The Big 5 Daily: Google Announces Winners for its African Impact Challenge, MTN Joins IoT World Alliance

We begin today’s big 5 Daily with interesting news across Africa.

Ahead of 2019 general election in Nigeria, 15 media organisations in the country have joined forces to fight misinformation as they launched a fact checking program called the CrossCheck Nigeria Project. The project aims to get normally competing newsrooms to work together to investigate and disprove erroneous claims, particularly on social media.

Yesterday was a beautiful day for some South African, Kenyan and Nigerian innovators using technology to solve social problems on the continent. For the first time in Africa, Google announced that four different won its Impact Challenge from the three African countries. The four winners will receive $250k each.

MTN Group has announced joining the IoT World Alliance, making it the first telecommunication company in African to join. IoT World Alliance is a collaboration of mobile network operators aimed to adopt and run a globally connected business through smart business decisions.

Africa is gradually adopting drone technology to solve everyday problems and it has increased the numbers of techpreneurs emerging from the continent. The deployment of drone has increased in different sectors and have gone to the extent of saving lives by transporting blood from the banks to the hospital where it’s needed and the delivery of medical tools. See how Africa is embracing drone technology to solve its major problems.

The TechGist Africa teamhad a Sit-Down with FarmCrowdy, Nigeria’s first digital agriculture platform during their 2nd Year Anniversary. At the session, the founders talked about the challenges they faced setting up, their milestones, how the platform has revolutionized the Agric sector, plans for expansion, the launching of Digital Agriculture Day amongst other important issues.

…and that is all for the Big 5 Daily today. See you tomorrow.