Forbes names Rwanda's Iribagiza among promising entrepreneurs

Clarisse Iribagiza, 26, has been rated among Africa’s 30 most promising young entrepreneurs of 2015, by Forbes, an American business magazine.

Friday, February 06, 2015
Iribagiza.

Clarisse Iribagiza, 26, has been rated among Africa’s 30 most promising young entrepreneurs of 2015, by Forbes, an American business magazine.

Iribagiza, the co-founder and CEO of the mobile development firm, HeHe Ltd, featured in a report published by the influential magazine on Thursday, alongside continental moguls from Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Tanzania among other countries.

"It is a great honour for the entire team working tirelessly to realise the dreams that we have,” Iribagiza told The New times yesterday.

She added that; "Recognising the work we do is encouraging and it is also a reminder that we are not doing anything in vain. It pushes us to greater heights.”

Iribagiza rose to fame in 2012 after hitting a jackpot of $50,000 grant from Inspire Africa, a sub-regional TV entrepreneurial contest.

She invested the money in her  company.

She has since made several countryside trips to secondary schools in a bid to inspire the youth into developing mobile applications.

Founded in 2010, out of the college class rooms of the University of Rwanda’s College of Science and Technology (formerly Kigali Institute of Science and Technology), HeHe Ltd has grown to become an IT solution lab with clientele that includes a number of government agencies.