Input Output Global’s Project Catalyst, dubbed Cardano’s “innovation engine,” has partnered with a pan-African business incubator called iceaddis to launch Ariob, an incubator scheme.
According to an announcement, Ariob means a “collection o starts” in Ge’ez, an ancient Semitic language from Ethiopia. The partnership is set to enhance the growth of projects funded by Project Catalyst and offer high potential start-ups within it “access to venture-building expertise and resources.
The partnership is focusing on Africa, a continent that’s home to 1.3billion people and is “seeing a huge acceleration in adopting new technologies such as blockchain.” Per the announcement, as there are “no allegiances to legacy systems, it is far easier for technological advances to take hold.”
The move comes after IOG announced a partnership with the Ethiopian Ministry of Education last year to provide five million students in the country a way to verify their academic credentials using technology built on Cardano.
Project Catalyst, the announcement details, is “one of the largest decentralized innovation funds” and a “focal point for ecosystem development and innovation” that is driven by the Cardano community,
Each funding round sees the community present challenges across various Cardano-related subjects, which are then answered with project proposals defining solutions that are then voted upon before funding is attributed.
The Ariob incubator program is set to offer “services aimed at realizing creative potential, testing ideas, and using prototypes to find the best product.” Markos Lemma, co-founder, and CEO of iceaddis, was quoted saying:
Cardano is a platform that’s creating solutions to real-life challenges in Africa and one of our most valuable relationships is with the Cardano ecosystem. Together, we want to demonstrate that the next big ideas are emerging from African countries, and we are ready to invest our resources to make that happen.
Projects joining the Ariob incubator include DirectEd, which is developing solutions to facilitate scholarships for students in low-income countries, CheCha, a digital USD voucher system, and Thrift Finance, a decentralized thrift savings system governed by THRIFT token holders.
IOG’s announcement comes shortly after the Cardano Foundation, a non-profit organization custodian of the Cardano ($ADA) blockchain, partnered with the Blockchain Center of the University of Zurich, “one of the leading research universities of Europe.”
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