By 
WAFUNDA, a social tech enterprise based in South Africa has emerged overall winner of the first Impact Africa Elevator Pitch Competition.
This was disclosed in a statement yesterday. WAFUNDA is a start-up, focused on the use of digital technologies to facilitate the delivery of tertiary education to people regardless of their financial background. According to the statement, it was followed closely by SEAKA, who won the second prize.
SEAKA is a Nigerian digital ecosystem that brings together service providers, customers and potential investors, on one platform.
The Impact Africa Elevator Pitch winners were announced as part of the closing ceremony of the virtual Impact Africa Social Entrepreneurship Summit 2021, held recently.
In her acceptance remark, Sophia Campello Beckwith, who made the pitch on behalf of WAFUNDA described her excitement to have won given the quality of the other submissions to the competition.
In their acceptance remark, SEAKA talked about how the company evolved out of the identification of the problem of pairing the right traders/ service providers with the right customers mainly to help scale the challenge of trust in the marketplace.
The winners, WAFUNDA South Africa, walked away with a prize fund of £5,000 while the second prize of £3,000 went to SEAKA Nigeria.
“Both companies while expressing their gratitude to the organisers and judges, confirmed that their cheques would be used to expand their activities for the betterment of the communities and countries they operate in,” the statement added.
Head-Judge, Nashilu Mouen-Makoua, who is Head of Growth Strategy at Clay.Run in New York, described the process of filtering through all of the submissions as “hard work – there were so many really strong submissions. Each judge was assigned a quarter of the submissions to review and each judge had to choose 2 pitch ideas that stood out for them and up to 3 runners-up.
“We were all really impressed by the thoughtfulness and the care that went into preparing the pitches and expressing their ideas.”
For Tom Barnes, the co-judge, who is a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the UK, “the process was educational for me to learn about some of the challenges that the businesses were trying to tackle and the hugely positive impact they could have on their communities, which really came through in the submissions.
“We talk a lot about social enterprise at BCG and in the industry but in the challenging times that Covid has presented to everyone, particularly in rapidly developing economies, any entrepreneurship flair can have a social impact and can make a real difference in the lives of the owners themselves also their employees, consumers and the wider public. So, seeing so many examples of this was really inspiring for me.”
The judges created another category of winners in recognition of the transformative potential of their pitch ideas – The Judge’s Special Recognition Award – this award went to GAIA Gas Energy of South Africa and Afrotoons of Ghana.
Lucy Pearson, Country Director British Council Nigeria, in presenting the prize cheques and recognition awards to the four companies noted that the competition was fierce, “we could not get down to recognising just the 2 winners so the Judges Special Recognition Award had to be created.”
The first Impact Africa Elevator Pitch Competition was sponsored by Afreximbank and FSDH Asset Management.
Acting Managing Director at FSDH Asset Management, Toyin Owolabi, said it as an honour to sponsor such an event to motivate the development of more social entrepreneurs across the continent.
In his closing remark, Executive Director at Ashoka Africa, Pape Samb, congratulated the winners and encouraged the many participants that did not make it.
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