West Africa
Startups: Edmond Nonie
Edmond Nonie (31), CEO at the startup Track Your Build in West Africa
“A lot has changed since we launched the company in Sierra Leone in June 2016. The initial idea behind Track Your Build was to enable Africans living anywhere in the world to monitor construction work back home. I’ve seen a lot of people get duped when they can’t check up on the progress of a project. It quickly became apparent that the problem was too wide-ranging for one plucky start-up to tackle all at once so we have pared back to focus on progress benchmarking for now. Once we’ve build up our strength in this area, we can establish our expertise one step at a time. I was really pleased when I discovered that we’d been selected for the GIZ programme. I had wanted to come to Nigeria for a while to build the business here but lacked the contacts and local knowledge so this opportunity gave me that “in”. Now we are developing our business, talking to clients and looking for investments. We already have a number of major institutional clients, including the United Nations Office of Project Services and the World Bank as well as a number of local and international engineering companies. I think we’ve found a niche in the market and there’s definitely an appetite for the services we offer. One of our clients wants 3D models of their construction site on a daily basis and drone surveillance for security purposes. There have been some challenges though and it mainly boils down to investment. A lot of clients say come to us when you have the resources, but investors say come to us when you have the clients. It can be quite difficult to persuade African companies to invest in startups that haven’t started to turn a profit yet but now we’re making progress and I’m feeling hopeful about the future of Track Your Build.”
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January 2019