Easy House, Impact Farm, Smart Water Meter and Beyi Group Win in Kenya and Rwanda
Proptech startup, Easy House and grocery delivery innovation, Impact Fram were crowned winners of the Kenya leg of the Digital Innovations for Business Resilience in the EAC region. In Rwanda, Beyi Group and Smart Water Meter finished on top of the pile. Each of the four startups bagged $1,000 to further their innovations courtesy of the Inter-University Council.
The two winners from Kenya, Impact Farm and Easy House receive their dummy cheques from IUCEA’s Ben Ruhinda
Easy Home is a digital innovation that provides property owners with a platform to list their properties, screen tenants based on data that we provide and manage their properties. The house hunting experience is marred by fraud in Kenya with many conmen that pause as real estate agents. Easy House is looking to bring organisation to the industry, and this is why the judge felt str strongly about it.
Impact Farm, on the other hand, is a grocery delivery service that delivers fresh groceries in under 30 minutes from a network of small scale farmers. This means a steady market for the groceries produced by the farmers while the urban dwellers receive fresh groceries from the gardens.
In Rwanda, Smart Water Meter and Beyi Group emerged as winners. Smart Water Meter is an innovation that counts the water consumed through its digital water monitoring platform. It also predicts water demand and provides real-time notifications on water usage. BEYI Group is the builder of the Agri-automatic Rice Transplanter, the world’s first machine that can transplant rice automatically without an operator on board. They wowed the judges when they showed them a prototype of the machine and how it exactly works.
The two winning teams from Rwanda, Smart Water Meter and Beyi Group (holding plaques) pose for a photo with the judges
The National Pitch Event for Kenya was held at Daystar University in Nairobi on Saturday 2nd April 2022 and it came at the end of a week-long boot camp at Strathmore University. Only the top 10 startups were invited to this Bootcamp from the over 200 innovators that applied.
For Rwanda, which was also held at the same time, both the BootCamp and pitch event took place at Grid Innovation and Incubation Hub (GIIH) IN the University of Rwanda. Burundi and Tanzania will follow from 4th April up to 9th April 2022. Uganda and South Sudan were wrapped up already. The Bootcamp and national pitch events took place from 21st March to 26th March 2022. The top two teams from each country will compete at the regional finals for a share of $10,000 in grants. To join Easy House, Impact Farm, Smart Water Meter and BEYI Group will be NileBoda and GoGo Play from South Sudan while Early Stroke Detector and KAWU will represent Uganda. The lineup will be completed by the four winners from Tanzania and Burundi National Pitch Events.
About the Program
Digital Skills for an Innovative East African Industry (dSkills@EA) is a project as part of the technical development cooperation between the German Government under the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the East African Community (EAC) Secretariat.
The project is implemented by the Inter-University Council of East Africa (IUCEA) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), together with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the East African-German academic consortium led by the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) and the University of Oldenburg (UOL) together with its partners the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), the University of Technology and Arts Byumba (UTAB), the University of Applied Sciences Mannheim and the German Aerospace Center
