Top startup events in South Africa, Africa you should know about this week [16/01/2017]

Looking to get into the South African startup scene or scratch up on some of your skills? Well, you’ve come to the right place. There are loads of competitions, networking sessions and workshops happening around South Africa and the rest of the continent (namely Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana) that we’ve rounded up to make your life a bit easier.

This article is part of a weekly series that highlights all the top startup competitions, networking sessions, workshops and conferences around South Africa, and the greater region. If you have any event recommendations for us to add to the list, or next week’s, please let us know in the comments below or send us an email.

Not all of the events are free and some will require booking in advance. Please click on the event names to find out more information.

Cape Town

Make Great Products

At this meetup, we’ll explore how great tech products are made? The meetup follows the Lean Coffee technique, making it a structured, but agenda-less meeting. We will meet at a coffee shop, create an agenda together and start talking. We might end up talking about building great teams, emotional design, accessibility, growth hacking, lean experimentation, company culture, pair designing, microcopy, ethnography or whatever topic gets the most votes.

Date: 17 January, 8:00am to 9:00am
Location: Cafe Frank, 8 Kinetic Way, Century City

The Mentor Within – The Cape Town Launch

We are delighted to host the Cape Town launch of the book, The Mentor Within, by Rosemary Shapiro-Liu. This business and leadership book was launched in Sydney in 2016 and is an effective self-coaching tool for better decisions and powerful action. As many of us begin the year with renewed commitment to ourselves and our communities this book is a valuable tool to assist with honouring those commitments.

Date: 17 January, 5:30pm to 8:30pm
Location: Umvoto, 8 Beach Road, Muizenberg

Equal Rating Innovation Challenge Semifinalists Announced!

Last October, we launched the global Equal Rating Innovation Challenge as our way to help bring the next wave of people online. We asked entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, and innovators all over the world to propose creative and scalable ideas that cultivate digital literacy and provide affordable access to the full diversity of the open Internet. Our expert panel of judges selected 5 semifinalists from the pool of submissions.

Date: 17 January, 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Location: RLabs, 66 Tarentaal Road, Bridgetown

Lean (Startup) Coffee

For people working in startups, lean (startup) coffee is a weekly 1-hour coffee that runs a mash-up of leancoffee.org with theleanstartup.com. Unlike other startup meetups, lean (startup) coffee is agendaless, speakerless and talks about what you care about. We each propose topics, vote on them and talk about the most popular ones for a few minutes. Come visit to see how it works.

Date: 18 January, 8:30am to 9:30am
Location: TRUTH. coffeecult, 1 Somerset Road, Green Point,

FREE #CapeMarketing Workshops for Small Businesses in Woodstock

Are you a start-up, entrepreneur or small business owner? Perhaps you just have an inkling of an idea and need some advice or inspiration.

We offer a relaxed and safe space for you to discuss any issues, ideas or success stories. If you have any marketing problems you need help with, you can bring them all to the table and tap into the wealth of experience and knowledge from the group.

Date: 18 January, 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Location: The Woodstock Exchange, Block A / 4th Floor, 66 Albert Road, Woodstock

FREE #CapeMarketing Workshops for Small Businesses in Diep River

Are you a start-up, entrepreneur or small business owner? Perhaps you just have an inkling of an idea and need some advice or inspiration.

We offer a relaxed and safe space for you to discuss any issues, ideas or success stories. If you have any marketing problems you need help with, you can bring them all to the table and tap into the wealth of experience and knowledge from the group.

Date: 19 January, 9:00am
Location: N/A

Serious About Games Breakfast Meet-Up

This breakfast meet-up will be hosted by Nick Hall, founding member and Chair of Make Games SA and CEO of Interactive Entertainment South Africa. Nick will be sharing the research conducted in conjunction with the first Serious About Games competition (R1 million up for grabs – check it out here: www.seriousaboutgames.co.za) His research covers an overview of the game development industry in South Africa, with a particular focus on the potential for the growth of the serious games market.

Date: 19 January, 7:30am to 9:00am
Location: Bandwidth Barn, Woodstock

Startup Grind Hosts Roger Norton and David Campey (Lean Iterator)

Startups Grind will be hosting Roger Norton and David Campe for this month’s Cape Town event. David Campey is the founder of Afrolabs and still enjoys producing tech every day. Building a great place to enjoy working with great people building great products. In Africa, for Africa. Roger runs Playlogix, that helps entrepreneurs work out what it is they need and helps them build it. After 32 projects in 3 years, we started to develop a process similar to Afrolabs that became the core of the Lean Iterator.

