DotCom’s Bus Ticket Zambia Wins “Africa’s Best New Venture” from Harvard

The 17th Annual Africa Business Conference was held last Saturday at Harvard Business School and DotCom founder and tech entrepreneur Mawanu Kambeu was a guest speaker there. DotCom has a junior project called Bus Ticket Zambia that enables users to search for and buy Bus Tickets electronically with different major bus operators.

The Bus Ticket Zambia project has now been awarded the Africa Best New Venture for 2015 award by Harvard at the conference whose theme was “A more inclusive Africa: The pursuit of progress for all”.

The objective of the New Ventures Program is to showcase Africa’s most promising entrepreneurs that are focused on solving Africa’s problems. Along with the accolades, the university has awarded Dot Com Zambia a $15,000 grant towards the project. $10,000 of which was awarded by a distinguished group of experts, while $5000 was a viewer’s choice award voted for by the delegates at the conference, where Mawano Kambeu, Managing Director of Dot Com Zambia, delivered a pitch about Bus Tickets Zambia to the audience.

Speaking in Boston, Mawano states, “For any business, start up or established, there is no greater honor than being recognized by Harvard Business School and there is no better motivation than having some of the world’s top business leaders and academic minds telling you that you have the capability of changing Africa. I am proud for my organization and I am proud for the people of Zambia”

Mawano further explained that conference had many companies with great ideas that were inspirational. On paper the concept of bus ticketing seems like a fairly standard project that hundreds of companies have done, but Bus Tickets Zambia in essence is a national transport system that will have tremendous social and economic impact to the African traveler through technological efficiencies, with some of the experts stating that Bus Tickets Zambia could be the template model for much of the continent.

To his fellow Zambian entrepreneurs, Mawano says, “Don’t give up! It is hard out there, we are working 18hrs a day with little resources and even for this project we have been met with lots of road blocks and challenges, not to mention it is hard to get cooperation from stakeholders, but it can be done, so don’t give up”

This is not the first award that Dot Com Zambia has received for their technology projects for the Zambian market. Bus Tickets Zambia recently won second place, last November, at the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) Competition in Morocco sponsored by the U.S Government