Hiedberg at Tech in Ghana

Our founder, Miriam MacCarthy, had the opportunity to attend the annual Tech in Ghana conference!

Tech in Ghana is a prominent UK-Ghana platform dedicated to strengthening and showcasing Ghana’s thriving tech ecosystem both locally and to the world. Since launching in 2017, it has garnered the active involvement of several multinational corporations, decision-makers, investors, fast-growing scale-ups, and founders from the region.

She was able to listen to inspiring keynotes and discussions on the state of tech in Ghana. Although each panel and speaker provided endless insights, her main takeaways are:

The Ghanaian government has created sandboxes to help drive continuous innovation.

Sandboxes are a great opportunity for Ghana’s burgeoning Fintech community. Start-ups will have the opportunity to showcase their products and validate their product market fit. Founders will be able to deep dive into real-time data surrounding their users, user experience, market, etc. to iterate and create the best version of their tools or services.

Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing provide a unique opportunity to capitalize on and own African narratives in our languages.

A key, and valid, concern is ownership. If we are going to continue providing organizations with African indigenous languages to diversify the data pool, we want assurance that we will maintain ownership and receive recognition for our input.

As machine learning and natural language processing continue to become more inclusive, more businesses, specifically on the African continent, can truly utilize them to optimize their business operations, accelerate product development, and innovate for themselves locally and internationally.

Data is key in designing products to help onboard the unbanked.

Affinity Africa discussed how they use data to design products that target women. Using data to create customer segmentation and break down usage of, in this case, a fintech tool, allows product managers and product marketers to custom-tailor features to provide a better customer experience to their user base.

Blue Penguin also shared their experience creating a POS system targeting market women. However, this opportunity and subsequent challenge are related to using data to change learned behavior (i.e. accepting cash is cheaper than using a POS) and marketing the product in line with how the market women operate their businesses and interact with their customers.

At Hiedberg, we believe data is king and that data can shape the personal connections customers have with the brands they use.

Although there’s plenty of movement, innovation, and traction in Ghana’s fintech community, there is still the burden of government regulation and bureaucracy. Tap Tap Send pointed out the need for increased collaboration between the government and the start-up community. This partnership will give founders the space and freedom to test their proof of concepts and scale their companies even faster. Countries like South Africa and Senegal have taken steps in this direction with the creation and passing of start-up acts that encourage and facilitate local innovation. Ghana is making strides to join the growing number of African nations with start-up acts and has drafted their own start-up bill.

All in all, this conference was a great reminder of Ghana’s tech space’s massive growth and opportunity!

Hiedberg’s three brands:

• CoStaff
• Kodeera — COMING SOON!
• Hiedberg Consult

are ready to partner with players influencing Ghana’s tech scene.