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Women in STEAM From PhD to tech product

AFRICA NEWS AGENCY

Women in STEAM From PhD to tech product

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Since its launch in 2018, Digital Africa has been running a number of programs for women. One of them, WinSTEAM, is an incubator dedicated to women in STEAM.

Since its launch in 2018, Digital Africa has been running a number of programs for women. One of them, WinSTEAM, is an incubator dedicated to women in STEAM. The objective of science incubators is to support the development of early-stage technologies and science-based businesses. With dedicated teams and support, these incubators allow researchers and scientifi c teams to exploit the outcome of their research from a business standpoint, thereby fostering the emergence of innovative solutions carried by scientifi c expertise. STEAM-based incubators are massively underrepresented in Africa’s growing incubation scene, and women-focused incubations are still scarce at an international level. This is why Digital Africa, alongside key partners in Rwanda, will develop the WinSTEAM project to enable women researchers in STEAM to turn the innovation they propose into viable, scalable and sustainable businesses.

To turn top notch research output into business

The aim of WinSTEAM - or Women in STEAM- is to support women researchers in STEAM to turn their research into viable, scalable and sustainable businesses via specifi c incubation. Digital Africa wants to create a womenspecifi c incubator dedicated to scientifi c excellence, whose purpose is to turn top notch research output into business that can be scaled up by top teams.

With this incubator for women in STEAM, women researchers will:

● Turn their research into viable, scalable and sustainable solutions/ businesses through a 9-month tailor made incubator scheme, online and with specifi c sprints in person in Rwanda

● Join an international community of peers to provide them with feed backs and networks, as well as tools and resources

● Learn how to build a powerful network of allies and team members to develop a tech product

● Benefi t from international expertise to turn their research into a tech product

● Design a fi rst proof of concept (POC) and learn how to pitch it impactfully

● Showcase what they propose through different platforms

● Connect them with industrial experts and mentors

● Provide the startup capital with a grant to initiate the development of their POC

● Prepare them to be investment ready and connect them with potential investors.

Partners

The program will be designed and structured by Digital Africa. In order to implement this project, Digital Africa will work closely with key partners such as AIMS to scout the talents that will benefi t from the scheme. Scientifi c incubation specialists will carry the technical and content portion of the program in partnership with the DA team and fi nancial partners will fund 80% of the program.

Implementation - Pilot version

The program will start in 2022 with a pilot version to be further scaled up. The big milestones are the following:

1. Selecting partners that will help delivering a turnkey incubation solution

2. Careful sourcing of 5 women researchers (phd holders, published, english speaking) through fi eld partners, also with a call for applications. Selected researchers will be co opted and chosen for their appetite to use their research as a ground for business

3. Running a 9 month-long agile incubation with blended approach: online content and

coaches, and 3 on-site design & development sprints in Kigali

1. Sprint 1 - month 1: ideation phase (1 week)

2. Sprint 2 - month 4-5 : Business plan and fi nance (1 week)

Launched in 2018 with the mission of empowering African tech entrepreneurs to design and scale revolutionary innovations for the real economy, Digital Africa is an initiative that brings together partners of all nationalities - startups, academies, incubators, institutional funders, venture capitalists, technology clusters - and all committed to African digital entrepreneurs, led by Agence Française de Développement (AFD). 3. Demo day - month 9: Final design of the POC and Pitch Deck. At the end of the

program, presentation of concrete results of the incubation work (product,

algorithm, patent...)

4. 20 KE grant to each selected woman to initiate the start up

Digital Africa has structured a series of programs around three main areas:

1. Support for high-impact startups in the digital sector.

2. Finding and accessing African and global funding to scale projects.

3. Supporting policies that advance innovative digital entrepreneurship across Africa.

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