The Migration Entrepreneurship Prize identifies and supports socially driven businesses on a mission to enhance socio-economic inclusion of migrants. The program focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East, which are regions prone to strong migration movements caused by factors including poverty, instability and conflict among others.

“We are proud to support migrant entrepreneurs striving through our collaboration with Seedstars. They offer market based solutions that will help improve access to services in impoverished regions that will benefit migrants and host communities alike” said Nina Hälg, who served on the Jury panel on behalf of the FDFA.

The 20 start-ups selected offer promising business ideas to enhance the positive impact of migration and migrants for societies. The global prize winners presented solutions that help improve the livelihoods of migrants and host communities by contributing to their social and economic rights and by reducing the pressure for people to choose irregular dangerous migration routes.

The 20-startup winners of the Migration Entrepreneurship Prize 2021 are the following:

• Glade Inc (Nigeria) - Glade is a FinTech startup building a modern business banking service that helps small businesses automate and run their finances effectively.
• Lock&Stock (United Arab Emirates) - An app-based education marketplace that aims to disrupt the way students enroll into university by connecting them with guaranteed scholarships.
• Toju (Nigeria) - Provides complete record management tool and financial service toolbox for thrift collectors (AJO or ESUSU), cooperatives and local saving clubs.
• Datacultr (Singapore) - Allows consumer lending companies to significantly reduce their risk on 'New to Credit'​ customers by enabling borrowers to present their newly purchased or existing smartphone as a ‘virtual’ collateral.
• EYouth (Egypt) - Offers educational solutions for underprepared youth in MENA to embark on the fields of entrepreneurship, career development and personal skills development.
• Taqadam (Iraq) -Brings digital economy employment to youth and refugees without access to stable internet or computers.
• Fatora (Turkey) - Creates a simple online store that helps sellers go global and sell more, enabling them to manage their online shop anytime and anywhere.
• eFlow (United Arab Emirates) - eFlow achieves quality and accessible education worldwide by utilizing a smart and interactive educational chatbot that runs on common apps and needs no learning curve or high bandwidth.
• Salasil (Jordan) - Provides video and live podcasting authoring tools for educators to generate and publish e-content as video.
• CWallet (Qatar) - Cwallet is a blockchain powered mobile money wallet that evolves in 3 basic principles: payroll, payment, and remittance.
• BotsZA (South Africa) - Helps companies integrate artificial intelligence, automation, and chatbots into their business processes, particularly in HR.
• Confirmu (Israel) - Enables lenders to underwrite people who are new to borrowing using a 3-minute game which is mapped to the loan repayment.
• Get It Done Now (Nigeria) - A marketplace that allows the users to get home services, food, finance solutions, insurances, and digital consumer goods all in one app.
• abela.app (South Africa) - abela.app is a mobile payments company building an ecosystem to enable people to digitally send, receive, use and save money, creating access to the most basic of financial services.
• CraveHome (Turkey) - CraveHome is an online homemade food ordering and delivery platform that connects home cooks with users, creating opportunities for people at home to generate income by linking them to consumers willing to pay for their healthy home-cooked meals.
• ReBootKamp (Tunisia) - ReBootKamp is a software engineering training institution whose mission is to provide training that responds to market demands and gives access to employment in the most innovative sectors.
• HackUp (Tunisia) - HackUp is a Tunisian start-up with a mission to help recruiters hire the best developers, using online technical tests and organizing hackathons.
• Sghartoon (Tunisia) - To help children with educational trouble, Sghartoon offers a platform that helps detect children’s health and mental performance using games and links them to therapists in case needed.
• Fabskill (Tunisia) - FabSkill is an AI-powered remote recruiting platform using live and pre recorded video interviews.
• iCompass (Tunisia) - The iCompass team is composed of academics and engineers specialized in IT, mathematics, and linguistics that cater to the needs of public and private institutions in order to assist them with their digital strategic plans, communication and marketing.

The startups were selected by a panel of experts, namely: Nina Hälg, PHRD Program Manager; Francesca Bombassei, Seedstars MENA Regional Manager; Philippe Rudaz, UNCTAD Economic Affairs Officer; Alvaro Cosi, UNHCR Innovation Manager; and Ana Alvarez, Migration Hub and Migrapreneur Founder and CEO.

For the five Tunisian startups, the panel of judges were: Kevin Schoucair, Program Manager at Seedstars; Tamara Zakharia, Innovation Youth Officer at the Lebanon Office for UNICEF; Saïd Zekri, Program Officer at FDFA Tunisia; Fatma Mokaddem, Consultant at IOM; and Pauly Suchy, Manager for Startup Programs at the Global Entrepreneurship Network.

The global winners received access to the Seedstars Investment Readiness Program and have been given access to the Seedstars network of partners, mentors, and investors. To learn more about the Migration Entrepreneurship Prize, visit the website at: https://seedsta.rs/3dxPWev.

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ABOUT SEEDSTARS

Seedstars is a Swiss-based private company with a mission to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship. The groups’ activities cover over 90 emerging ecosystems through a variety of initiatives such as the Online Seedstars World Competition, acceleration programs, physical hubs called Seedspace, venture capital investments and company building activities. Seedstars The Documentary is a feature film featuring the company’s vision to give a voice to the game changers of the developing world.

"They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds." - Mexican proverb

ABOUT THE FDFA’s PEACE AND HUMAN RIGHTS DIVISION (PHRD)

The FDFA's Peace and Human Rights Division (PHRD) is responsible for the promotion of peace and human rights as set out in the Federal Council’s foreign policy strategy. It focuses on the security of the individual and protecting people against violence, war and acts of arbitrary treatment. The PHRD is part of the State Secretariat.