Companies

Kenyan firms top list of Africa’s most innovative

ihub

Software developers at work at iHub lab, Nairobi. Photo/FILE

Three Kenyan entities were Wednesday ranked at the top of a business technology magazine’s list of the 10 most innovative companies in Africa.

Fast Company, a New York-based global business publication, names iHub, Sanergy and One Acre Fund as Africa’s foremost leaders in innovation.

Heading the list, iHub is said by Fast Company to be “connecting, amplifying and accelerating Africa’s tech community.”

The not-for-profit operation functions as a “hybrid co-working space and university commons, which has grown to more than 10,000 members in just three years,” the magazine says.

iHub has incubated 150 companies — “many of which are dedicated to finding technological solutions to Africa-specific problems,” Fast Company adds.

The tech hub was founded in March 2010 as a co-working open space, incubator and vector for investors to connect with early stage techpreneurs.

“It is a place where companies spring up, products are funded, people get connected and where innovation thrives,” says Erik Hersman, co-founder of iHub.

READ: Seed fund cashes in on Kenyan online start-ups

Number two on the list is Sanergy, which is cited for “bringing sustainable sanitation to sub-Saharan Africa.”

The article notes that more than 12,000 Kenyan slum-dwellers now use portable toilets equipped with toilet paper, sawdust, soap and water “thanks to Sanergy’s sustainability model.”

The chain of toilets are the brainchild of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates David Auerbach, Ani Vallabhaneni, Lindsay Stradley and Nathan Cooke who came up with the idea of franchising toilets to meet the sanitation needs in urban informal settlements.

It enables local residents to become “micro-entrepreneurs” by buying and managing the sanitation facilities, Fast Company reports.

As an additional economic and environmental benefit to Kenya, waste from the toilets is treated in accordance with government standards and turned into fertiliser for East African farmers who could not otherwise afford crop-growth stimulants.

READ: New toilets franchise throws slum dwellers an economic lifeline

One Acre Fund, listed as the third-most innovative business entity in Africa, was launched in Kenya in 2006 and now assists 130,000 small farmers in Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.

The company provides seed and fertiliser on credit and trains farmers to use them while helping them find buyers for their harvests.

Nigeria is home to three of the seven other businesses included on the magazine’s list of Africa’s most innovative. South Africa places two companies in the top 10.

And Mauritius-based UpEnergy, which does much of its business in Uganda, is ranked seventh for “making it safer to cook in rural Africa.”