Company founder Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu to Nairobi to give final presentation to elite panel of judges headed by VIRGIN founder Sir Richard Branson.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – soleRebels Africa’s fastest growing footwear brand has bested well over 3000 top level African companies and reached the finals of the prestigious 2011 Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship!

Company founder and managing director Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu will now head to Nairobi, Kenya on December 8th, 2011 to give a final presentation in front of an elite panel of judges headed by VIRGIN founder Sir Richard Branson.

The Awards, dubbed the Nobel of Business Awards in Africa, honors Africa’s best entrepreneurs who work to create businesses that meet the needs of those around them and by doing so raise the living standards of their communities while also creating something of lasting value for themselves, their employees, their communities and their nations and rewards them with prizes of $350,000. “At our core we at soleRebels are creative artisans who aim to craft the coolest and most comfortable footwear. We do this by combining our heritage artisan crafts with modern design sensibilities, while pouring our creative selves into our shoes. The final result is that when our footwear is bought, the purchaser can SEE, FEEL and enjoy all the elements of heart, soul and creative craftsmanship that have gone into their construction. We are deeply proud that that this ethos has carried us to the finals of this amazing competition!” stated Bethlehem.

The Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship is owned and founded by Legatum, a private investment group, based in Dubai, with a twenty-five year heritage of global investing. They manage a multi-billion dollar fund of proprietary capital which is allocated to businesses and programmes that promote sustainable development.

Legatum is joined by Omidyar Network as a major sponsor of the 2011 Africa Awards. Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, the organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic and social change. To date, Omidyar Network has committed more than $400 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation across multiple investment areas, including microfinance, property rights, government transparency, and social media.

“This years Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship received more than 3,300 applications from top companies in 48 African countries, the most ever received. soleRebels selection as a finalist puts the company into an elite category of achievement”, commented Hamish Banks, Head of Corporate Communications for Legatum.

Google is also a partner of the 2011 Africa Awards . Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google's strategy in Africa is to get more users online by developing an accessible, relevant and sustainable internet ecosystem.

• Reducing access as a barrier to all potential users
• Making the Internet relevant and useful to Africans
• Helping strengthen an Internet ecosystem in Africa that is vibrant, and sustainable and self-sufficient in the long-term

The Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship is collaborating with Google in exploring a number of initiatives to promote African entrepreneurship within the scope of the Africa Awards programme.