ACIH To Incubate 150 Startups In Kenya
The Association of Countrywide Innovation Hubs(ACIH) has revealed its intentions to incubate 150 Kenyan startups in its new accelerator event which is to hold across ten regions in the East African countries.
Targeted at sustaining innovators, the program will help them develop their ideas and translate them into effective businesses. The participants will have to go through a series of mentorship, training, pitching demonstrations and demo events.
Sources reveal that at least Fifteen organizations chosen from the ten regions will undergo the process at the same time.
For the program, the ten regions selected are:
- Coastal
- Eastern
- LakeBasin
- Mt. Kenya
- North Eastern
- North Rift
- Northern Region
- South Rift
- Western
These regions are for the mainstream member, while Nairobi is for the Associate members.
According to ACIH Chairperson, Magdaline Chepkemoi “The youth are doing tremendous things at the grassroots level and in our learning institutions. Sometimes they are not aware that they are being innovative, and even when they know, they are so limited in exposure that they are hardly aware of the opportunities that they could tap into, to take their efforts to the next level.”
Magdaline also noted that the benefit of the program is not limited to only startups as partners and the governments will be able to discover existing potentials while creating calculated steps for innovators in Kenya.
“These regional innovation events will highlight areas of interventions and bring to surface possible solutions to the existing economic challenges in the respective regions scalable in other regions,” Chepkemoi stated.
The participants will be engaged in various activities such as physical and virtual capacity-building programs, hackathons, sensitization forums, and policy roundtable discussions.
ACIH is a community of innovation hubs in Kenya. it has also sort the assistance of partners which includes Innovate UK, the United Nations Development Program, Safaricom and many more.