The 2024 Aurora Tech award winner, Folake Owodunni has charged aspiring women entrepreneurs in the tech space to develop a spirit of resilience if they hope to succeed with their innovations or businesses.
Owodunni made the remarks on Saturday, September 28, 2024, during a panel session at the 2024 Wetech Conference sponsored by inDrive. She described her success at the last edition of the Aurora Tech Award as a product of resilience, signalling a turning point in her career.
While advising eligible women in tech to apply for the 2025 Aurora Tech Award, she maintained that the initiative remains the best platform to get the desired recognition and support.
The Tech Entrepreneur noted that her initiative, Emergency Response Africa, aims to address the issue of inadequate response to emergencies in Africa by connecting ambulances and first responders to patients through technology.
The initiative, which has received tremendous acceptance from various state governments in Nigeria, continues to attract successful partnerships aimed at improving emergency response, such as transporting pregnant women in labour to hospitals.
According to her, the need for better emergency response systems motivated the set up of Emergency Response Africa. An inspiration she attributed to high-profile deaths and numerous unreported cases of death in Africa due to the knowledge gap on the part of the public during the period of emergencies.
The initiative, designed to confront issues such as public panic and misconceptions about emergency services, aims to improve emergency care by educating the public and ensuring timely and effective responses to medical emergencies.
In her remarks, the Acquisition Manager, inDrive Nigeria, Catherine Akindele speaking to the success of the Aurora Tech Award, said “ The Aurora Tech Award was borne out of the need to foster fairness, inclusivity and empowerment of women in technology.”
Akindele stated that the award has received a significant number of applications from participants with innovative tech ideas, with only a few selected each year. Shedding more light on the company’s commitment to the awardees, she said, “Beyond the reward, we monitor the progress of participants by providing resources and guidance on how to grow their businesses.”
The Aurora Tech Award, now in its 5th edition, is structured to enable participants to learn from each other and gain inspiration from one another’s experiences.
About inDriveinDrive is a global mobility and urban services platform. The inDrive app has been downloaded over 240 million times and was the second most downloaded mobility app in 2022 and 2023.
In addition to ride-hailing, inDrive provides an expanding list of urban services, including intercity transportation, freight delivery, task assistance and courier delivery. In 2023, inDrive launched New Ventures, a venture and M&A arm.
inDrive operates in 750 cities in 46 countries. Driven by its mission of challenging social injustice, the company is committed to positively impacting the lives of one billion people by 2030. It pursues this goal both through its core business, which supports local communities via a fair pricing model, and through the work of inVision, its non-profit arm.
inVision’s community empowerment programs help advance education, sports, arts and sciences, gender equality, and other vital initiatives. For more information, visit their website.
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