The 'AMPION Venture Bus' , a spin-off of last year's African StartupBus initiative, concluded its West Africa journey on Thursday. The Southern African phase of the journey begins on Friday 7 November with AfricaCom in Cape Town as one of its key destination points.

The West African leg of the startup bus tour was focused on developing mobile apps that will tackle the Ebola virus. It ran from 27 October until the 1st of November traveling from Lagos, Nigeria to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast.

Other main stops en route included Benin, Ghana and Togo.

According to a statement the first winning startup of the African Venture Buses 2014 is HaltEbola.

HaltEbola is a mobile application using voice messages to connect people in rural areas to share information on Ebola in their local languages.

"The AMPION Venture Bus West Africa was a very unique experience for us... we modeled HaltEbola, a digital platform that uses mobile to connect rural communities to information, practices and expertise that would be helpful in the current Ebola crisis.

"With the outlook of extensive support through AMPIONs network, we hope to be able to launch the prototype in a few weeks. Recording translations for many West African languages will take some time, but we have started right away," said the founders of mobile app.

The southern African Venture Bus tour starts in Harare, Zimbabwe and will welcome 40 high profile participants from Africa and all over the world.

The Venture Bus tour is expected to make a stop at the biggest tech conference on the continent, AfricaCom in Cape Town, South Africa.