How to plan for Africa’s next technology decade

Sometimes, it helps to look back at how far you have come, especially when you’re getting ready to tackle another summit. I say sometimes because while it can serve as a base for renewed inspiration, it can equally serve as an excuse to relax and revel in mediocrity.

Thankfully, we don’t have the luxury of the second option in the African tech discourse. We’re simply too early in the game. Still, a little reflection and direction-setting would do us a lot of good. Not in the least because the first two decades of Africa’s digital tech history (early 2000s to date) were an exercise in entrepreneurial opportunism—in a good way. It brought us as far as ~$20 billion in venture capital and venture debt investment. Not counting billions more in secondary and tertiary value, or the impact on gross domestic product.

But if the last 20+ years were an example of how big entrepreneurial opportunism can take us. The last five years, especially, demonstrated how fickle the monogamous opportunism that is married only to global hype cycles can be.

As we enter another global cycle, we can decide to make this the start of the clearest strategic decade of investing in and building tech in Africa. Or we can continue to build micro, often contradictory and occasionally intensely personal fiefdoms. I wrote about why this is terrible in The Curse of Monomania.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can melt down the last two decades into pots of learning and transform that collective intelligence into Strategic Direction.

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Strategic Direction does not mean everyone does the same thing or even agrees about the same things all the time. But it does mean that we’re all playing the same game, and both the goal and the goalies are well-marked and in position. Within that spectrum, there’s more than enough room to be creative.

Think about the recent craze for “innovative financing”. It’s such a cool term that it risks becoming a bandwagon. So, while the basic idea is to innovate better ways to finance what’s getting built in Africa. What often goes unsaid is that finance is a fickle beast. And that sometimes what looks cool can also blow up spectacularly.

That is not an argument against innovative financing, however. I am a full-throated supporter of broadening the range of financing options and fund management approaches. I have written about it here and here, for example.

And in one of the recent letters, which I write bi-monthly to our Africa community at Norrsken, I shared how excited I was to watch rapidly maturing tech startups in Africa go from the doom loop of the so-called “funding winter” to riding a strengthening current of mergers and acquisitions and finding access to an expanding range of financing options. In some cases, it has included raising capital from public debt markets, which startups are typically locked out of.

The point is that there will not be one silver bullet. Instead, we will need Strategic Direction across all levels of the startup ecosystem to define the goal boundaries of the game, if not the game itself.

Perhaps the best way to understand why this is important is to look back to…

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Yesterday

The story of technology investments in Africa is a power law story. According to IntelPoint, the continent’s technology businesses managed to raise an average of roughly $50 million in startup investments between 2000 and 2005. But by 2022, this “seed” investment had created an ecosystem where investments soared to more than $4.6 billion (conservatively).

That’s a massive increase of approximately 9000%. Europe, by comparison, has only grown by around 250%, from $33 billion in 2003 to $116 billion in 2021 (the peak year).

And this does not count capital that has poured into enablers like the physical components of the digital ecosystem, such as data centres, mobile broadband, and fibre networks.

Between $15 billion and $20 billion has been invested in African technology companies over the past 11 years, from 2014 to date. And despite a partially thawed funding winter, by August 2025, African startups have already crossed the $2 billion investment mark. The last time we crossed this threshold so early in the year was in 2023, and before that, in 2021.

That said, if you run a poll on what the larger goal for building and financing technology startups in Africa is, I can almost guarantee that you will get a potpourri of answers ranging from the kumbaya corporate social responsibility soundbite to the brazenly profit-maximalist. All valid, but almost all lacking in Strategic Coherence.

Today

Why? Because raising more money or building unicorns, camelcorns, or zebracorns ought not be an end in itself, because it packages a dubious mix of mismatched incentives into a nice-sounding topline number that is practically meaningless.

We should be big supporters of more capital going towards impactful, scalable, and commercially viable technology startups because we believe that the best solutions to the big challenges we face on this rocky spaceship, a.k.a. planet Earth, should get the most support possible.

That outcome is the goal. But even for us, this Big Noble Goal needs to find Strategic Coherence within the larger map of what other partners and stakeholders are building, investing in, or otherwise supporting. We don’t have to agree, but we need to know where the goalline is and how everyone is playing to get the ball across the line. It’s more likely than not that we will be kicking the same ball around at some point.

This is what I see when I read the essays and LinkedIn complaints about the lack of exits, the need for local capital, and the need to stop copying and pasting foreign innovation and financing models. Essentially, the strategic coherence problem is coming to a head.

Startup founders and the investors who back them in Africa want to see more capital deployed. But more crucially, founders, their investors, and tech customers want to see more impact, productivity, and capital returned per dollar invested.

Here’s how a 2025 report by , Africa’s foremost technology publication, describes this underlying current: “Beyond funding, the ecosystem’s maturity was evident in its strategic activity. The first half of the year saw 29 M&A deals, 20 startup expansions, and at least 34 major strategic partnerships, signalling a clear trend towards consolidation and collaborative growth.”

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Which I translate to mean that everybody is growing up and ditching shiny play rocks for practical tools that work. We’re seeing that this affects every aspect of supporting startups—from how startups are financed, to how technology companies are built, and even how we support these founders.

One way this is playing out is that in just under two quarters, our local pilot project to drive local capital towards Rwandan startups has so far connected startups in Rwanda to more than $3 million in local currency financing. It’s not a lot in the context of $2 billion raised since January, but for smaller VC markets like Rwanda, it demonstrates how local nuance and strategically coherent partnerships with local financial institutions can unlock better financing opportunities for builders.

In the less stable world we are entering, this type of local, regional and continental coherence will be a crucial part of designing, supporting and building startups that are resilient. And of course, as we learn more, we will share more.

Tomorrow

The big takeaway is that African founders, investors, and enablers now have the best opportunity to define the future of startup building and investing.

As I said earlier, in many ways, the first twenty-five years of technology businesses in Africa just sort of happened. In particular, the last five years of startup investing in Africa were riding the coattails of the huge global hype in startups. But we cannot afford to be continue that dependency on global trends, models, and perspectives.

At some point, we will need to put enough muscle into our differentiation to allow African startups and their investors to stay grounded while remaining connected to the global technology and capital markets. The best way to tell the future is to make it. Or as Dwight Eisenhower put it, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything”.

That planning process is what we’re hoping to kickstart by convening the key leaders who want to and can be part of making a future for technology startups with people and planet at the centre. I like to describe it as two days of sharing and learning to create the next 3,652 days (or ten years).

I want to see what leaders like you who are on the ground come up with as a Strategic Direction that is also Strategically Coherent in local, regional and continental layers. Deal?

Abraham Augustine

Ecosystem Manager,
Norrsken East Africa

Thank you for reading this far. Feel free to email kenn[@]bigcabal.com with your thoughts about this edition of NextWave. Or just click reply to share your thoughts and feedback.