Thirty-two tech companies cleared a field of more than 150 applicants on November 4, when Djibril Ouattara, Côte d'Ivoire's Minister of Digital Transition and Technological Innovation, named the first cohorts of Ivoire Tech Next 15 and Ivoire Tech Scale Up in Abidjan. Both are 24-month programs run by the ministry. Next 15 targets startups that have been active for at least a year and already have a product in the market. Scale Up is aimed at digital SMEs with between three and five complete financial years behind them.
The ministry announced both programs in August. The pitch was straightforward: move young companies from promising to established, and from local to competitive across borders. Alexia Amichia, the ministry's deputy director for entrepreneurship and tech startup development, put it plainly. "Our ambition is clear," she said. "To move from an ecosystem of promising startups to a genuine base of solid, competitive tech companies capable of succeeding beyond our borders. We don't just want to celebrate innovative companies. We want to help the future Ivorian and African tech champions emerge."
Picking the winners, it turns out, was the easy part. What comes next is where programs like this tend to get stuck: actually funding the selected companies, opening up public procurement to them, and measuring results honestly rather than ceremonially. The state followed through on its word, and even went a little further. Now it faces the harder work.
The first real test is coming soon, at the Ivoire Tech Forum. How the government shows up there will say a lot about whether this selection is a launchpad or just a list.
Originally published by TechCabal.