List of the nominees for the 2020 Digital Impact Awards Africa

By Editor

Posted on November 18, 2020

HiPipo; the organizers of the annual Digital Impact Awards Africa have released the list of nominees for the 7th edition of the annual Digital Impact Awards Africa (#DIAA2020). Digital Impact Awards Africa is Africa’s most important gathering of C-Level Executives and senior Digital and IT executives.

The release of the nominations marks the end of a comprehensive entry submission and validation exercise that ran from 19th October to 10th November 2020. #DIAA2020 grand finale is scheduled for 11th December at Mestil Hotel, Kampala.

Digital Impact Awards Africa is a platform that promotes Digital Inclusion, Financial Inclusion and Cyber Security.

In other words, the Awards seek to recognize, celebrate and appreciate different individuals and organizations that are spearheading the use of digital mediums to better serve their communities.

Altogether, there are 36 categories in the 2020 Digital Impact Awards Africa including 17 that recognize best performing digital and financial players from across Africa and 19 categories purely focused on Uganda.

The #DIAA2020 edition comes in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented period that has on one hand wreaked socio-economic havoc across the world, but on the other hand further showcased the life- serving and saving capacity of digital-financial services (DFS).

The 36 categories include two special recognitions. These are: Regulatory Financial Inclusion Rails Award, and Women in FinTech Leadership Award.

Regulatory Financial Inclusion Rails Award

World over, regulators are key enablers of financial inclusion in some cases by adopting provision of digital financial infrastructure as a public good. Regulators lead the provision of a national digital identity to all residents, the development of a real-time payment systems and the establishment of a favourable legal framework.

The Digital Impact Awards Africa “Regulatory Financial Inclusion Rails Award” is a special recognition of initiatives, programs and projects that are setting up the needed financial inclusion infrastructure rails with key emphasis on instant (real-time) payments platforms in Africa.

Women in FinTech Leadership Award

Just like most countries especially in Africa, Uganda still struggles with a huge gender diversity challenge in the financial technology space. Only 10 per cent of the 41 FinTechs that took part in the 2020 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative had either women co-founders or women in their senior management.

The limited involvement of Women in Financial Technology is unfortunate because they are the majority gender world over and most importantly, their last-mile utilisation of financial technology solutions is very high. As such, the #DIAA2020 Women in FinTech Leadership Award seeks to recognize and appreciate a Woman that is taking lead in bridging the aforementioned gender diversity challenge.

Minus these two special recognitions, the rest of the categories will include jury assessment and public voting that will commence on Thursday 19th November until the eve of the awards.

The awards gala will be the climax of the #IncludeEveryone – Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit that will happen on the same day.

This summit will explore the strategic trends and technologies that are shaping the future of Digital, IT and business. The summit theme will be “Collaboration to Advance Safety and Security towards Sustainable Financial Inclusion”.