Facebook is having its first FbStart event in Africa on Tuesday, 15 November at AfricaCom 2016 in Cape Town – one of the largest and influential Africa-focused tech events in the world.

FbStart is a global programme designed to help mobile start-ups build and grow their businesses. The event is part of Facebook’s FbStart world tour, which is a global event series connecting Facebook product experts and engineers with local developer communities.

The FbStart programme gives start-ups access to year-round support from Facebook product experts, an exclusive community of global start-ups and free tools and services from premier partners like Amazon, Dropbox, and Stripe.

To date, around 300 African start-ups have enrolled in FbStart, up from around 100 members two years ago.

“Being part of the FbStart programme was one of the best things that happened when we started Tress,” says Priscilla Hazel, co-founder at Tress, a community of black women from around the world who share and discover new hairstyles. “We were able to focus on building a great product,  keep our expenses low and  have access to great products that are complementary to Tress. We are still benefiting.”

Tress’s founders  applied for FbStart while they were students at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST). With no budget to spend, they benefitted from free credits for tools and products such as Parse, MailChimp, UserTesting, TwinPrime, and Facebook ads. “Having access to these tools really helped us bootstrap and use awesome tools at no cost to us when we first started out,” says Hazel.

This free half-day event is an opportunity for developers in the Cape Town community to come together and meet with the Facebook team, industry experts, and other start-ups to learn from one another. It will cover new products from Facebook, dive deeper into the existing ones, and discuss real-life case studies and best practices.