Timbuktu Chronicles

From the Royal Academy of Engineering:

Scientific research has become a powerful buzzword in the vision and mission statements of all African universities. Some African universities have even stated that their vision is of becoming research-intensive institutions in the near future...[more]

From Chief Vera:

Al Jazeera reports:The founder of AFA Sports is turning athletic and athleisure wear into an economic force for the continent.

When Ugo Udezue left his plush job as a National Basketball Association (NBA) agent at one of the top firms in the United States four years ago, he never imagined he would go on to pioneer the first and only African sports apparel company to officially outfit a team at the Olympic Games in Japan this year...[more] View this post on Instagram

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From How We Made it in Africa,a profile of Zamgoat covered earlier:In Zambia, goats are the second most popular type of livestock owned and reared by smallholder farmers. The animals are hardy and able to live off a wide range of available grasses and plants.

Despite the prevalence of goat-keeping, packaged goat meat was not typically found on shelves of supermarkets; it was largely sold informally. For Paul Nyambe, this was a glaring gap in the market. Growing up in rural Zambia, rearing goats as a child, he wanted to capitalise on the opportunity for the commercialisation of goat meat...[more]

Alliance for Science highlights the breakthrough work of Novine Farms:When Dr. Baker Bakashaba graduated from Uganda’s Makerere University Medical School in 2014, a close family friend gave him the gift of a cow.

The generous gift rekindled Bakashaba’s desire to engage in livestock farming at his rural home in Western Uganda. Motivated by the kind gesture and his family’s farming background, he founded Novine Farm. Six years later, he is one of East Africa’s most successful small-scale livestock breeders...[more]

From Stanford Social Innovation Review:Research on 23,000 ventures reveals factors that donors, managers, and entrepreneurs should consider as they choose to support, run, or use accelerators, the increasingly popular training programs that help businesses succeed...[more]

From the Philadelphia inquirerEntrepreneurs want to bring the flavors of West Africa — especially Nigeria and Ghana — to American audiences by way of bowls...[more]

From Tech CabalHere’s how early-stage investment mostly happens: An Investor and an ambitious entrepreneur get talking. After a few background checks and business plan conversations, the investor decides whether to invest. But not before checking their gut feeling. Along the way the investor is constantly asking, “Does this feel right?”

In 2018, Franziska Reh and her Co-Founder felt this investment process wasn’t right. If this was the conventional way people made investment decisions, what would an unconventional approach look like? They started working on a way to revolutionize access to funding for entrepreneurs using technology

In the summer of 2019, Unconventional Capital (Uncap) was launched. Back then, it was simply a website with two pictures and one sentence: If you’re an entrepreneur in Africa and you need funding less than $50,000, please apply...[more]

From Hardware Things:On a sunny day in November 2013, the staff and students of the French South African Institute of Technology at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in Cape Town, South Africa, waited with bated breath. 10,000 kilometres away, the TsetpisoSat - a cube satellite they had spent five years working on - was being launched in Yasny, Russia. The satellite, named for a sesotho word that means "promise," was the first cube satellite built on the African continent...[more]

From Let us Talk about Health in Africa

From She Leads Africa:“Africans need to put on the clothes made by their fellow citizens as a showcase of support and home pride”. Africa has become a hub for designers unafraid to create fashion statements embellished in colors as bold as the continent’s sunsets and in prints as culturally rich as its people. Their designs are cat-walking across runways both at home and around the world from New York to London to Tokyo. Despite its budding international fame, the African fashion industry has long ways to walk before “made in Lagos” rings the same as “made in Paris.” For the meantime, the paucity of internal and external investment is a barrier frustrating attempts to move forward. In recent times, African fashion has not just dipped its toes but fully plunged into the world’s fashion scene. Anisa Mpungew, a Tanzanian designer and creator of Loin Cloth & Ashes, says “Africa is not afraid of patterns and colors, that’s the one thing we do in our sleep, so we use it to be louder amongst our foreign friends.” Indeed, African designers are making bold fashion statements through the complex patterns and colors they dare to work with...[more]

From CGIAR:Small and medium agribusiness and agtech (agricultural technology) start-ups often struggle to grow due to a lack of access to resources, appropriate technologies, technical and management expertise, and market support.

CGIAR researchers at ICRISAT in 2003 founded the Agri-Business Incubator (ABI-ICRISAT) program to address these challenges. By leveraging research expertise and aggregating the services of various actors in the agricultural sector, ABI-ICRISAT has managed to provide many innovative solutions to value-chain problems commonly faced by start-ups...[more]

Abstract

Accelerator programs are an increasingly important part of entrepreneurial ecosystems. While accelerators have core defining features—fixed-term, cohort-based educational and mentorship programs for startups— there is also significant variation amongst them. In this paper, we relate key variation in the antecedents, organizational design and operation of these programs to theories of firm-level entrepreneurial performance. We then document descriptive correlations between these design elements and the performance of the startups that attend these programs. In doing so, we probe the connections between design and performance in ways that integrate previously disparate research on accelerators and expand our understanding of startup intermediaries. Our findings delineate the building blocks as well as an agenda for future researchers to build upon not only our understanding of accelerators, but also our understanding of what new ventures need to survive and flourish...[more]

From Risen Africa:

Vanessa Kanbi profiles Ghana's Milani Planet Fruit Company

From NatureSynthetic biology will transform how we grow food, what we eat, and where we source materials and medicines. Here I have selected six products that are now on the market, highlighting the underlying technologies and projecting forward to the future that can be expected over the next ten years.

“The time has come for synthetic biologists to develop more real-world applications […] the field has had its hype phase, now it needs to deliver.” So concluded an infamous article in 20101. Early research struggled to design cells and physically build DNA with pre-2010 projects often failing due to uncertainty and variability. Since then, rapid technological advances occurred that are well-reviewed in this series of commentaries2. Products from synthetic biology are rapidly permeating society and by 2030, it is highly likely that you will have eaten, worn, used or been treated with one...[more]

From Forbes:We have a global dependence on fossil fuels that is hard to break. Petrochemicals, which are derived from fossil fuels, are used in everyday products. When you reach for a plastic cup or put on spandex clothing, you are wearing items made from petrochemicals.

Using petrochemicals in everyday products has an enormous impact on our environment. The manufacturing process creates greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and pollution. However, there are better and more sustainable alternatives to petrochemicals that manufacturers can use to make everyday products.

Today, Genomatica, a biology company that is remaking everyday products through clean manufacturing, announced that a second commercial plant will be powered by its technology. Through a partnership, Cargill, a global food corporation, and HELM, a family-owned distributor and chemical marketing company, will invest $300 million to build the new plant. Genomatica is licensing its biomanufacturing process technology to the companies...[more]

From Spectrum:Biological circuits, made of synthetic DNA, have incredibly vast and important medical applications. Even though this technology is still early-stage, the approach has been used to create tests for diagnosing cancer and identifying internal injuries, such as traumatic brain injury, hemorrhagic shock, and more. As well, synthetic biological circuits can be used to precisely deliver drugs into cells, at specific doses as needed...[more]

Spectrum profiles Sunculture:
Kenya has the highest penetration of off-grid solar systems in Africa. Farmers in the region are gaining access to a number of solar-powered devices, including irrigation pumps, egg incubators, grain processors, and refrigerators...[more]