The COVID-19 pandemic was a blessing in disguise for the tech community globally. The COVID safety protocols of lockdown and social distancing inadvertently accelerated the digital transformation happening across the country. Many people adopted digital tools for education, access to entertainment, news, financial services, logistics movement, and more. This trend is a driver for the increasing demand for local digital tools in Ghana.
Six young entrepreneurs in the Node Hub Incubator have braced all odds in the COVID-19 pandemic to develop innovative digital tools for the education, logistics and transportation sectors in Ghana.
About the startups
Lademy, an edtech start-up seeks to bridge the language barrier between Ghana and her neighbouring countries and facilitate transparency in trade and commerce. Lademy app provides French-to-Local language courses to help the Ghanaian business community transact business easily in Togo, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso. It uses games and other innovative features to make learning French fun. Esther Awine, a french teacher and Mr Hermon Sel Hammah Tettey are the co-founders of Lademy.
Errand Genie is an online platform that enables users to run their personal and professional errands, move logistics hassle-freely, and have the item delivered to them wherever they are. It seeks to be the uber for delivery service providers and okada delivery drivers to reduce their wait time and increase their pricing efficiency. Rashid Gibril and Mawuli Denteh are the co-founders of Errand Genie.
Ticky is on the journey to reduce passenger wait-time at bus terminals in Ghana by enabling users to book tickets using a web or USSD application at their convenience. Roger Gyening and Geoffery Gone are the young entrepreneurs behind the ticky idea.
Ticky App provides the following services to make users have an incredible travel experience: bus booking, ticket reservation, offline booking, bus hire, and pickups.
Ten weeks of innovation support at Ho Node Hub.
The six entrepreneurs were selected into the Node Hub Incubator program based on their outstanding performance at the
Ho Startup Submit held on the 12th of September 2020.
The incubation program is a ten-week intensive program packed with several activities that prepare the entrepreneurs for the start-up world. The activities include the following:
Entrepreneur Hustle
The incubatees are tasked to sell products of selected startups in their communities. The incubatees hit the streets of Ho with flyers and handbills of the Hub's Web Training program to sell the product. At the end of the activity, each team had signups for the training program and exceeded the target set for them. The entrepreneurship hustling activity allowed the entrepreneurs to experience at first-hand sales rejections, negotiations and customer segmentation.
Empathy Field Trip
The incubates attended a design thinking workshop which helped them better understand their problem areas and design products that truly meet the needs of their customers. They later embarked on an empathy field trip to spend time with stakeholders and learn more about their pain and gain points.
Product development & Business Modeling
The product development phase of the program begun after the empathy field trip. The incubatees used the insights gathered on the field, to build their products and business models. The incubatees were introduced to the agile methodology which helped them build their products incrementally based on feedback from their customers.
Lademy "demoing" their app to GIZ's head of Digital Transformation Centre.
At the of the 10th week, the most promising start-up would be selected to represent the Volta Region in the upcoming National Startup Summit in Accra.