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ADF launches first-ever African Drone Business Challenge

The African Drone Forum (ADF) has announced the launch of the first African Drone Business Challenge, a business plan competition for African entrepreneurs to uncover new commercial use cases for drone applications that demonstrate a high potential for local impact.

The goal of the Business Challenge is to encourage African entrepreneurs to envision new opportunities that may emerge as a result of both the increasing rural connectivity in Africa, combined with new semi and fully autonomous systems for delivery, digital fabrication, and artificial intelligence for navigation and image analysis.

“Tech is there, but use cases beyond medical product delivery are the missing piece,” said Jean-Christophe Zufferey, co-founder of senseFly. “We should spend more time analysing existing supply chains to see where and how drones make sense."

The deadline for business plan submissions is Monday, 9 December 2019. Finalists will receive notification in early January 2020 if they are selected to participate in the final pitch event at the ADF.

Benefits

Ten finalists will be invited to attend ADF and will receive pitch training, exhibition space, mentoring, and the opportunity to pitch their business ideas live to a crowd of industry leaders, investors and government officials. The ADF will run concurrently with the Africa Tech Summit (https://www.africatechsummit.com/) offering networking potential with over 1000 participating digital leaders, tech corporates, technology regulators, banks, mobile network operators, and startups from across Africa and the globe. Finalists will compete for cash prizes up to 40 000 GBP.

Requirements

To submit a business plan, you must be a citizen of an African country or an African in diaspora, and have business concepts that would operate within Africa. Participants can range from an individual entrepreneur or an early-stage startup to an innovation team within a small business, corporation, or government office that focuses on integrating new drone services or applications into their business models. Entrants do not need to be drone companies but should focus on concepts and customers for new business opportunities enabled by drone technologies. Significant consideration will be given to proposals that demonstrate both economic and social value to their communities.

If you have any questions, please contact Andi Fisanich (afisanich@worldbank.org) and Jonty Slater (challenge@africandroneforum.org)

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