HOW IT WORKS

LOCAL LEVEL

phase 1: public nominations

• We start by opening up public nominations on the national level. Anyone can nominate an individual, startup, company, or organization in any relevant category per country through the GSAwards proprietary competition system. 

• Categories can belong to either the baseline categories or the vertical categories and can be divided further into startups, individuals or ecosystem supporters. 

• Nominees have to accept the invitation to the competition and provide the required data to be properly assessed in the selected category and, consequently, become approved applicants. 

• To become an approved applicant the finalist needs to fit the criteria for the specific category.

• Parallel with the public nominations, Ambassadors and Ecosystem Partners are also invited to recommend the best candidates to participate in the competition by nominating them. These sourced nominations are to ensure quality and not solo rely on organic nominations. 

• An Ambassador and an Ecosystem Partner can not nominate themselves in any category but can be nominated by third-parties

• The finalized applications are collected through the GSA proprietary competition system.

• A shortlist of up to 10 finalists (per country, per category) is selected and will compete at the regional level as finalists.

• The shortlist will be quality assured by a pool of GSA stakeholders (pre-jury). These can be a mix of experts in a given vertical category, ecosystem partners, country partners (if the specific country is represented by any), the regional partners, and the global team.

• The regional winners are selected through a combination of the rating given by all regional juries and the total amount of collected public votes. 

• The overall rating of each finalist is based on the average of the summed points from each jury member and the amount of collected public votes. 

• A jury consists of a minimum of 3 jury members. The public voting will always have the same weight as one jury member.

• Unlike all baseline and vertical categories, the People’s Choice category winners are entirely selected by the amount of collected public votes. This category is applied to startup based categories only. 

• The regional winners are announced at the regional Grand Finale Day and published online afterwards. 

• Exceptionally for the African Startup Awards, phase 3 is replicated one extra time. Firstly, winners among the 5 regions of Africa are selected based on the regional jury and public voting. Then, phase 3 is repeated to find the regional winners of Africa (as a whole region) who will compete at the global level.

phase 4: Selection of Global Winners

• At the global level, global finalists are asked to engage in the public voting phase and to register for the Global Grand Finale Days. 

•  All regional winners, which were part of a vertical category (now considered global finalists) will be placed in a new category called
  Best Vertical Startup category. 

  On the other hand, all global finalists which are part of the baseline categories will automatically be registered in their same categories.

• Phase 3 is repeated to find the global winners, however, this time by a global jury.

• The global winners are announced at the Global Grand Finale Day and also published online afterwards. phase 4: Selection of Global Winners