Nine African founders took the stage in Djibouti this year for the First C STAR Alumni Entrepreneurship Competition, pitching across AI, fintech, healthcare, electric mobility and green manufacturing for a share of $31,000 in non-dilutive grant funding. Here's who won, how the judging worked, and — since "C-STAR" is easy to confuse with a handful of unrelated programs that share the acronym — what the China Merchants C-STAR program actually is.
- Prize pool: $31,000 USD, non-dilutive grant funding across 9 winners
- Where: Red Sea World exhibition center, Djibouti
- Process: Open application → preliminary screening → live final (9 finalists, 7 in person, 2 remote)
- Judging: Expert panel (80%) + peer delegate jury from the 4th C STAR cohort (20%)
- Organizer: China Merchants C-STAR African Youth Innovation & Entrepreneurship Program, backed by China Merchants Group Charitable Foundation, UNDP Djibouti, the Djibouti Ports & Free Zones Authority, CLE and CAC Bank
What is the C-STAR program?
Search "C-STAR" and you'll land on at least four unrelated programs — a rehab clinic in Missouri, a speech-translation research consortium, a supply-chain framework, a rehabilitation lab at Northwestern. This one is the China Merchants C-STAR African Youth Innovation & Entrepreneurship Program, initiated and sponsored by the China Merchants Foundation and officially launched in April 2022. It's based at the Centre of Innovation and Maritime Excellence (CIME) in Djibouti and runs staged entrepreneurial incubation and acceleration for young founders recruited from across Africa.
The numbers give a sense of scale: since 2022, C-STAR has drawn applicants from 54+ countries, with 641 applications for the 2026 cohort alone. It provides coaching, capacity building, supply-chain sourcing and venture-capital matching, and connects founders to Chinese enterprises, universities and investors. The program is also cited in the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation's (FOCAC) Beijing Action Plan for 2025–2027 — it sits inside a broader, state-backed China-Africa entrepreneurship pipeline, not a one-off pitch contest.
The Entrepreneurship Competition itself is the program's alumni showcase: a chance for founders who've already been through a C-STAR cohort to pitch their traction to outside judges and investors, rather than a first-touch accelerator application.
How this year's competition worked
This year's final ran across a three-stage process — open application, preliminary screening, then a live final in Djibouti — narrowing the field to nine finalists (seven pitching in person, two remotely). Judging combined an expert panel (financial institutions, investment bodies, private-sector representatives and academics) worth 80% of the score with a peer delegate jury drawn from the 4th C STAR cohort worth the remaining 20%, so founders were partly judged by the people who've been through the same program.
The winners
🥇 First Prize — $10,000
Mwamba founded Plastic For Change in 2019, after Zambia's plastic-bag ban, to bring marginalized informal waste pickers into a structured recycling economy rather than leaving them at the bottom of it. The organization now sources from more than 5,000 waste pickers across Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and has diverted over 1,200 tons of plastic from landfills and the environment. C-STAR's own announcement noted she was also recently named to the Africa Business Heroes 2026 Top 100 — we haven't independently verified that placement, but it lines up with the traction her win reflects. Explore open funding in Zambia on Startup Map Hub.
🥈 Second Prize — $6,000 each
Lastmal is a merchant credit-intelligence platform for informal SMEs across Ghana and West Africa. It turns everyday sales, payments and logistics activity into a single verified transaction record — the evidence formal lenders need to underwrite businesses that have never had access to traditional credit. Bakorkor, based in Accra, founded the company in 2021 and also serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at Angel Fair Africa. See funding open in Ghana.
Medyc has run an e-health teleconsultation platform since 2020, connecting patients in Djibouti to specialists across general medicine, dermatology, gynecology, psychology, nutrition and addiction care, plus home sample collection and medication delivery. The company has raised roughly €107,000 to date, is part of Microsoft for Startups, and is expanding toward Ethiopian and Somali markets. See funding open in Djibouti.
🥉 Third Prize — $3,000 each
A fintech entry from Ethiopia's fast-moving digital payments scene. Public detail on Nura Pay is thin beyond the competition listing itself — a reminder that Ethiopia's fintech pipeline runs well past the handful of names (Telebirr, Chapa) that dominate coverage. We'll update this if more becomes public.
An electric-mobility venture out of Djibouti, one of two Djiboutian finalists this year and part of a small but growing set of EV plays across the Horn of Africa. As with Nura Pay, independently verifiable public detail is limited right now.
Shiferaw carried the Chapa banner at the final. Chapa itself isn't a new venture — it's one of Ethiopia's more established digital payment gateways, licensed by the National Bank of Ethiopia, founded in 2021 and now processing payments for 1,000+ businesses across multiple currencies. See funding open in Ethiopia.
⭐ Outstanding Pitch Awards
Dimir Technologies, founded in 2020, runs a 3D-printing and laser-cutting Fab Lab in Addis Ababa — part of Ethiopia's growing maker-space and green-manufacturing scene. Girum is also a certified business mentor and has consulted on Fab Lab work for the UN Industrial Development Organization.
We couldn't independently verify further public detail on FOX PLC beyond the competition listing. If that's you, reach out — we'll gladly update this with more on what you're building.
LOCALNLP is training NLP models for Mandinka, Wolof and Bambara — languages spoken by more than 50 million people who currently have little to no access to AI tools in their own language. Jagne is an AI entrepreneur and startup coach. See funding open in the Gambia.
Why it matters
Three things stand out about this list beyond the individual pitches. First, it's non-dilutive — grant capital that doesn't cost founders equity, which is rarer in African tech funding than the venture headlines suggest. Second, the geography: Djibouti, the Gambia and Zambia get a fraction of the funding-news coverage that Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo do, and three of nine winners came from exactly those markets. Third, the sector spread — AI, fintech, healthcare, circular economy, green manufacturing and electric mobility all placed, which tracks with where non-dilutive and impact-oriented capital has been concentrating across the continent this year.
It's also a visible marker of the China-Africa entrepreneurship channel specifically: state-backed, foundation-funded, and increasingly showing up in policy documents like the FOCAC Beijing Action Plan. Founders evaluating where to spend their limited application bandwidth should know this channel exists alongside the more commonly covered YC/Google for Startups/Techstars set.
Watching for the next cohort
To be direct: we're not claiming any of this year's nine winners came through Startup Map Hub. We're simply glad to see non-dilutive capital reach founders in markets that rarely get this kind of coverage — and we'll be tracking C-STAR's next application window here. If you're building in Zambia, Ghana, Djibouti, Ethiopia or the Gambia, the fastest way to see what's open right now — C-STAR's next cohort included, once applications reopen — is our live funding directory rather than waiting on the next LinkedIn post to cross your feed.
Don't wait for the next announcement
Startup Map Hub tracks grants, accelerators and investor opportunities across Africa as they open — so you see them before they're a LinkedIn recap.
Details as announced by the C-STAR Program on LinkedIn and reported by La Nation, Djibouti's national newspaper, September 2026. Company descriptions compiled from public sources; independently verifiable detail on some winners is limited as of publication — we'll update this piece if more becomes available.