Impact Lab's raison d'être is to encourage companies and public services to go digital and to help young startups develop. The initiative is led by Moroccan Salma Kabbaj. "Since 2015, Impact Lab has positioned itself as Africa's innovation accelerator. Our mission is to facilitate the deployment of innovative African models to address the continent's socio-economic challenges. We provide innovation consulting services to companies and public institutions, fostering synergies with start-ups to bring new solutions and models to the fore and scale them up," says Salma Kabbaj.
It is an ambition that requires a great deal of awareness-raising. "Getting traditional companies to work with startups requires a lot of work, because even if they have the will, the processes and the mindset aren't adapted. Therefore, we help them to prepare their internal environment to work with these innovative startups."
Success stories in healthtech and agritech
To this end, Impact Lab participates in a number of programs, including Investing in Innovation (i3). Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and sponsored by Cencora, Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD), Microsoft and Chemonics, this pan-African program invests in the most promising early- and growth-stage African healthcare startups. It has already supported more than 240 startups in eighteen African countries.
For its second edition, twenty-nine startups from ten African countries were selected. Notably, 38% of these startups are run by women and 17% are active in French-speaking Africa. The selected startups received a grant of $50,000 and access to market opportunities to foster partnerships with leading donors and industrial and institutional players to enable them to scale up.
They were also able to participate in the i3 program's annual Access to Market event, which took place in Nairobi on November 14-15. This event creates dynamic partnerships between industry players, governments, donors and key multilateral agencies. The aim is to promote the value and development of startups through contracts, pilot projects and mutually beneficial investments.
The first thirty-one companies to benefit from the i3 program last year signed twenty-four contracts, pilot projects and strategic partnerships, resulting in some outstanding entrepreneurial successes.
Among them is Deepecho, founded in Morocco in 2021, which offers an artificial intelligence, or deep learning, solution that replicates the mechanisms of the human brain to improve prenatal ultrasound results. Deepecho helps reduce infant and maternal mortality caused by medical errors. 80% of these are measurement related and the leading cause of infant mortality is intrauterine growth retardation. Deepecho is working on fetal biometrics to solve this problem and improve diagnosis. After the pilot phase, the company intends to accelerate its commercial development in Morocco and other African countries. "They have even been published in the scientific journal Nature. In their first round of funding, they raised six million dirhams, or $600,000," notes Salma Kabbaj.
Launchpad Agritech, a new accelerator program
Sand To Green, a Franco-Moroccan startup incubated in 2022 as part of the AgriTech4Morocco program, aims to green the desert. Based in southern Morocco and co-founded by Wissal Ben Moussa, a young Moroccan agronomist originally from the region, the company bases its model on agroforestry. "Thanks to Impact Lab's support, which helped it to gain visibility, the company has raised one million dollars, thanks to which it will develop a second farm and demonstrate that its model can be industrialized. The aim is to create franchises covering 500 hectares.
Another success story is Meditech in Côte d'Ivoire, which has developed a solution for verifying the authenticity of medicines. "After a very good start, they are now able to build a platform that connects pharmacists and laboratories, digitizes information and the distribution of medicines and, above all, generates enough data to identify needs to be met," says Salma Kabbaj.
Meanwhile, Impact Lab has launched Launchpad Agritech, an accelerator program dedicated to startups in the agricultural sector. This initiative, financed with technical support from the Luxembourg investment fund Sanad, managed by Finance in Motion and implemented in partnership with agri-food players Domseeds, Lesieur Cristal and Sipra, aims to catalyze innovation in the agricultural sector in the Maghreb and French-speaking Africa and address the key challenges facing companies in the sector. The thirteen selected startups from Morocco, Tunisia and Côte d'Ivoire meet five criteria defined with the program's partners: controlling water resources, optimizing the use of inputs, estimating yields, managing agricultural equipment and monitoring poultry farms. Conditions for these start-ups to increase their impact.
