Crowdfunding In Ghana — A New Platform For Funding
It is undeniable that, more often than not, the immediate community around a business idea originator are critical to the success of the business. These may include friends, family and acquaintances that provide the needed morale and financial assistance, and the community that best appreciate the problem the new business seeks to solve.
Regarding funding, there is the recent explosion of crowdfunding sources for well developed ideas. This is where a pool of people voluntarily support the project with donation and in some cases technical know-how that is critical for transforming the concept into a viable product. These crowdfunding opportunities such as kickstarter, fundable, indiegogo, gofundme etc have however been largely limited to the Europes and Americas, leaving Africa trailing behind as usual. In the few cases where these crowdfunding platforms support African countries, limitations of payment platforms means many Africans have no means to contribute to a project of interest.
There are very few platforms seeking to get around these constraints by opening up simple yet effective crowdfunding portals that are more Afrocentric that support payment options that are more Africa friendly such as mobile money and cryptocurrencies. The entry processes are more flexible where people tend to be less tech savvy yet equally interested in great business potentials.
One such new platform is Crowdfundit Live supported by DigiGhana, a simple gamified crowdfunding platform which aims to make crowdfunding more accessible to individuals aiming to finance their blog or website as well as start-ups aiming to promote their business and raise funds. The crowdfunding platform supports multiple payment options including bank cards, mobile money, on-chain cryptocurrency, stable coins, bitcoin lightning among others. This should set the tone for other well established and more resourced crowdfunding platforms to enter the space and hopefully spook existing crowdfunding titans into opening up to Africa.
How the sector will grow going forward is worth observing.
