Caption: A Session from the Student-Built Solutions workshop at the University of Kigali
On a Saturday in March, 23-year-old Abdihamid Hassan, from Isiolo County, stood before judges at iHUB Nairobi and pitched Arda Link AI, a platform built for Kenya’s pastoralist communities. The idea is to use AI and satellite data to monitor pasture conditions, track livestock movement, anticipate drought risk, and make that information available to communities that are too often left out of digital infrastructure.
He was one of 15 finalists selected from more than 3,800 startup idea submissions across Kenya. By the end of the Red Bull Basement Kenya National Finals, Hassan had won the national competition and earned the right to represent Kenya at the Red Bull Basement World Final in Silicon Valley this June. There, he will join a global pre-acceleration phase in the United States to refine his idea into an MVP, then compete against 44 other innovators, drawn from a pool of 100,000, for $100,000 in funding, $25,000 in Microsoft Azure credits, and mentorship from Red Bull Ventures.
Removing the cost of starting
Over 1,000 creatives used our free podcast studios and editing suites. Three fashion entrepreneurs each received $10,000 in seed funding through the Fashionomics Africa Accelerator, paired with business support to help them scale. We ran Creatives Fundraising Workshops in Nigeria and Kenya, giving participants practical tools to find and structure funding. And our Entertainment and Media Hubs community grew past 3,000 storytellers collaborating across the continent.
At iHUB Nairobi’s STAWI Creative Spaces Initiative, 15 entrepreneurs received free desk access and 5 were given event space. One of them, the filmmaker Shirleen Wangari, screened her film Cards on the Table to a live audience, a small but vivid reminder that the right space can be the difference between a story told and a story shelved.
The rooms where investment finds talent
Some of the most valuable work we did this quarter happened simply by putting the right people in the same room. iHUB hosted eight senior leaders from Michelin’s Global IT and Digital teams for a working session with Kenyan fintech and mobility founders, including GoPay Kenya and Emoti, who spoke candidly about what scaling in Kenya actually demands. We welcomed 30 graduate students from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, who explored the future of African fintech alongside leaders from Visa, NCBA Group, and Flourish Ventures. And when an Advantage Austria delegation of CEOs and senior decision-makers visited, we made sure our alumni connected directly with them, with one of our Spark Accelerator startups, FaidiHR, pitching at the Austria Advantage Startup Night.
The logic behind all of this is simple. Investment follows access, and founders need rooms where both exist. So we keep building them.
Learning that goes somewhere
We care less about how many people attend a session than about what they do next. At the University of Kigali, students from IT, computer science, and business backgrounds worked through CcHUB Design Lab’s Student-Built Solutions workshop, moving from identifying a systemic problem to pitching a viable, tech-enabled solution out loud. In Nigeria, our Founder Speaker Series brought together 189 unique startups, drew over 85% satisfaction, and saw every respondent willing to recommend it, while more than 30 participants moved on to register for other CcHUB programs. Founders told us the conversations had shifted them away from chasing the next startup idea and toward building businesses meant to last.
That same philosophy sits behind our largest new commitment of the quarter. In March we launched GATEWAY, a five-year initiative in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation to help 340,000 young Nigerians across 10 states move from job seeking to solution providing. GATEWAY is fully funded for participants, places young women, persons with disabilities, and displaced youth at the centre of its design, and does not stop at training: it connects people to the platforms and networks where real gig work happens. Registration is open now at gateway.cchub.africa.
Building digital spaces that work for everyone
Access is not only physical. The digital public square has to be safe and open too, and this quarter we worked to keep it that way. At the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum in Abidjan, we convened a fireside session on technology’s double-edged role in African democracy, which closed on a point worth carrying forward: a resilient Africa needs electoral technologies built for African realities rather than borrowed from elsewhere. We published a white paper examining how online violence is being used to push women out of civic spaces and what the continent must do to reclaim that ground. And around Safer Internet Day and Data Protection Day, we ran campaigns to make digital rights feel accessible and real to ordinary users, while our reflection on multi-stakeholder digital governance was featured on the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience. A free, safe, and informed digital public is the infrastructure everything else rests on.
What the quarter told us
None of this went unnoticed. Our Creative Economy Practice was honored with the Inaugural Creative Ecosystem Enabler Award at the CreatiAfrica Biz Awards 2026, which we read less as a trophy and more as a signal that the wider ecosystem sees what we are building.
Look across the quarter, from Nigeria and Kenya to Rwanda, Namibia, and Côte d’Ivoire, and one thread holds it all together. Whether it was a creative who needed a studio, a founder who needed a room with investors, a student who needed a path from theory to practice, or a young person who needed a way into the digital economy, the answer was the same. Get access right, and the talent that was always there finally has somewhere to go. That is the work, and the past quarter showed us it is working.