Mandla Money was recently named the best in the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) Leopards Lair 2021 Student Entrepreneurship Competition. This is an annual event hosted by Akro Capital in association with UCT student run organisations Invest Society (Invest Soc) and UCT Entrepreneurs Society. This fierce competition sees the university’s most innovative brains battle it out to showcase their most creative and solution-based business ideas and product inventions.

Mandla Money participated in the Social Innovation Post Ideation category. Mandla Money aims to foster financial inclusion and boost economic participation by providing a suite of blockchain-enabled financial services accessed via mobile phones and web-applications. These services are particularly geared towards less tech advanced environments. Mandla Money’s pioneering product is the Mandla Wallet, which allows users to send and receive Stellar’s Lumens and Ripple’s XRP digital assets via WhatsApp or SMS in a fast and affordable manner. Users also save on data and storage costs required by most mobile applications. Mandla Wallet is currently in closed beta.

Mandla Money’s solution was named best in the Social Innovation category, securing a total award of R150,000. The prize money was jointly sponsored by UCT’s Bertha Centre in association with SAB Foundation (R100,000) and Imvelo Ventures (R50,000).

The judges for this year’s competition were Anton Baumann (co-founder of Imvelo Ventures), Jason Basel (co-founder of EduOne, Akro), Precious Mdlalose (IDF Capital) and Bridgit Evans (Executive Director: SAB Foundation).