Ethio Telecom launches ‘Ethiotel Innovation Program’ to support tech startups and innovators
Date: 2023-02-09
Ethio Telecom, Ethiopia’s leading network provider has launched its Ethiotel Innovation Program with the aim of empowering and supporting the country’s tech startups and innovators.
Ethiotel innovation program is designed to be implemented in three chapters mainly to address the challenges that any startup businesses would face such as market penetration, customer attraction, retention, acquiring experts and finance, etc, and enable business ideas at conception to be realized and existing startups to grow.
In addition to this, the program will encourage local solutions and problem-solving practices, attract skilled talent, inspire the youth, help people develop new skills, support the development of creative ideas and commercialization of new products that benefit the community as well as create a collaborative environment for tech startups, technology partners and industry players in order to bring their best and realize digital Ethiopia.
The program consists of support and commercialization packages. The support package would enable the winners to obtain telecom resources, financial and in-kind support, marketing support, training, mentoring, coaching, networking, and experience sharing. The Commercialization package would also enhance the winners in building the ecosystem and gain support and joint venture for products and services rollout to the market.
The first phase of the program which will be implemented from February 10 to April 30, 2023, focuses on startups that leverage cloud and mobile financial service capability. In this phase of the competition, the top 100 winners will be engaged in solving the challenges and limitations they face, ensuring their business continuity as well as immediately implementing finance and cloud business ideas into action.
Selected top 100 winners/startups will obtain professional, expertise, financial, and material support and in collaboration with our technology partner Huawei Technologies shall also receive sponsorship to travel to China and acquire international experiences.
Furthermore, the second phase of the program will be implemented from March 20 – Jul 30, 2023, and beyond finance and the technology sector, the program will emphasis on the implementation of digital content, solutions, services, analytics, consumer and business applications of selected top 150 startup businesses.
The last phase of the innovation program will begin in August 2023 and will capitalize on the institutionalization of the businesses and innovations. Particularly, Ethio telecom will establish a TechHub center as well as take best practices from phases 1 & 2 and build a research & development center.
