TEF Entrepreneurs Emerge Winners in Google Impact Challenge

Two organisations from the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) Entrepreneurship Programme – HelpMum and Project Enable Africa – have been named among the 2018 winners of the Google Impact Challenge.

They both won $250,000 each.

The Google Impact Challenge supports organisations with game-changing ideas to create economic opportunity in their communities.

While HelpMum is a 2016 TEF entrepreneur, Project Enable Africa was among the 2017 cohort.

Another winner, the Budgit Foundation, was a 2012 grantee of the TEF Innovation Fund.

The winners praised the TEF and its Chairman, Mr. Tony Elumelu, for his role in discovering, unleashing and empowering the next generation of African entrepreneurs.

The initiative aims to help 10,000 young people continent-wide quench their thirst to become entrepreneurs. With the TEF Entrepreneurship program, Elumelu intends to invest $100 million over 10 years to identify, train, coach and finance 10,000 entrepreneurs. The initiative was launched in 2015.

HelpMum, one of the winners, uses low-cost innovation and the power of mobile technology to tackle maternal and infant mortality in underserved and remote areas in Nigeria. The firm provides clean birth kits to ensure any pregnant woman is given the best possible care during delivery, no matter where she lives. This helps prevent infection during childbirth – one of the major causes of maternal mortality in Nigeria.

HelpMum also provides life-saving health information to pregnant women and nursing mothers in their own indigenous languages. In the next year, HelpMum aims to impact 100,000 pregnant women directly with their clean birth kits, and to economically empower 2,000 community health workers and traditional birth attendants.

On the other hand, Project Enable Africa, is a disability-friendly digital hub that was created to promote access of persons with disabilities and their caregivers to ICT skills and opportunities.

Project Enable Africa is a digital inclusion project that promotes access of persons with disabilities and their caregivers to information and communication technologies (ICTs) skills and opportunities. Their platform and their disability-friendly digital hubs are free and safe for persons with disabilities to access information and inclusive training, collaborate. The project gives visibility to productivity, rather than disability, allowing persons with disabilities to enhance their social, cultural, and economic integration in communities.

Project Enable Africa’s Digital Hubs intends to connect at least 1,000 persons with disabilities to jobs, support them to start and run their own enterprise, and promote digital inclusion for persons with disabilities across Nigeria.