Kenya's Mookh has emerged the winner of the Visa Everywhere Initiative Sub-Saharan edition. This was out of the dozen startups from across the continent that made it to the finals.
The competition had three briefs which were sort of sub-themes each of which had its own winner as well as an overall for the entire initiative.
Credpal won brief 1 which was to find a solution helping people "move away from [the] cash on delivery (COD) culture for e-commerce in Africa."
Mookh won brief 2 which was "leveraging partner social media platforms like Facebook to create an amazing bank to business onboarding user journeys in order to remotely enable businesses to accept digital payments." Zowasel won brief 3 which was focused on "Driving Financial Inclusion."
Each walked away with $25,000 for winning their respective briefs.
"We are proud to announce that CredPal for brief 1, Mookh for brief 2, and Zowasel for brief 3 have won US$25 000 as our Visa Everywhere Initiative winners. Our overall winner, who gets an additional US$25 000, is Mookh.," Visa South Africa announced on its Twitter account.
However, Mookh got an additional $25,000 for being the overall winner. "I'm excited about the $50 000, but even more so about what partnering with Visa can enable Mookh Africa to do," said Eric Thimba, the CEO, and founder.
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Beyond the monetary reward, the winners for each specific brief stand to win themselves follow-on investment from Visa as well as support.
"If Visa determines in its sole discretion that a Brief Winner has created a standout solution, Visa may provide further investment and mentoring support to that Brief Winner, subject to the parties agreeing on a suitable development program and additional terms for the investment."
Visa announced earlier this year that its Visa Everywhere Initiative was expanding to Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time. This attracted 238 entries from across Sub-Saharan Africa out which the 12 finalists were selected.
Nigeria and Kenya had the highest number of startups at the finals, 4 each. While South Africa had 2 and Uganda and Namibia each had one.
These startups were; VoguePay, CredPal, Loystar and Growsel (Zowasel) from Nigeria, M-Changa, Mookh, WayaWaya and LipaPlus from Kenya, Swipe2Pay from Uganda and Brig Africa from Zambia while Howler and FinChatBot were shortlisted from South Africa.
The Visa Everywhere Initiative takes place in Europe, Latin America and Carribean, Middle East and Australia.
To-date, the initiative started in 2015 and has awarded over $2 billion and provided mentorship to more than 130 finalists.
Previous winners include IncreaseCard, QPal, EasyShare, HopOn, and Losant.