A spin-off of last year’s African StartupBus initiative dubbed ‘AMPION Venture Bus’ is planned to kickstart in September with five buses touring 16 countries on the continent.

In October last year, StartupBus Africa departed Harare for Cape Town on a 2,500km journey. Developers, designers and business people joined the African hackathon journey to build and launch startups.

And similar to the first StartupBus Africa tour, the ‘AMPION Venture Bus’ is expected to be a five day business launch and training exercise on buses across African roads.

Co-organiser of the StartupBus Africa initiative, Fabian-Carlos Guhl, has told ITWeb Africa that after the first African road trip last year, the organisers realised the demands of emerging markets were significantly different.

“It is not an overstatement to say that the StartupBus Africa was a major success, however, we realised the requirements for emerging markets in Africa were different to the ones in the US, Europe and Asia,” he said.

"Seeing as the African tech markets are still very dynamic and new we came to the conclusion that the buses need a strong organisational backbone to provide sustainability.

"So we decided to create AMPION, a non-profit that will offer promising entrepreneurs and their startups designed on the Venture Bus a fellowship programme and sustainable networking ties to mentors," he said.

According to Guhl the ‘AMPION Venture Bus’ will tour 16 countries travelling from West, East, southern to North Africa.

The tour is planned to start in September in West Africa travelling from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria.

The next routes are in East Africa in October starting in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

After East Africa is southern Africa, which is planned to commence in November in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

The final AMPION Venture Bus routes will be in North Africa starting in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

"The first bus will tour in West Africa and is destined for DEMO Africa where the ‘Ampioneers’ will pitch at the main stage of the event," he told ITWeb Africa.

"Our organisation will also be organising tech conferences in Africa in the future," he stated.