Backing South African social entrepreneurs
Diageo Empowerment Trust
The Diageo Empowerment Trust’s Social Tech Startup Challenge helped women- and Black-owned South African start-ups turn ideas into businesses — 271 ideas and 30 working prototypes.
The Challenge
The Trust set out to support South African entrepreneurs solving social problems in their communities through technology, and to give aspiring founders — not just existing employees — a real route from idea to viable business.
What we did
The Trust launched the Social Tech Startup Challenge across three focus areas: Grow Nation (agriculture), Make Nation (manufacturing) and Tech Nation (mobile and IoT). To reach founders, it went to universities and start-up hubs and even onto one of South Africa's most popular radio talk shows. The top 30 idea authors attended an all-expenses-paid three-day workshop and built 30 "pretotypes" — fast, cheap tests of a product idea. The top 15 then joined an entrepreneurship programme run by the Gordon Institute of Business Science, with digital experts from Urbian supporting prototype development. Nosco led the design and planning, provided the platform and supported pretotyping, prototyping and MVP development, alongside partners Wavemakers (awareness) and GIBS (education).
Results
The challenge drew 2,200 registrations, 271 ideas, 300 comments and 30 prototypes. Fifteen founders progressed into the prototyping and entrepreneurship programme, competing to build market-ready MVPs, with roughly €60,000 in funding on the line for the strongest new business.
