The Digital Africa platform is aimed at stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem in Africa and around the world. That is to say:

• Entrepreneurs, at any stage of maturity of their projects, whether they are in ideation, start-up, or growth/development.
• Innovation coaches/facilitators, whether incubators/accelerators, associations, NGOs, business incubators and foundations, universities and training centres, fablabs, coworking, etc.
• Investors, whether business angels, investment funds, banks or companies.

The Digital Africa platform was created with the objective of responding to the major issues that an entrepreneur may encounter in Africa:

• Create your network
• Be supported throughout the development of your project
• Finding funders
• Test your solution on a community of actors
  To address these issues,

Digital Africa has implemented a series of features:

• Networking with stakeholders in the sector (entrepreneurs, investors, coaches)
• Virtual communities and clusters
• Resourcing of documents useful for entrepreneurship and innovation
• Creation of personal and company profile pages
• Expression of professional needs
• Call for projects module

Do you work in a coaching structure or are you a mentor?

Digital Africa challenges itself to facilitate your engagement, often facing the following issues:

• Identify promising profiles to support
• Offer relevant and constantly updated resources to the companies you support
• Financing your support programs
• Strengthen your networks and build bridges with other local and international structures.
• For this purpose, Digital Africa provides several modules:

• Networking with stakeholders in the sector (entrepreneurs, investors, coaches)
• Resourcing of documents useful for entrepreneurship and innovation
• Creation of the page of your structure and expression of these needs
• Creation of communities to bring together the companies you have supported and that constitute your local ecosystem.
• You also have the opportunity to create communities for your promotions and keep in touch to innovate together.

Do you invest in projects in Africa, on your own behalf or on behalf of your company/fund/bank?

Digital Africa supports you in the key challenges of your business:

• Sourcing future projects and identifying talented entrepreneurs
• Local monitoring with communities and clusters

Once you have your Digital Africa account, you have access to a 360° profile where you can describe who you are. Feel free to add media that illustrate what represents you or your professional projects.

• Step Two: Present your experiences and explain the skills they have brought to you.

On Digital Africa, all experiences are valuable and valued, whether they are of a professional or associative nature, or whether they are a personal commitment.

For each mission, you can associate the skills you have developed during this work. This allows you to value your achievements and, in the medium term, to be identified for these characteristics.

• Step three: Have fun! The Digital Africa profile can be fully customizable.

You can add the sectors of activity that interest you and the communities you have reached, the challenges you have participated in in the past, and the media.

To the right of your profile tab, you have a project page on which you can create the projects you are currently working on and what they require, such as “financing”, “collaboration” or “documentary resources”.

If you are several to work on an initiative, do not hesitate to add the members of your team on the page of your project!

You can create as many projects as you want.

By creating a page for your company, you allow other actors to locate you on Digital Africa’s map and create synergies with your activities.

Your company page, like your profile page, allows you to present the range of your activities and news, launch events, connect your teams, display the companies you have supported (if applicable) and prepare private administrative forms for investors.

o administer a company page two solutions:

• Either you are authorized within your company to animate its page on Digital Africa. In this case, you can create the company page when you register on the platform and complete it as you go along.
• Either you are attached by an administrator of the entity as a secondary administrator. A company page can be managed by up to five administrators.

To find people and companies, simply go to the “Member Mapping” page.  Two options are then available to you:

Browse the map using the filters to find the companies relevant to your search – only companies can be identified in map mode –
Switch to list mode and search for either a person or a structure, refining your search with advanced settings.

Your dashboard is the page you are on when you just logged in to the platform. It has several elements:

Your news feed, updated with the latest content posted by the clusters, communities, entities you follow.
The events you have registered for

If you want to send messages to other users, you can do so once they have agreed to join your contacts.

To avoid interacting through the platform’s instant messaging, you can configure your profile in private mode.

You can also exchange freely through the news feed, in posts or comments or in knowledge communities.

A cluster is a page on which users can discuss, exchange and work together on a common business sector.

Take the “Education, training, vocational and employment” cluster, for example. This page is run by up to five managers who publish news about the sector and guide users in their questions.

The resources shared in the cluster go up in the global resourcing. This makes it possible to have specific resources on specific sectoral themes.

On clusters, communities are attached.

They operate on the same principle but differ in several respects:

Anyone can create a community
Communities have a more local and specific purpose. For example, “The designers of Abuja”.
Communities can be created and linked in a cluster, or can be created without linking. For example, “Diambar Football Clubs” can be created without being linked to a pre-existing cluster.

Creating a community can serve several purposes:

Bring together in a virtual space people with whom you have already worked to carry out a project or maintain a collective dynamic (for example, a promotion of entrepreneurs you have accompanied / friends with whom you have launched an unsuccessful project / colleagues with whom you want to change the world).
Test a solution on the market by identifying the problems of your target group (e.g.: You want to develop a solution to improve waste treatment in Cairo. You then create a community: “Let’s finish with the garbage in Cairo! “where you can survey all the people who are concerned about the problem.
Joining a community allows you to strengthen your network and connect with people with whom you can think and collaborate later. Feel free to browse through all the communities created on the Digital Africa platform!

On the platform, only entities can post resources. If you are not a director of an entity (whether it is a start up, a company, or an association, you can only post information in the news feed).

For administrators, all you have to do is go to the entity page, and add a resource in the “resources” insert of your structure’s profile.

Before posting any resources, ask yourself the following questions: Can the document/media I propose be useful to a person working in entrepreneurship, innovation, investment in or towards Africa? Does it contain relevant, up-to-date content that can be used by others? Do I have the right to distribute this content?

If the answer is yes to these three questions, share this document! The objective of Digital Africa is to build a large library of knowledge accessible to as many people as possible and managed by the community.

As the project call functionality is under development, the creation and communication of these calls are managed by our services. For any request and creation of a challenge/competition/profile search, do not hesitate to send us an email at contact@digaf-staging.infinit-dev.io.