Benin innovation hub

An innovation centre in Benin is poised to “solve African problems.”

Located in the capital, Cotonou, the ‘Seme-City’ startup and innovation hub is helping young entrepreneurs and project managers to develop their start-up ideas.

“We come to find collaborations, we come to find training, to find support precisely to set up a project, to train, to get a diploma, but above all there is a purpose, which is to solve African problems with new methods. With what we have done today we can say we are improving and we will continue to do so together”, said Claude Borna, general manager of Seme-City.

Recently, a young entrepreneur benefited from the guidance offered by the centre to develop X-Over, a mobile application that facilitates the tracking of COVID-19 infections.

Equipped with a QR Code scanner to check users before entering a building, the app is being rolled out across the country.

“X-Over is a mobile application we developed as part of the crisis management against Covid-19. It actually allows us to detect the different people who have been in contact with a Covid-infected person. Not only does it allow us to track these contacts, but it also provides users with reliable information about the Covid”, has expained Donald Tchaou, X-Over team member.

While the tracing application is not the only program of its kind, developing the app in Benin saves money and strengthens local control over data.

Sèmè-City is an economic development programme aimed at making Benin a technological hub for West Africa, based on the model of Kenya in East Africa, or Rwanda for the Great Lakes region.