The City of Cape Town, Invest Cape Town, Wesgro, the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi) and Silicon Cape have partnered to make marketing resources openly available to local startups to encourage the region’s growth.
A pitch deck and infographic PDFs have been made available open source for the whole ecosystem’s use, and can be downloaded from the CiTi and Silicon Cape websites.
“The resources clearly show why the Cape is the leading tech hub in Africa. It is because of our skills pipeline, which is unmatched on the continent, combined with the quality of life and infrastructure in the Cape, and our established funding and support institutions. This means that we are the home to large tech corporates like Amazon Web Services and Naspers, and the largest set of tech startups in Africa,” said Tim Harris chief executive officer (CEO) of Wesgro.
The purpose of the communications drive is sustainable economic growth. The resources are licensed under Creative Commons BY SA, so that anyone can reuse the slides or images, in their entirety or piece-by-piece.
“The long-term economic impact of attracting international tech businesses to the Cape is significant for the region and the country. Beyond the obvious inflow of financial resources, it will make it easier for our local startups to attract local and international investment,” said Harris.
Alex Fraser, director of Silicon Cape, said the open sharing of the materials was important as it ensured many more people in the extended ecosystem can speak about what the Cape has to offer.
“The more voices we have sharing this message, the more impact we will have,” she said.
“We have already used this information for a number of visiting trade delegations, to motivate why international businesses and startups should choose Cape Town as a base, but this is only the start. We would love to make this an ongoing project with statistics updated every year.”
Ian Merrington, CEO of CiTi, said the project exemplified CiTi’s approach to Open Collaboration.
“If the world views Cape Town as a place where international businesses are conceived, developed and scaled, then investing in Cape-based startups will become commonplace,” he said.
The City of Cape Town’s director for trade and investment Lance Greyling said the city was happy to have funded this collaboration of stakeholders to produce relevant and insightful content for the sector.
“Our measure of success will be how the market adopts and propagates the materials designed to spread the word that Cape Town is an established and exciting digi-tech hub,” he said.
