Kenyan Start-Up, agriBORA wins Hessian Founders Award

A Kenyan start-up, agriBORA, from Darmstadt has been named one of this year’s winners of the Hessian Founder Award (Hessischer Gründerpreises).

In an event graced by the Hessian Minister of Economics Tarek Al-Wazir, Drs. Frank Martin and the Chairman of the Executive Board of the Regional Directorate of the Federal Employment Agency of Hesse, Oliver Franz, Mayor and Chief Economist of the state capital Wiesbaden, the 131 applicants of the award and their families came together to celebrate innovation and courage.

“Start-ups renew and revitalize our economy. That is why the Hessian state government supports founders: from advice to financial assistance on their way to becoming self-employed. With our start-up initiative, we are making a name for Hessen as a start-up State and encouraging more talented young people to join us, ” Tarek Al-Wazir said in his speech at the event.

The Hessian Founder Award was introduced in 2003 and is awarded to Start-ups younger than 5 years and whose founders no longer depend on state funds to finance their livelihoods. The award comes in four categories, namely:

• Courageous Start-Ups (Mutige Gründung)
• Social Start-Ups (Gesellschaftliche Wirkung)
• Innovative Start-Ups (Innovative Geschäftsidee) and
• University Start-Ups (Gründung aus der Hochschule).

In the newly added category, University Start-Ups, much younger companies were considered than those in the other categories.  Among the winners in this category was agriBORA, founded by Kizito Odhiambo.

agriBORA  is a social entreprise that seeks to build a network of intelligent weather stations in Kenya in an attempt to transform how smallholder agricultural decisions are made by combining new field sensing technologies and weather observation techniques to provide data-driven insights.

The twelve finalists have created 126 jobs together, and more than 1,200 people work for the 131 applicants for the Hessischer Gründerpreis 2018.

You can find out more about agriBORA and their work here:  www.agribora.com or about the Hessian Founders Award here: hessischer-gruenderpreis.de

If Kizito looks familiar, could be because we’ve featured him previously for his win of the DAAD Prize and also while he worked as a HiWi at the University in Darmstadt.