Apply for the US$100,000 Anzisha Prize
With the launch of the 9th annual Anzisha Prize, the organisers look forward to celebrating the stories of successful entrepreneurship such as the winner of last year’s prize, Melissa Bime. Melissa is a nursing graduate and the founder of INFIUSS, an online blood bank which has distributed over 3800 pints of blood across 28 hospitals in Yaounde, Cameroon. When she was chosen as a finalist, she was flown to Johannesburg for an all expenses paid business accelerator run by the African Leadership Academy. At the end of the programme, she had the opportunity to pitch her business to a panel of renowned judges. Melissa was chosen as the winner due to her innovative business model that demonstrated the importance of job creation and scalability. Applicants are advised that judging criteria requires them to show commitment to growing their venture into a job-creation engine with the ability to demonstrate their contribution to society. All the criteria can be found on the Anzisha website at anzishaprize.org/apply.
The prize is open to very young African entrepreneurs who have founded or co-founded a running business in any sector on the continent. Applications are open in English, Portuguese, Arabic and French to encourage applicants from across the continent to recognise the diverse entrepreneurship efforts that are growing among very young Africans. The Anzisha Prize currently has 102 fellows within its network since the program started in 2011. We are proud to have our entrepreneurs represent over 30 African countries within a diverse suite of sectors. We encourage all nationalities to apply so that we can continue to support exceptional young job-starters who are improving lives and will become a part of a truly Pan-African network. Josh Adler, VP of growth and entrepreneurship at African Leadership Academy.
Finalists selected will become a part of the growing number of entrepreneurs receiving targeted business and entrepreneurial support. In addition to the call for applications that close on 31 March 2019, the Anzisha Prize team will be visiting key regional hubs in the next few months to tell the stories of youth entrepreneurship as part of the annual Anzisha Tour. The 2019 tour cities will include Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Yamoussoukro in C´te dIvoire.
About the Anzisha Prize
The Anzisha Prize is delivered by African Leadership Academy in partnership with Mastercard Foundation. Through the Anzisha Prize, the organisers seek to fundamentally and significantly increase the number of job generative entrepreneurs in Africa. They believe that a key to doing so is to test, implement and then share models for identifying, training and connecting high potential, very young entrepreneurs (15 to 22 year olds) so that many more organisations have better collective success in creating a pipeline of entrepreneurs with the capabilities for scale.
About African Leadership Academy
African Leadership Academy (ALA) seeks to transform Africa by developing a powerful network of entrepreneurial leaders who will work together to achieve extraordinary social impact. Each year, ALA brings together the most promising young leaders from all 54 African nations for a pre-university program in South Africa with a focus on leadership, entrepreneurship and African studies. ALA continues to cultivate these leaders throughout their lives, in university and beyond, by providing on-going leadership and entrepreneurial training and connecting them to high-impact networks of people and capital that can catalyse large-scale change. For more information, visit http://africanleadershipacademy.org.
About the Mastercard Foundation
The Mastercard Foundation seeks a world where everyone has the opportunity to learn and prosper. The Foundation’s work is guided by its mission to advance learning and promote financial inclusion for people living in poverty. One of the largest foundations in the world, it works almost exclusively in Africa. It was created in 2006 by Mastercard International and operates independently under the governance of its own Board of Directors. The Foundation is based in Toronto, Canada. For more information and to sign up for the Foundation’s newsletter, please visit www.mastercardfdn.org.
