In Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, six groups of young technologists had five minutes each on September 19 to pitch products they had spent the previous 12 weeks building.
Bloom pitched a solution to make it easier to pay fares on informal buses; Africoded built a system connecting African job seekers to remote and cross-border work; and Harambee developed a waste-collection service connecting households with informal waste collectors. By the end of the event, six team projects and selected individual projects competed before a jury of technology experts for $12,000 in prizes.
It was the final Pitch Day of the 2026 Pan-African Yango Fellowship, a program run by Yango Group, a Dubai-headquartered company that provides digital services, including mobility, delivery, foodtech, and entertainment across over 30 countries in Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and other regions.
The company selected 24 fellows from more than 600 applicants across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Zambia, Senegal, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. For 12 weeks, they worked in mixed-country teams, moving from identifying a problem to researching it, designing a solution, developing a business model, and building a prototype.
According to the World Bank, around one million young Africans enter the labour market every month. Less than 25% of African higher-education students are enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, even as roughly 230 million jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to require digital skills by 2030. That is the gap Shashi Singh, Director of Operations for Yango Ride MEA & Asia, points to when he talks about what the Fellowship intends to address.
“Before we started this, we were doing a lot of hackathons in different countries,” Singh said in an interview with TechCabal. “The idea for us is, because we are a technology company, we want to do something in that space. We’ve always wanted to do something in the technology space. For us, kind of when we work in these kinds of countries, we see that there is a lot of potential; there is a lot of talent in the people here, but the access is limited.”
The Yango Fellowship began in Zambia in 2024 and expanded to two countries in 2025. This year, it reached six, with the 2026 cohort also placing a greater emphasis on applied artificial intelligence (AI).
“When we did this for the first time, we saw very good engagement from the audience who participated. We got good feedback,” Singh said. “And then we said, if this is from one country, why don’t we do it across countries? And the opportunity for people to talk to different countries was even the more exciting part.”
Before the fellows met in Abidjan for the graduation and Pitch Day, they spent their first weeks in online workshops learning personal branding, innovation, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy before splitting into six mixed-country teams for the 12-week core programme, according to the company. The teams chose to work on problems from their everyday life.
For Yango, that local focus was important because the company believes people who live with a problem are often better placed to understand the context needed to build around it. Singh compared that knowledge to the context window used by AI systems.
“Somebody building a product from outside has that gap of context window,” he said. “When somebody is sitting somewhere else and building a product for a market, that person can only build a product with a limited context. Even if that person travels, comes into the market, and spends a lot of time, there’s a lot that somebody who spent his last 20 years in the market would know that somebody who spent 20 days or 20 months. That context window is what we are trying to bring.”
That idea fits into Yango’s African strategy. Adeniyi Adebayo, the company’s Africa Chief Business Officer, told TechCabal in a June interview that Yango’s approach to Africa is built around local presence and city-level understanding, rather than treating countries as uniform markets. The company believes that the same local knowledge that helps it operate in those markets is useful when building technology for them. In May, Yango disclosed plans to invest at least $150 million into African expansion in 2026 as it targets entry into 10 additional countries in Africa.
Yango did not frame the Fellowship as a talent funnel. Singh said previous cohorts have gone on to internships and startups, and that Yango is exploring similar pathways for its 2026 fellows, without expecting them all to eventually join the company.
“The idea is for them to get that exposure, and for us to be able to be in touch with them, so that whenever there is a possibility, either they get an opportunity to work with us, or build something which could even be a competition for us, which is even healthy,” Singh said. “In this way, we’re enabling the whole society to grow together.”
Yango already has another route into that relationship through Yango Ventures, which Singh said supports early-stage startups through accelerator programmes. He said some products emerging from the fellowship could eventually be folded into Yango’s ecosystem.
Yango’s ambition with the fellowship extends beyond the 24 fellows who graduated in Abidjan. The company holds an ambitious measure of success for the program.
“I think the idea for me for the next three to five years would be that we get one unicorn from any of these fellowships,” Singh said. “I’m really passionate about these people, because I heard them talking. Somebody coming up and becoming a unicorn is probably the dream story for us.”
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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