South Sudan’s NileBoda wins East African digital innovation contest

Mayang (C) received a dummy cheque from the organizers of the contest. (Courtesy photo)

NileBoda Inc, a South Sudanese motorcycle taxi (bodaboda) company that can be hailed using a telephone application, beat over a thousand contestants to emerge top in the 2022 Digital Innovation for Business Resilience in East Africa competition.

Digital Innovations for Business Resilience in the East African Community, is a program under the dSkills@EA project which aims to support young innovators at universities in the East African Community to develop and implement digital innovations for business resilience in the times of Covid-19.

This year’s competition brought innovators from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Sudan where more than 1000 youths participated in pitching their ideas at their respective national level in a 3weeks boot camp after which 12 teams across East Africa were selected for the Regional pitching.

Twelve finalists battled it out for $10,000 at the regional pitch event that took place on 26 May 2022 in Uganda. South Sudan’s NileBoda through its application technology reached the finals carrying home a grant of USD 2,000 from the shared grant of USD 10,000.

NileBoda is a transportation application that deals with the movement of people around Juba and can be downloaded from the Google app store on android phones. 

Radio Tamazuj caught up with the NileBoda chief executive officer Mayang Tut who said it was challenging at first to convince people about their idea however through reworking their pitching process, they were able to show the value of what NileBoda was doing in South Sudan. 

“It became very hard for people to understand what we are doing. We were ranked the last according to the expectation from the regional final pitch but when we started the first day of the training, we reworked our pitch on how our idea is solving the problem of people, and finally, we were selected among the first runners up,” Mayang said.

Even though South Sudan is ranked lowest in technology in the region, Mayang says people were shocked at how they emerged as winners.

“It was a good thing showing how finally South Sudanese have a way of making things happen. People were looking at Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and they never understood our background,” he said. “It shocked everyone that South Sudan was the lowest country in Technology but we won. We just did what we know and said what we know as our App already exists.”

According to Mayang, South Sudan has a very bright future in terms of innovation and technology however serious technological investment needs to be channeled into the sector.

“The future of innovation is bright in South Sudan but currently it needs investments. While financial support is a very important investment providing the young people with the relevant tools that they need is more important because in the next 20 years the future of innovation will be worldwide, close to two billion jobs are going to be from technology,” he added.

NileBoda has been in existence for more than five years now and employs more than 20 people.

South Sudan has a high population of jobless youth and Mayang urged them to come up with ideas that can solve particular problems.

“You do not need money to start a business, you only need a feasible idea,” he said.