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The Good, the Bad, and the GITEX africa 2023

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Unlike a regular GITEX in Dubai, GITEX Morocco wasn’t a polished event, but it was perfectly fine. We already shared our overall impressions; now it’s time for a more detailed review.

The first thing you realize when stepping off the plane is that Marrakech is warm. The trio of nordlings from Dataspike had to adapt to such unusual conditions. On our first day in Morocco, we doubted that our precise verification algorithms would identify our faces, flushing from heat and sweating in the warm air.

Surprisingly, the event was held in Marrakech rather than Casablanca, known for its robust startup infrastructure with a handful of accelerators, venture funds, and networking opportunities. Marrakech is the land of great history and culture, but Casablanca fosters game-changing innovations.

GITEX Morocco was nowhere as perfectly organized as GITEX in Dubai. There were many queues at cafes and water carts, with young startup founders and oil sheiks waiting in the lines. Additionally, the event wi-fi network didn’t work despite all attempts to launch it. That was unusual for a tech conference, and I’m sure the next GITEX conference in Africa will go without such issues.

Now to the good things.

As expected, in 2023, many participating startups worked on web3, blockchain, and crypto. Yet, there have been numerous projects adjusting successful consumer tech business models for African markets. Unlike the futuristic GITEX in Dubai, GITEX Morocco was focused on real-life improvements.

At our stand, we made hundreds of acquaintances with people from Africa and the Middle East. We spent time explaining the aspects of compliance, KYC, and AML standards and demonstrating our platform, which streamlines all these processes. Even though compliance automation isn’t the most innovative field of tech, we kept people interested in our features and entertained them with videos of our teammates making funny faces to test Dataspike’s performance in liveness checks.

What did we learn from GITEX Africa?

Africa has great potential for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer tech companies. As many global companies hesitate to expand to African countries, there’s a blue ocean of opportunities. We got some worthy leads here and will surely return the following year.