Baharini Fresh, M-Chota and Salu Solutions are the winners of the just ended Pwani Concept Hack dubbed ‘Innovate for Pwani’ organized by Cellulant during Pwani Innovation Week which took place from 3rd -7th December 2018, in Mombasa. Baharini Fresh, the overall winners, is creating an interactive sales mobile app that will cut out the numerous middlemen to connect the fishermen directly with both wholesale and retail customers. They also seek to provide facilities that will enable fishermen to scale their fishing business such as coolers & credit facilities.
The concept hack was an ideation & pitching competition that sought to challenge youth in the 6 Coastal Counties (Mombasa, Kwale, Kilifi, Lamu, Tana River, and Taita Taveta) to find creative solutions to everyday real-life issues affecting their communities.
10 teams of 2-4 contestants entered the competition and went through 3 days of intense collaboration and workshops sessions for hands-on skills in ideation and concept pitching.
Cellulant was the title sponsor of the inaugural Pwani Innovation Week – a consolidated effort by Swahilipot Hub and Cellulant to help create a widespread culture of innovation in the coastal counties of Kenya.
About Baharini Fresh, M-Chota & Salu Solutions
In Mombasa and its environs, fishermen get very low prices for their fish which they sell to middlemen. Due to lack of direct access to their consumers. Baharini Fresh are creating an interactive sales mobile app that will cut out the numerous middlemen to connect the fishermen directly with both wholesale and retail customers.
In Mombasa county, clean water is sold, but residents often don’t know in advance where to buy it or how much it costs. The time expenditure for finding and fetching clean water can be substantial. M-Chota aims to leverage the power of mobile technology to bypass information barriers to clean water by making information more available about location, availability, quality, and cost of water in real time.
Salu solutions are seeking to produce fortified organic fertilizer from recycled garbage and partner with farmer cooperatives enabling their farmers to access affordable fertilizer. Through this solution, they seek to lower the cost of garbage collection, the cost of fertilizer by half and increase farmers’ incomes.
Winners’ Award package
The winners received branded merchandise from Cellulant and incubation space at Swahilipot Hub, cloud storage on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. The teams were also presented with winning trophies and certificates from Cellulant during the event’s gala dinner.
The Judging Panel
A team of 6 judges drawn from the government and corporate sector in Mombasa as well as from Cellulant worked with the 10 teams in a full day of pitching sessions providing feedback and guidance on product originality, relevance to chosen sectors, quality of implementation, quality of presentation and readiness to go to market.
- Michael Ng’ang’a- Systems Analyst, County Government of Mombasa
- Salim Ali- Community Outreach, Coastec Empowerment Community
- Cindy Ondego- Founder, and Director Mombasa Works
- Diana Akara- Fixed data support, Safaricom
- Wasim Noorani -Managing Partner, Innovus Risk & Advisory LLP
- Njeri Wangari Wanjohi- Content Marketing Manager, Cellulant Group
About Innovate for Pwani Concept Hack
The Innovate for Pwani concept hack was an ideation & pitching competition that sought to challenge the youth in the 6 Coastal Counties (Mombasa, Kwale, Kilifi, Lamu, Tana River, and Taita Taveta) to find creative solutions to everyday real-life issues affecting their communities.
The teams were challenged to utilize their creativity, resourcefulness and team building skills to come up with solutions to problems in key sectors. The objectives for the contestants were to; develop an innovative solution to everyday challenges in the Coast, showcase a product/service concept, develop a go to market strategy and to stimulate creative problem solving through collaboration.
Our objective was to foster a culture of innovation led solutions to everyday challenges at the Coast with the youth at drivers of this change.
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