A delegation of young Ethiopian-Israelis working in Israel's tech sector arrived in Addis Ababa on Aug. 13, 2019, to take part in the SolveIT innovation competition run by iCog Labs, CTech reported.
The Addis Ababa skyline, photographed on August 11, 2012. (Simfan34 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) [file photo]
The members belonged to Tech-Career, an Israeli nonprofit that trains members of Israel's Ethiopian community for tech jobs, and their trip was sponsored by U.S.-based Kudu Ventures, CTech said. NoCamels reported it was the first Ethiopian-Israeli delegation to join the SolveIT bootcamp.
Two teams won the trip at a two-day hackathon in May hosted by Tech-Career and sponsored by African Tech Got Next, a series on African tech entrepreneurship under Kudu Ventures. BunaTrip is a travel app for finding Ethiopian-founded businesses abroad and Ethiopian families willing to host visitors. Kube digitizes a traditional community savings and loan practice of the same name, NoCamels reported.
The competition ran Aug. 13–16 and was funded by the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. Its two-week startup bootcamp included a reception with President Sahle-Work Zewde, visits to incubators and a pitch event with investors, CTech and NoCamels reported.
SolveIT was developed by iCog Labs and was the idea of Ethiopian tech entrepreneur Betelhem Dessie, NoCamels said. In 2019 the initiative received a 5 million birr investment from Kudu Ventures to launch an accelerator program.
“We take responsibility and it is our goal to make sure these innovators have all the access they need to be successful in the Ethiopian market and beyond,” said Noel Daniel, founder of African Tech Got Next and a partner at Kudu Ventures.
Data from the Adva Center, a Tel Aviv policy research center, showed that 23 percent of Ethiopian-Israeli households were poor, compared with 13 percent of Israel's general Jewish population, Algemeiner reported. In 2016 the net monthly income of an Ethiopian-Israeli household was 11,250 shekels, about $3,150, against 15,751 shekels for all households, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.
Sources: CTech (Calcalist), NoCamels (Wayback Machine archive), Algemeiner