South Africa

Giraffe - the South African automated recruitment platform - has launched a series of free online courses designed to make jobseekers more employable. The impact of COVID-19 on the South African labour market has compounded an already dire employment situation - with an estimated 1.7 million net job losses in the past 12 months. 1.5 million of…

Founded in 2015, Giraffe is a job matching platform that aims to reduce unemployment in emerging markets by enabling jobseekers to make a CV on their mobile device for free and subsequently connecting them with relevant jobs in their area. Businesses looking for staff can post a job online at www.giraffe.co.za . Giraffe then uses matching…

Allan Van Der Muelen, 24, grew up hard in South Africa’s Cape Flats. With gang violence, little hope and less opportunity, things could have gone a very different way. Yet lured by live Jazz to a workshop as a teenager, he began a journey of innovation that would change the lives of thousands of young people from some of South Africa’s toughest…

For most of us who live in cities today, every possible need is within a short trip of our current location; be it food, clothing or even medical care. But that is not the case for more than 1 billion people worldwide who lack direct access to an all-weather road. To those communities, essential supplies and services may be days away. Lack of…, FRONTIER TECHNOLOGY , Autonomous airships are the marathoners of the drone world. Whereas the industry has successfully deployed many “sprinting” drones, that may be deployed on-demand, quickly and conveniently, to carry small high value payloads; the distance over which these drones are able to operate has remained a big barrier to expanding their deployment over more…, ON BEING OPEN SOURCE , The support of UNICEF’s Innovation Fund investment will allow us to bring a minimum viable product to market, on which we can raise additional funding and ultimately expand our reach and impact to the global scale. It is for exactly that reach and impact, that we support an open-source model for this technology; so that passionate people, wherever…, TEAM , Our team is made up of a group of South African engineers, who have been privileged enough to know what seamless logistics looks like in a developed setting, while being close enough to places where that access is near non-existent. We bring our multidisciplinary knowledge of mechanical and electronics engineering, as well as machine learning to a…, WAY AHEAD, It excites us equally to be part of a cohort of startups working toward the common goals of using drone technology to positively impact people’s lives. By working on a problem greater than ourselves, as part of a community greater than ourselves, in a spirit of cooperation, we stack the odds in our favour of making a lasting impact on the world. …

In photo: SURGE Cape Town students with Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.   Many people are still completely unfamiliar with blockchain and cryptocurrency and the opportunities they present. Often, when people learn about their potential, they are captured by it. Take this group of young people in Cape Town who recently joined us at a…, What is SURGE?, Blockchain is a difficult concept to understand. Economics, security, computing, philosophy; these are all difficult topics to understand by themselves, but blockchain uses elements from these fields and more, making it even harder to understand. Until recently, there were no formal education courses on blockchain. There is still a large gap in…, More details on ETHCapeTown, SURGE Cape Town was a side event at a larger gathering of the Ethereum community, called ETHCapeTown. This was the perfect opportunity to host a SURGE event, since some of the brightest minds were in one place, and could act as mentors to newbies to blockchain. As SURGE students learned about blockchain for the first time, at the same time, 144…, Sparking Action, As ETHCapeTown wrapped up, some people had heard about the SURGE event and the students that had joined us to learn about blockchain for the first time. Feeling excited about what SURGE was doing — introducing people who normally wouldn’t get to learn about this topic to the world of blockchain — some of the ETHCapeTown participants decided they…, Up Next, SURGE will be visiting two other continents over the next month. In May, there will be SURGE events in New York and Bangkok. If you’re interested in learning more or getting involved, please reach out to our team at blockchain [at] unicef [dot] org.  

Grahamstown, South Africa -- A new type of test that could revolutionise the way women and children are checked and treated for some of the world’s most life-threatening diseases and complications is being developed by scientists in South Africa, with support from UNICEF.   Three types of simple-to-use diagnostic tests are being developed to give…