Scaling startups and helping small businesses grow

Sep 10, 2018

Microsoft 4Afrika is helping startups across the continent scale up with ripple effects on other local businesses

One area that Microsoft focuses on with its investment in Africa is investing in local technology solutions. Microsoft makes it clear that “Africa has the potential to lead the technology revolution”. Since the inception of 4Afrika, it boasts of 64 funded and 94 Startups it supports. With these startups generating a total of $5.1 million in reciprocal investments.

Startups are very dear to Microsoft’s heart. As our mission is to identify and support the best startups in Africa to become successful companies.” – Djiba Diallo, Microsoft 4Afrika Innovation Lead

One such startup benefiting from this support is MoVAS Group. Microsoft 4Afrika says “MoVAS has worked closely with Microsoft to develop and scale their solution”.

To give you a background on this take a look at this video.

Microsoft 4Afrika supports Startups 

MoVAS has 12 million users on its platform across Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, Somalia, the Republic of Congo and Swaziland. Issuing loans to thousands of customers across Africa daily. MoVAS needed a platform to manage and grow their offering in a cost-effective way. Microsoft offered assistance through its MySkills4Afrika volunteer program.

MoVAS services were migrated to Microsoft’s Azure platform. Now it is possible for them to crunch large volumes of data faster, more accurately and with less human resources. MoVAS say “the results has been a 300% jump in lending, meaning even more people can now access finance”.

“Going forward, MoVAS plans to move all their hosted services to Azure. They also plan to rewrite their credit scoring algorithms to be tightly coupled with Data Lakes, machine learning and artificial intelligence sitting on top of Azure. By doing so, they hope to on-board new clients in two to three weeks, instead of the usual three months”.

We engage with startups to understand the challenges they encounter and support them. This is core to our mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.” – Djiba Diallo, Microsoft 4Afrika Innovation Lead 

MoVAS provides a lifeline to its customers, usually small business owners, rural farmers, women, etc. Who are able to access the previously up hill task of getting a small financial boost. These smaller businesses are also now able to sustain or grow theirs. 

There are other such stories and we look forward to sharing them with you. What do you think about Microsoft’s engagement with startups. Got a startup story to share? Talk to us.