Shega Weekly – Ethiopia Launches AI Center and More

In this week’s edition of Shega Weekly, we brought you the major highlights of the startups and innovation ecosystem in Ethiopia. From hotline service deployed to prevent the misinformation of locust to a national data center to be built and more.

A Tier 3 National Data Center To Be Built in ICT Park

The government aimed to build a national data center, where all the essential information and statistics of all federal institutions and citizens are securely stored and filed along with cloud services, making it the first nationally hosted cloud facility.

The Data enter will serve as the head data center for the electronic government solution where all the data processing and storage are executed. The data center will give cloud services, colocation, and hosting to better deal with business applications. Read more

Ethiopian Banks Pushing Digitalization

Birhan bank is collaborating with the Minister of Education to facilitate the digital payment method for Parents. The project is named “Birhan school pay ” aims to make payment easy for parents with different package offers from wherever they are through any type of phone. 13 schools have already been included in the program with more schools underway. Read More

Abay International Bank has also launched a specialized bill generating system for service providers. Dubbed Unicash, a system built by Atlas Technologies System, made for schools, colleges, universities, utility companies, travel, hotels, and health care service providers. Read more

A Hotline Service to Prevent the Damage of Locust

The Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in partnership with Mercy Corps and the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) has developed and deployed a WhatsApp for Business Desert Locust Hotline.

Information about the occurrence of desert locusts, their natures, and their movement are currently available on the WhatsApp hotline. This available information is also shared on the ATA run 8028 farmers hotline via voice and text to more than 5 million registered users across Ethiopia. Read more

Ethiopia launches AI Center

An Artificial Intelligence Center that “will be a site for the development of functional and problem solving technological innovations” was ingurated by the Prime Ministre of Ethiopia.

The artificial intelligence center focuses on AI-Robotics, Big data, machine learning, natural learning processing, and computer vision.

Machine Translation Startup Lesan Is Making Web Content Available in Ethiopian Languages

Meet Lesan, a machine translation company for Ethiopian languages that builds technology to open up the web to more communities.

Founded by Asmelash Teka Hadgu and Adam Beaudoin, Lesan offers APIs that allow companies to instantly and accurately translate content to and from Ethiopian languages. Read more on this.

Opportunity Alert

Jobs Creation Commission and First Consult with the support from Mastercard Foundation are running a COVID-19 resilience fund to support Micro- Small and Medium Enterprise found in Ethiopia. Apply here.

Gebeya in Partnership with IFC is implementing a project that will involve training (a fully-funded training program will emphasize practical skills and certification of 250) female software developers and seed funding to 20 female entrepreneurs whose digital business ideas will be supported by Gebeya. Apply here.