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$72K, African App Launchpad Cup 2020 competition

$72K, African App Launchpad Cup 2020 competition

by | Oct 27, 2020 | Africa, General, Other News, Startup

African App Launchpad cup competition 2020 Microsoft Africa

IT Industry Development Agency (itidA) is collaborating with Microsoft Egypt to host the 2020 African App Launchpad Cup pitch competition.

The virtual competition opens to teams or startups in 21 African countries. Eligible African countries include; Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Namibia, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, The Gambia, Nigeria, Togo and Uganda.

African App Launchpad Cup 2020 focuses on two competition tracks in Game development and App. development.

Teams or startups working on game development, Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality can participate in the game development track. Whilst the app. development tracks is for those working on specific app development irrespective of the tech used.

Registration and Submission of projects begins October 15th to 22nd November. With the finalist list being announced on the 30th of November 2020.

Interested persons can apply as a team of not less than two members or as a startup not older than two years. Another requirement is that you must have a working Prototype.

Game or app. ideas will be judged on team competencies, innovation, originality and creativity, business model, art and design.

First three winners in each track will win USD 12K, 8K, 4K respectively. In addition twenty four other finalist teams or startups will get USD 1K.

Microsoft is sponsoring a go to market program for the first place winners of each track. As well as a VC introduction from Microsoft Network across Africa.

Click to read and find out more about the competition.

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Wazihub, Microsoft, Zindi, Soil Moisture Prediction Challenge

Wazihub, Microsoft, Zindi, Soil Moisture Prediction Challenge

by | Aug 14, 2019 | General, IoT, Microsoft

Help rural farmers in Africa predict soil humidity using sensor data from IoT.

Wazihub

Wazihub and Microsoft are partnering with Zindi Africa to create the Wazihub Soil Moisture Prediction Challenge competition. The competition seeks to create a machine learning model capable of predicting soil humidity. Using past data from the soil and getting results in a very short time.

Find out more about the Wazihub challenge

In the face of climate change, the agricultural sector in Africa needs to adapt its practices. Being able to accurately measure and predict soil humidity in their fields will allow farmers to prepare their irrigation schedules optimally and efficiently.

Sensor-based irrigation and machine learning algorithms can provide farmers with a solution to manage water usage more efficiently. However, current machine learning algorithms built on sensor data require a lot of data for proper training. Stable sensor data is difficult to obtain in rural Africa where many problems arise such as accessibility, limited battery power, lack of internet, humidity/heat problem.

The objective of this Zindi competition is to create a machine learning model. Capable of predicting the humidity for a particular plot in the next few days, using data from the past. A part of the challenge is to design algorithms that are resilient and can be trained with incomplete data. (E.g. missing data points) and unclean data (e.g. lot of outliers).

This resulting model will enable farmers to anticipate water needs and prepare their irrigation schedules.
This competition is sponsored by Wazihub[webpage] and Microsoft.

Kindly visit competition page for details and rules.