Association of Countrywide Innovation Hubs announces plans to incubate 150 Kenyan startups

The Association of Countrywide Innovation Hubs(ACIH) has announced plans to incubate 150 Kenyan startups in a new accelerator programme in ten regions across the country.

The program will focus on supporting the innovators to turn their ideas into productive businesses through a series of training, mentorship, pitching events, and demo days.

Fifteen organizations from the ten regions will go through the process concurrently.

The ten regions earmarked for the innovation weeks are North Eastern, Eastern, Coastal, Mt. Kenya, North Rift, South Rift, Western, LakeBasin, and Northern Region for the mainstream members and Nairobi for the Associate members.

“The youth are doing tremendous things at the grassroots level and in our learning institutions. Sometimes they are not aware that they are being innovative, and even when they know, they are so limited in exposure that they are hardly aware of the opportunities that they could tap into, to take their efforts to the next level.” says Magdaline Chepkemoi, the chairperson of ACIH.

The chair also cites the benefits are not limited to the startups only but also the government and partners to realize the existing potential and map strategic next steps for the Kenyan innovators.

“These regional innovation events will highlight areas of interventions and bring to surface possible solutions to the existing economic challenges in the respective regions scalable in other regions,” Chepkemoi added.

Some of the activities that participants will be part of include Hackathons, virtual and physical capacity-building sessions, policy roundtables, and sensitization forums.

ACIH which is a network of innovation hubs in Kenya has also enlisted the help of partners including the United Nations Development Program, Innovate UK, and Safaricom among others.

The main aim of the programme is to promote and foster entrepreneurship across the country.