Appfrica.org facilitates, mentors and incubates entrepreneurs in software in East Africa and Uganda. It offers a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that allows students and recent graduates a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment with industry professionals as mentors outside of school. Entrepreneur projects are refined and prepped to help them secure funding and launch sustainable, profitable businesses. This project, loosely modeled after Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, is better known as Appfrica Labs.

Appfrica Labs is a for-profit incubator and software development firm currently based out of Kampala, Uganda. The mission is to offer opportunities and work experience for East African software entrepreneurs so that they can then use their talents to bolster the growing local markets by offering products and services. Appfrica picks up where East African colleges leave off by offering hands-on experience in programming languages like Java, C++, C#, Ruby on Rails, Django and Python, CouchDB, PHP, Perl, Kannel and that aren’t often taught in-depth locally at university. These skills are highly valued around the world and having professionals in these areas helps to make East Africa a more attractive place to develop software - not only locally, but also for international companies. Appfrica Labs also provides oversight and guidance to the projects that are launched out of the incubator.

Appfrica.net is our popular blog and magazine that covers all aspects of African contributions to technology and innovation. It’s one of the most popular and widely read technology and business sources on the continent. Appfrica.net is available in a number of languages thanks to human and machine translations. These languages are Swahili, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Spanish, and Luganda.