Nairobi-based iHub has announced a 12 month partnership with citizen engagement organisation Making All Voices Count (MAVC) to support civic tech startups and spur collaboration between innovation ecosystem players.
MAVC aims to transform the way citizens and their leaders interact, by seeking out, funding and learning from creative solutions that amplify citizen voice and ensure that governments have the capacity, as well as the incentive, to listen and respond.
iHub announced a 12 month partnership with MAVC, through which the organisations will foster stakeholder collaboration, as well as helping to scale innovations created by civic tech startups, especially those providing service delivery solutions.
“Through this partnership we hope to initiate collaborative engagements that facilitate deeper relationships among various ecosystem players, conduct outreach activities to support the development of innovation and entrepreneurship capacity at county level and scale existing technology innovations,” iHub said.
While startups will receive support through the initiative, the partners also said they intend to benefit the counties in Kenya. The partners said the increased devolution being afforded to counties presents the opportunity to create truly localised solutions.
To support county-based innovation, iHub said it will share best practice and experiences of building the Nairobi-based community with county governments, with a view to helping counties build their own local communities of innovators and entrepreneurs ready to tackle local challenges faced at local level.
