One night at 2 a.m., Folake Owodunni woke up because her 1.5-year-old son was screaming in pain. As a first-time parent in Canada, she was terrified and called 911. Paramedics arrived within 10 minutes and resolved the minor issue. This experience inspired the idea for Emergency Response Africa, ensuring quick medical help in Nigeria.



In her homeland, Folake dedicated herself to building first aid infrastructure, greatly improving emergency response times and saving countless lives. We talked to Folake about her journey, pitching in Nigeria and Canada, the essence of entrepreneurship, and why her mother inspires her more than Elon Musk.

The Gwiji for Women mobile app connects cleaners with their clients in Nairobi, Kenya, and gives decent jobs to less fortunate women who are forced to raise children in harsh conditions. Elizabeth won the Aurora Tech Award for creating an incredible idea to help her community, and raise the economic empowerment of women in Nairobi.

In Kyrgyzstan, Ainura Sagyn has created the Tazar app, bringing together waste producers and recyclers; established the women’s online magazine sheisnomad.com, and set up coding training programs for young women. Ainura won the inDrive  Award for creating a sustainable business and making a significant contribution to the development of the women’s community in Central Asia.

Hannah was a migrant herself when, standing in a huge line at the Mexican Immigration office with her German passport, she witnessed two Creole-speaking guys being rejected because of their background and citizenship.

Reflection on these biases eventually led her to the idea of creating an AI-based hiring app, Intrare, that would be absolutely prejudice-free, helping good specialists find jobs without bias, whether they are single moms with an experience gap, non-cisgender individuals, or migrants.

Iva Gumnishka is the driving force behind Humans in the Loop, a social enterprise providing remote job opportunities in data annotation for people from conflict-affected regions.


A successful symbiosis of a non-profit foundation and a commercial company, Humans in the Loop has been promoting fair working conditions and ethical AI in Iva’s native Bulgaria and across the globe.


Iva won the Aurora Tech Award for restoring faith in people who are still behind artificial intelligence technologies.

At the age of 19, Elena Konstantinova launched the AgriTech-SpaceTech startup, held her first pitches for investors in the United States, and is preparing to register her company. By training, she is an environmental safety management engineer in the aerospace industry.


Aerospace-Agro offers help in evaluating the condition of agricultural fields, identifying possible deficiencies and problems, and developing recommendations on how to address the issues at hand.


Elena won the inDrive Award as a young woman who introduces technology to the conservative farming industry.

Inventor, founder and trainer from Botswana, Sarah Phiri-Molema was born deaf and went through the entire calamity of being misunderstood by non-impaired people she interacted with. From the wall of indifference with her peers to the even broader problem of not being taken seriously in startup pitches, she faced numerous challenges.



Nevertheless, all of that struggle eventually led her to become an excellent physicist-engineer and to find an affordable solution for her own problem. That’s how Deaftronics was born.

Rocket Learning creates tech-enabled digital teacher-parent communities to share daily learning content and quizzes that parents can do with their children at home and teachers can do at school.


Namya has won the Aurora Tech Award for making early childhood education accessible to low-income families and for creating a scalable and cost-effective model that can impact our children's future today.

Anna Filippova launched the startup KidsWay: the idea is that busy parents can call a nanny driver to escort and chauffeur their child around for pick-ups and drop-offs to or from school, an interest class, or the pool. In the past, Anna was a TV presenter.


"The business of safely getting children to where they need to be," is how Anna Filippova used to describe her company when she was starting out, in 2016.


Anna was given the inDrive Award for creating a business that fulfills an important mission for all parents.