Cameroonian Nara Laurence, co-founder of startup Wasamundi.
Cameroonian online city guide startup Wasamundi is exploring opportunities in the education and banking sectors as it looks to become the country’s biggest data bank and information resource.
The startup was co-founded by Nara Laurence in 2011 and currently provides information services on areas such as housing, restaurants, hotels and health.
Wasamundi’s platforms include wasaHOSTEL, which aims to simplify search for students housing, wasaTEXTO, which links businesses to consumers through instant SMS updates, and wasaME, which is URL shortener for companies listed on Wasamundi.
Speaking to HumanIPO, Laurence said while Wasamundi has already signed up a small number of schools it is planning a bigger project to aid university students with access to educational resources.
“One area we would like to provide services for on a significant scale is education,” Laurence said. “We would like to expand higher education’s reach and quality with our IT services.
“Though we have some schools on our platform, we are still to make this sector a real reliable resource for students. We are already working on something big that can help most University students easily access vital school information and educational resources offline with their mobile phones.”
Wasamundi is also looking at ways it can contribute its services to the country’s banking sector.
“We believe Africa, especially Cameroon, still needs to explore and benefit a lot from this sector,” said Laurence. “With things like mobile money which is still struggling hard to win the hearts and trust of the people, we believe something special still has to be done to persuade them.”
Regarding businesses expansion outside of Cameroon, Laurence pointed to the fact the translation of “Wasamundi” is “search earth” and its aim was to make the platform the place to go to “search, find and connect with anything you are looking for in Africa”.
He said: “Our next target will be Nigeria. We think the need is there and we’ll have a better chance to succeed there too taking into consideration things like language (English only), population and even the penetration rate of internet and mobile phones there.”
