In an award organized by the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), South Africa’s Wala, Nigeria’s RecyclePoints, and Kenya’s Tulaa have emerged the top three winners in the 2018 Zambezi Prize for innovation in financial inclusion.
The $200,000 Prize Competition, which held in Nairobi, Kenya, was organized with support from the Mastercard Foundation.
South African crypto startup Wala emerged as the overall winner with a $100,000 grand prize while Kenyan startup, Tulaa and Nigerian startup, RecyclePoints each won $30,000 as runners-ups.
The seven other finalists include Apollo Agriculture(Kenya), Bidhaa Sasa (Kenya), FarmDrive (Kenya), Farmerline (Ghana), LanteOTC (South Africa), MaTontine (Senegal), and OZÉ (Ghana), who won $5,000 each.
The MIT Zambezi Prize for Innovation in Financial Inclusion is a global platform that supports Africa’s leading financial inclusion entrepreneurs with multiple rewards from funding to training opportunities.
According to Ann Miles, Director of Thought Leadership and Innovation at the Mastercard Foundation, the Zambezi Prize “shines a bright light on the creativity and talent of Africa’s young people, and the thinking they bring to financial inclusion. This is making real differences in the lives of poor people on the continent.”
All 10 Prize finalists will attend the Zambezi boot camp on the MIT campus during the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC) gala in Boston on November 5-9, 2018.
Founded by Chioma Ukonu, RecyclePoints is a waste recycling and social benefit venture that operates an incentive-based scheme which collects recyclable waste materials from consumers and in turn rewards them with “points” which they can accumulate and use to redeem/shop for household items offered through the startup’s iRecycle store.
