fish-Sensfish
Caambyo a ceramics, decorative wood products designer.
Lets braid hair! - ebraiding

AdvertFarm

Mobile Africa reports:

Advertfarm, a mobile content network, has emerged today from private beta. This start-up is privately funded and based in Lagos, Nigeria. Advertfarm, as a stand-alone company, focuses on delivering mobile contents to users across Africa through Short Message Services (SMS)...[continue reading]

via MobileAfrica

Plastic Bag Paving Stones

François-Xavier Freland of France 24 reports:

Mopti - a town known for its mosque, its port - and its plastic bags. Nicknamed the 'Venice of Mali,' the town has decided to have a clean-up. The idea has come from Niger and is spreading across Africa: to collect the rubbish left over from modern civilization, and turn it into something else, in this case traditional-look paving stones...[continue reading]

via Sociolingo
See related story on plastic recycling in Aboransa Ghana.

Rwanda Beauty School

Jeanne Murekatete and Sylvie Mukamusoni both beauty salon operators are in the process of establishing a Rwanda Beauty School which "...will provide a 12-month intensive program designed to create a skilled professional able to turn lessons into income. In the first year the school will matriculate 30 students, with plans to increase student capacity in the future..."

Equator Products

Equator Products processes solar dehydrated agricultural products such as premium quality dried african birds's eye chillies for domestic and export markets.

Lister Hospital

Lister Hospital and Fertility Centre is a fully equipped ultra modern 25 bed medical centre providing extensive general and specialist healthcare and diagnostic services to residents, visiting business people as well as holiday makers-website

Coetzee Vanilla

Coetzee Natural Products a vanilla producer provides marketing, promotion, training, certification and extension services to its eight hundred and fifty organic smallholder farmers in five districts of Uganda.Other products include organic Robusta Coffee, Bird Eye Chili and Sesame Seeds-company website

Art of Africa

Simon de Burton writes in the FT:

...new names appear to be coming to the fore as buyers look to Nigeria itself as a relatively untapped source of contemporary art. Last December, a painting entitled "Underwater Still Life" by the late Benedict Enwonwu surprised even the experts when it fetched £19,200 at Bonhams in London, close to 20 times the high pre-sale estimate. At the same sale another of Enwonwu's works, this time a depiction of a crowded market scene, also soared more than five times above estimate to realise almost £7,000...[continue reading]

image: 'Underwater Still Life' by Ben Enwonu

The Renewable Energy Potential

A new book titled"...Africa’s Private Sector: What’s Wrong with the Business Environment and What to Do About It shows that Africa has 9 times the solar energy potential of Europe—an annual equivalent of 100 million tons of oil. Africa also has vast reserves of wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power--with adequate investments in solar thermal and other renewable energy, the continent can meet its own needs and export electricity to Europe..."CGDev.

Outwitting the Next Pandemic

Nathan Wolf on the TED Blog:

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives.

He discusses the need for developing domesticated wild game,as a means of mitigating the effects of threatened wild game . Grasscutters(covered earlier) -- large grass-eating rodents that you find throughout West and Central Africa -- are easy to grow, non-endangered and tasty. They have the potential to provide livelihoods for rural populations. At the same time, they'll decrease hunting of wild animal populations, such as species of non-human primates.

Pastry Chef - Amadou Ly

"...My goal is to create food that's fulfilling. I want to make food that people want to come back and eat again and again. I'd much rather make people say, "Wow, that was so good!" rather than, "Wow, that was really interesting!" That's not to say that my work is boring, but rather that the creativity in my work is a byproduct of my dedication to quality..."Amadou Ly
He further contends "Pastry it’s a lot more broader than you think. I wanna do more things, challenge myself. You can’t spend the rest of your life in a pastry kitchen."-Yumi Chen