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Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The HealthTech Hub Africa, founded by the Novartis Foundation and the Norrsken Foundation, and located at the Norrsken East Africa House in Kigali, has announced the second Africa HealthTech Challenge.
The HealthTech Hub Africa is a health tech accelerator with a physical co-working and community space in Kigali, Rwanda.
The hub aims to help drive the development of health technologies in Africa and fast-track such innovations in public health systems through collaboration with government partners.
The challenge selects 30 high-impact pan-African health technology startups and 10 scale ups with business-to-government solutions in the areas of cardiovascular health, breast cancer, virtual care and health, or the use of data for decision making in health.
Participating startups are expected to have business models that can deliver transformational population health impact in Africa.
Ann Aerts, the Head of the Novartis Foundation said, “We are excited to build on the success of the first cohort of 30 startups and the excellent collaboration with the Government of Rwanda.
This is a great opportunity for us to help tackle cardiovascular population health and other health challenges in Africa by leveraging local solutions, validating them, and supporting their integration in local health systems.”
The HealthTech Hub Africa Challenge welcomes applications from any African country with validated solutions that already demonstrate positive health impact.
The selected startups will benefit from a 10-month health and technology accelerator program, access to a public-private partner network, funding opportunities to validate their innovations in public health systems, and 24/7 access to a state-of-the-art co-working space that offers community engagement and partner matchmaking.
“We are excited to be launching yet another search for a new cohort of technology innovations designed to address health challenges in Africa. The HealthTech Hub Africa uses its annual challenge to bring together startups from across the health technology environment to innovate and collaborate, with a mission to transform healthcare for low- income and underserved communities,” said Pascal Murasira, the managing director of Norrsken East Africa.
The startups from the HealthTech Hub 2022 cohort have delivered significant impact.
They increased their beneficiaries from 113,091 in January 2022 to 634,940 in July 2022, collectively raised more than $10.8 million, and created over 300 full-time jobs across Africa.
Joris Cyizere, the managing director of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Rwanda said, “Agile multi-stakeholder collaboration is fundamental to fast tracking HealthTech innovation. The HealthTech Hub has been a great mechanism to do just that, enabling a direct link between government, civil society and innovators to co-design HealthTech applications that are aligned with national priorities.”
