After 30y I haven't seen Algeria. My family and friends told me it has changed a lot and going back to the city I was born in to participate to a hackathon was honestly an excuse I couldn't resist.
First thanks to Aymen and the Webia team. They invited me to participate as a jury and the team is great, fully dedicated to make that country move on.
About the organizers: what a team too. From the lobby to the competition and the awards ceremony it had nothing to envy to some of the international conferences I did in the past. The campus is H-U-G-E and you get easily lost but with the local hospitality mindset you'll find someone guiding you. I also noted that English was more prominent that French amongst students, which is a clear signal that the new gen is turning towards the international market.
Regarding the ideas, they were divided into 3 categories: Agritech, Health Tech and Pharma Tech. A lot of energy could be felt, lots of AI used of course, and like any hackathon, the focused was, for my taste, too focused on building rather than going-to-market. This is a university after all. But some ideas are worth exploring especially the ones in Agritech. Some healthcare ideas too.
The students exercised their presentation skills, which wasn't an easy task. Some did better than others and clearly some people there have already a professional maturity that can make them great in the business side. I also noticed a lot of women in the cohort which is confirming the data that STEM fields are definitely attracting girls which is cool to see as a diversity for these careers.
I spent a day there. Beyond the smiles, the energy, the good atmosphere and the food, I was honestly pleasantly surprised by the level of entrepreneurship will this generation has to offer and I am sure some of these minds will do wonders for their country. I passed on a message that emerging markets like Algeria have everything to offer them as a green field to do business, and that the attraction of the occidental might not be as strong or useful as before.
Perhaps one part I didn't felt is the investment. No VC in the room, poor knowledge of how leveraging venture capital can truly make a difference for high technology powered companies. This is perhaps the occasion to discuss this in a podcast following the event.
Thanks Biovatech, Techwaves, Webia and Aymen for the invite. It was a blast and I wish this has more visibility to promote these talents in the world.
My mum lands in Constantine three or four times a year.
The minute her plane touches down, something quietly breaks. Her doctor in France doesn't follow her. Her file doesn't follow her. Her prescriptions become a polite negotiation with whichever cousin happens to know "a good doctor". And from Morges, on the shore of Lake Geneva, I do what every diaspora kid does — I send messages, I send money, I send vibes, and I pray nothing happens at 2am.
If you grew up between two countries, you already know this feeling. You can wire €500 from your phone in under a minute. You cannot wire healthcare. The infrastructure for love is faster than the infrastructure for keeping the people you love alive. That is the absurdity I'd lived with for years.
Then I met the team at MaghAssist. And the absurdity stopped being permanent.
This is why we backed them.
MaghAssist.com has been around for fourteen years. Ministry of Health approved. Run by actual doctors — not the nurse-on-a-scooter setup that pretends to be home medicine in too many places. They've got ambulances on the ground in Algiers, Oran, Constantine and beyond. They've got medicalized aircraft that move patients between Europe and Africa — Paris to Algiers, Brussels to Dakar, end to end, one team, one chain of custody. That part nobody talks about. It exists. It's flying. They built it.
For people inside Algeria, MaghAssist is now a click. Call an ambulance. Start a teleconsult with a real physician. Book a doctor at your door. The kind of click-to-care that Europeans treat as banal — finally on the ground in Algeria, in Arabic, French or English, twenty-four seven.
For people like me — the ones living across two continents — they launched Magh Family. One subscription, paid from wherever I happen to be living, covers up to six people back home. My mum walks into her apartment in Constantine, a qualified doctor is at her door within the hour, her file actually follows her, and I sleep better. That is the entire pitch. That is the whole thing.
One quiet detail that matters more than it looks: a Swiss entity in Morges for diaspora customers, hard-currency payments, Swiss-grade invoicing, account data under the revised Swiss LPD. Medical records stay on Algerian soil, on Algerian servers, under Loi 18-07. Two of the strictest privacy regimes in the world, each doing the work it should be doing, no shortcuts and no offshoring of your mum's medical history to somewhere weird. That detail is not glamorous, but it is the difference between a serious healthcare company and a marketing campaign. The team got that right from day one.
Most stories about Africa get told in one of two registers: extraction or arrival. Capital coming in. Talent going out. Money flowing one way. This one is different. MaghAssist isn't a bet ON Africa — it's a piece of infrastructure BETWEEN Africa and Europe. Built for the people who already live in both places. Built for the families who never fully left and never fully arrived. Built for the diaspora that's been holding two countries together with WhatsApp and prayer for far too long.
They also opened an affiliate platform. Anyone — and I mean anyone — can sign up, get a tracked link, and earn a recurring fee every time someone subscribes through them. No application, no gatekeeping, no "ambassador program" nonsense. If you can tell your cousin about it, you can get paid for it.
🎁 Code DIASPORA25 — 25% off Magh Family. 🤝 Affiliate program: https://maghassist.com/affilies/
The MaghAssist team built this. We believed in it and we backed them — because if your mum, your aunt, your grandfather, or your own future self moves between Europe and Africa, this was built for us.
Who in your network needs to see this?
#Algeria #Africa #Europe #Diaspora #HealthTech #MaghAssist