Health and biotech company 54Gene has raised $500,000 for a fund aimed at improving Nigeria’s capacity to carry out tests for COVID-19. The money raised for the Nigeria COVID-19 Testing Support Fund will ramp up testing for the disease by up to 1,000 additional tests a day, the company said. The improved capacity will be […]
Online shopping is not an upper-class luxury. When a crisis forces normal economic and social activities to shut down, people must still be able to find food, toiletries and other essentials. Social distancing norms that prevent visits to physical shops make online stores the last resort for supplies. But as more than one South African […]
“Today is the day we start a company,” Oshiorenoya Agabi said to himself, as King Sunny Ade’s Koniku filled the airwaves. Agabi has been developing a technology that takes data from human smell to detect disease in human bodies for seventeen years. On this random work day at Imperial College London while doing PhD research, […]
The initial plan at Paystack, the Nigerian fintech company, was to run a 100% remote situation where staff will not be allowed into their physical offices this Friday. All staff were to work from home as a test scenario. The purpose was to provide guidance on how to operate should a shutdown become necessary, according […]
African research labs, innovation hubs and venture capital firms are putting money on the table to support solutions targeted at better handling the COVID-19 pandemic. In Senegal, a collaboration between Institut Pasteur de Dakar, a Dakar-based research lab and a UK company could produce a $1 test that carries out a coronavirus test in 10 […]
Accelerating business innovation is one of the potential gains that will make the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) truly revolutionary for Africa. To provide the enabling environment for an innovation culture to seep into and permeate entrepreneurship communities around the continent, the Africa Tech and Creative Group has opened ten ‘MyAfCFTA nodes.’ Spread around […]