African Healthcare Challenge 2020

What

The African Healthcare Challenge is an innovation competition that solves the real-life problems of African organisations and businesses by bringing together the smartest minds and most passionate people.

When

This challenge takes place over a weekend in March 2020.

We commence with networking and team building on Friday 21st February at 6pm.The judges will deliberate, and winners will be announced on Sunday 23rd February at 5pm'

Who

The challenge brings together diverse groups of smart, interesting and passionate people across the UK, and virtually from Africa. You may register as a team or as an individual.

Why

Improve healthcare service, policy and infrastructure in Africa by supporting organisations to solve their challenges.

Create meaningful networks between our smart and passionate participants and the speakers, sponsors, and delegates that support us.

Create a catalytic environment to launch successful start-ups in Africa that address the biggest healthcare challenges.

What is a Hackathon & Why is this Unique?

Hackathon

Typically, a hackathon (a hacker neologism) is an event where teams of computer programmers collaborate and compete against each other to come up with the best solutions to a stated problem in a very short time frame (~24-72 hours).

A weekend Challenge is not for everyone. Only the most passionate and driven people make time in their busy schedules to participate and develop great ideas. These are the people you want to work with, solving the biggest healthcare challenges across the Continent Sometimes ideas formulated in a hackathon environment lack real-world market ‘fit’ due to the time constraints of a weekend. To mitigate that issue, we involve the people who would be using these innovations right from the beginning, ensuring the solutions developed are user centred, feasible, viable and desirable.

Why Engage?

2020 will be the fourth year the challenge has been running, this African Healthcare Challenge directly supports development and innovation in healthcare for the African continent. It enables our high-calibre participants to discover and engage with a wide diversity of African healthcare opportunities in a fun and challenging environment that promotes collaboration, intelligence-sharing and innovation.

  • Build networks with African emerging leaders.
  • Deliver access to Africa’s most impactful opportunities in healthcare Innovation incubation.
  • Enabling global entrepreneurs to start building African solutions, even from abroad .
  • Providing an eco-system which enables direct problem-solving and the discovery of global collaborators and future inventors.

Tips for Success

  • Think about your teams wisely, a team that incorporates multi-sectoral backgrounds, will generate the most diverse and unique ideas .
  • Don’t be afraid to speak up and think outside the box, the best ideas can be refined from the most obscure suggestions .
  • Work effectively as a team, identify each person’s strengths and capitalise on them .
  • Think strategically, what are the elements the judges will pay most attention to? Work on ensuring these are the strongest and pick up the details later .
  • Have fun, as much as this is an opportunity to learn, its also an opportunity to network and socialise with people you normally wouldn’t. this is an opportunity .

See pictures from past competitions

Contact Us

The African Healthcare Challenge attracts designers, students, coders, healthcare professionals, students, development experts, policymakers, investors and a whole range of people passionate about Africa. A large part of our audience are millennials across a multiplicity of countries and regions passionate about driving change and we offer them the opportunity to directly take action.


This is a great opportunity to interact with an often hard to reach demographic, a great way to get exposed to, and engage with, a highly skilled and motivated audience who are at the leading-edge of Global Health and International Development. We can offer branding and communication opportunities across our pre-event marketing campaigns and have a range of options available for sponsorship and support. Embark on a fruitful and long-term partnership with us and expose the benefits of your organisation to the magic we create.

Date

Friday 21stst - Sunday 23rdrd February


Location

Tower Bridge Business Complex, Clements Rd, London SE16 4DG, UK