Miss. Africa Digital, a DCA Digital Academy Pan-African programme of DotConnectAfrica (DCA) Trust, has announced three winners of the fourth edition of its prestigious Africa-focused seed fund award.
KampaBits of Uganda won the 2019 Grand Prize of $5,000 while BasaliTech, Lesotho and Ace Communications from The Gambia both won the Second category prize of $1,000 each.
Now in its fourth year, the Women-In-Tech seed fund award offers grants to support women and girls in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields to launch or expand their own initiatives that will increase their digital opportunities in IT related training, jobs and leadership roles.
Announcing the winners, Ms. Kim Gueho, DCA Trust Corporate Trustee and Miss.Africa Co-Evaluation Committee said: “Each year we are delighted to see growth and skills development and at this fourth year’s seed funding round, the quality of the applications exemplifies the deep desire for digital knowledge, this remains is unmatched”.
Complimented the winners, Sophia Bekele, Founder & Champion of Miss.Africa Digital Programme, enthused, “It’s unbelievable, it was just a few years ago when we launched this amazing Seed Funding program to enhance and enable digital skillsets for women and girls, and to see us awarding the fourth round winners just shows the thirst for closing the digital gap.”
Receiving the award, Ms Mbawomye Justine, Project Manage, KampaBits Uganda, said “We are extremely honored to emerge as winners of the prestigious Miss Africa Digital Seed fund grant 2019. Winning this grant is one big step that has opened doors for us to be part of something great as well as positively impact the girl child in the technology field. We are going to use this grant to increase on our capacity thus accommodating and facilitating more girls in our technology training. We would like to thank DotConnectAfrica for their initiative aimed at empowering more women to engage in STEM & related careers.”
Expressing appreciation, Mrs. Fatim Badjie of Ace Communications, The Gambia said “We are pleased to be recipients of the Miss Africa Seed Fund. The Fund will play a role in supporting our initiative to engage and enlighten young girls in ICT while building their confidence to pursue future careers in STEM. Thank you”.
Setsoto Hlohlomi, BasaliTech in her response expressed surprise saying “It is so amazing to see the smiles on these young girls’ faces when they run their first program, launch their first website or even interact with computers for the first time. BasaliTech is honoured to have been recognized and deemed worthy by the Miss Africa Seed Fund among so many initiatives and supported to continue making such an invaluable impact to Lesotho’s community.”