Date: 19 January, 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Location: Workshop17, V&A Waterfront

Johannesburg

Business Networking

Focusing on building long term business relationships through word of mouth referrals. We are looking for professionals in selected industries to join us and were we tap into one another’s networks to grow each of our businesses.

Date: 18 January, 7:00am to 8:30am
Location: The Street Cafe (Rosebank Union Church), 40 St Andrews Road

Breakfast Business Networking

The Purpose of this Business Networking meeting is to offer you the business owner a networking platform to promote your business/service. To meet new like-minded business owners.

Date: 18 January, 8:30am
Location: Piza e Vino Eagles Landing, Corner of Scott and Christiaan de Wet Rd, Randpark Ridge

Pitch Night at the new Tshimologong Precinct

The JCSE and WITS will be hosting us at the new Tshimologong Precinct on 18 Jan. 2017. Attend a night of pitches, demos and networking. Innovative startups, ambitious entrepreneurs and influential investors all under one roof. Free drinks and snacks will be served.

Date: 18 January, 6:00pm
Location: Founders’ Square, Tshimologong Precinct, 45 Juta Street, Braamfontein

Kenya

Report: The Kenya EdTech landscape

Wangechi will be presenting the EdTech in Kenya Report 2016. She will also be discussing the inspiration behind report, how they did their research and some of the interesting findings. e-Ensures, is an African Online Quantitative Market Research company dedicated to assisting small & medium startups and entrepreneurs. Join us for this interactive, audience-driven evening of insights from the EdTech in Kenya report and great dialogue to kick off 2017.

Date: 18 January, 6:00pm to 8:30pm
Location: Spire Office, Daykio Plaza, Ngong Lane (off Ngong Road, next to Prestige), Nairobi

Opportunity for early stage fintech entrepreneurs to raise up to $100k

Digital Financial Services Innovation Lab (DFS Lab) is an early-stage incubator that supports high potential entrepreneurs refine, grow and launch fintech businesses in developing in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, DFS Lab delivers mentorship and strategic counsel to early-stage start-ups pioneering transformative business models that empower the poorest, profitably, and at scale. On the 18th we will be hosting their team, lead by their Entrepreneur in Residence, Ben Lyon. Ben is the Co-Founder of KopoKopo and Hover. He is also a former iHub member and an incubatee at m:lab. He will be sharing with early stage fintech startups an opportunity to raise up tp $100K and six months of additional support from the DFS Lab. The program runs for 5 days and includes flights, healthy meals, accommodation and fun!

Date: 18 January, 4:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: iHub, 4th floor, Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road, Nairobi

Traction Camp Nairobi Outreach Workshop

Traction Camp is a regional acceleration program aimed at nurturing startups in East Africa, so as to create globally competitive, growth-oriented, mobile and digital technology businesses. The program is supported by the World Bank Group’s infoDev program and the governments of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Kenya. We will conduct a series of information outreach workshops across the region for digital entrepreneurs. The main purpose of these workshops is to inform on some of the areas that we will be looking for in startups during the program, inform on the curriculum of the program and key activities of the program among others.

Date: 19 January, 5:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: iHub, 4th floor, Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road, Nairobi

Fireside chat with Ben Lyon (Kopo Kopo)

Ben is the co-founder of Kopo Kopo and currently serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at DFS Lab, an early-stage FinTech incubator supported by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ben splits his time between supporting startups and running his new venture, Hover, an SDK that enables developers to integrate mobile money in their Android applications. Ben lives in Seattle with his wife, Jess, and loves to read, travel and work with entrepreneurs.

Date: 20 January, 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Location: Metta, 14 Riverside, Nairobi

Nigeria

Charting a Course for your Startup

CFAtech.ng is bringing you CFA’s Startups Hangout a monthly meetup where Startups can connect with successful entrepreneurs that have gone through that road before, in order to tap from their experiences on how they succeeded, so, they can learn a thing or two that will help their startups grow. This way, they will not make the same mistakes that these successful entrepreneurs made and also do not need to re-invent the wheel.

Date: 20 January, 6:00pm to 9:o0pm
Location: Adna Hotel Limited, Oladipo Bateye Road, Ikeja, Lagos

StartX – Give wings to your ideas

Do you have a technology or business idea and need an ear? Are you looking for a technical co-founder? Product strategist? How about a whole team of highly experienced designers, engineers and business experts who can jump in and help you quickly test your business model, then scale and grow a sustainable company? This one day free business consultation is for you.

Date: 21 January, 10:00am to 3:00pm
Location: 44/46 Comercial avenue, Sabo, Yaba, Lagos

 

Have a startup event that you’d like featured on next week’s event roundup? Send us an email.

Feature image: David Stanley via Flickr.