Egypt to host 1st Global Impact Challenge in N.Africa, MENA on July 19

07 / 07 / 2019

• education

Egypt’s Red Sea city of El Gouna will host the 2019 Global Impact Challenge (GIC) for the first time in the Middle East and North Africa on July 19. The event is organized in tandem with Challenge Group and Endure Capital, one the of distinctive corporations that invest in successful startups.

This year’s Singularity University (SU) MENA GIC is focusing on Health, Energy, Education, Agriculture, Transportation and Fintech.

Egypt and the whole MENA region are a natural hub for tech-savvy experts: engineers, programmers, designers, and business professionals. As Haider Ghaleb, the SU Cairo Chapter Ambassador, says: “If Egypt joins the AI era it will leapfrog massively, which is why we are hosting this GIC to help foster exponential technology in our area.” The Singularity University MENA Global Impact Challenge is creating a platform through which local, bright minds can turn their ideas into actions, and eventually products and tools, that will tackle the world’s most urgent problems.

The top 20 shortlisted finalists of this Global Impact Challenge will be invited to attend a bootcamp in El Gouna from July 19-24, 2019, before the final pitch event.

The bootcamp will equip the finalists with the latest knowledge within exponential technologies, and prepare them for the final pitch event where they will pitch in front of a panel of judges from Singularity University. The finalists will work hand-in-hand with mentors from SU, former GSP participants, and other subject experts.

The winner will get a $60,000 scholarship to enroll in the Global Startup Program (GSP), one of the major programs offered by Singularity University.

“One of the most important conditions of the competition is that the winning team or company must return to the Middle East or North Africa after completing the program offered by Singularity University. This is after they obtain the required knowledge and most advanced technologies. This would enable them to work on providing solutions for the most important challenges facing their nations and the region where they live. The winning team or startup would be announced in July 2019 in El Gouna,” Ghaleb added.

Meanwhile, Walid Khalil, the Managing Partner of Endure Capital, said, “We have great confidence in the organizers of the competition due to their long expertise in this regard. The competition offers a detailed educational program, which is specifically designed for startups and emerging companies, with the support of the professors of Singularity University. The objective of the competition is to solve the major problems of the world and have a positive impact on the lives of one billion people during the last 10 years.