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Justice accelerator seeks ‘innovative’ start-ups

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 31 Mar 2021
Themba Mahleka, co-head of the HiiL Innovation Hub Southern Africa.
Themba Mahleka, co-head of the HiiL Innovation Hub Southern Africa.

Southern Africa start-ups are invited to earn a spot in this year’s Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) justice accelerator programme.

HiiL is a social enterprise devoted to user friendly justice, making justice easy to access and to understand.

Its programme, the Innovating Justice Challenge, was established in 2011, with the aim to attract top innovations that have a proven solution with increasing annual revenue and impact, have a scalable business model, are on their way to financial sustainability and are led by a strong team with experienced founders.

In a statement, HiiL says the challenge is searching for promising start-ups and social enterprises that are solving a pressing justice problem in a way that is high impact and sustainable.

Themba Mahleka, co-head of the HiiL Innovation Hub Southern Africa, says the numerous social and economic challenges of the past year have made tackling inequality and injustice in all its forms more urgent than ever before. “Through the HiiL Innovating Justice Challenge, we are looking for the best social entrepreneurs from Southern Africa that aspire for everybody to have access to justice at work, at home, in the neighbourhood and in business.”

According to the HiiL statement, successful applicants who proceed to the four-month justice accelerator programme will, in addition to receiving €10 000 non-equity seed funding, have the opportunity to present to an international jury and compete for additional cash prizes at the annual HiiL Innovating Justice Forum.

“We are especially interested in start-ups that work on what we’ve identified as potential ‘game-changers’. Interested applicants are encouraged to find out more about that on the HiiL Web site,” adds Mahleka.

Previous start-ups supported by HiiL in Southern Africa include LUMA Law, a chatbot for legal information founded by Grace Gichanga.

Gichanga says the accelerator provides extraordinary opportunities to learn and collaborate, "Everyone has a different approach to solving problems; we have become a much stronger organisation as a result of the programme."

The HiiL justice accelerator will accept applications for its programme until 30 April.

To register, click here.

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