10 of Africa’s most innovative apps of 2015 you should know about

Pan-African competition AppsAfrica has concluded earlier this week, announcing the continent’s ten most innovative mobile applications of 2015. With entries stretching from Nigeria to Togo and South Africa, the awards recognised a variety of platforms, that include live video and radio streaming to e-readers and many more.

“Our mission is always to promote and honour the fantastic innovation across the mobile and tech ecosystem in Africa,” AppsAfrica wrote in a blogpost.

“We had diverse entries from 21 countries and both the finalists and winners are a testament to how technology is being used to disrupt business models, empower people and drive positive social impact across the continent,” it continued.

According to the announcement, apps geared for health, education and fintech sectors were among the most popular categories among the entries.

Read more: The Ericsson Mobility Report sheds light on Sub-Saharan Africa connectivity

The organisation added that the contribution women are making in technology in Africa is very evident and important in empowering the next generation.

See the winners in their respective categories below:

1. Disruptive Innovation: Opera’s Sponsored Web Pass (Nigeria) uses data compression to enable over 60 million users use the web more affordably.

2. Best Mobile Innovation: bookly (South Africa) is a free mobile reading and writing platform built to improve literacy in Africa.

3. Non Data Mobile Innovation: GeoPoll (Kenya/USA) is said to be is the world’s largest real-time mobile survey platform, and reaches a growing network of more than 150 million users worldwide through SMS, voice and web communications.

4. Best African App: Tuluntulu (South Africa) is a video and radio streaming platform, targeting audiences in Africa and globally with African focused content.

5. Fintech Innovation:  VCpay (South Africa) gives those without bank accounts or credit cards, the power to pay for goods online, in app, overseas, wherever.

6. Health Innovation: GiftedMom (Cameroon) leases SMS notification platforms for maternal engagement to NGOs and provide simple mobile data collection and analysis solutions to enterprises.

7. Educational Innovation: mPaper (Tanzania) is a mobile application newsstand that brings together all local newspapers, magazines and books.

8. Social Impact Award: codeX (South Africa) is a full-time apprenticeship that enables student coders build projects for companies.

9. Best Entertainment: Gamsole (Nigeria) is a mobile game production company that develops games for Windows Phone mobile and Windows 8 PC. Gamsole’s games currently has over 9 million downloads around the world.

10. Women In Tech: Emefa Kpegba (OMobileFunding) (Togo) is a mobile crowdfunding platform for microfinance.