Well, that’s a dramatic title for an article. But, hear us out!
Africa is rising, we’re with you 💯. This article isn’t about that. This article is about what’s broken in our ecosystem and 3 ways we can reset it together. Our shared goal is to build a stronger foundation for the next era of African tech.
These solutions are pretty big, and this is a call for members of the African tech community that share a commitment to building an ecosystem we are proud of. Join us by clicking here if you want to be a part of this community effort!
So really, it’s a mixed story.
Last month, the African tech ecosystem crossed the $20 billion dollar mark of cash invested into the African technology ecosystem between 2016 and March 2023.
Massive shout out to Wiza, Tage, Eunice, Temi, Nichole, Maya, Rebecca, D. Barry, Benji, Caleb, Benjamin, Asemota, Sultan amongst others that ensure that we stay involved in the real things happening throughout the African startup ecosystem.
The weirdest thing happened though. Even though we hit that milestone, March 2023 was the worst month in 2.5 years since a lot of global VC blew up around the world.
It’s a pretty important signal - as if we’re getting a sign to reflect on what we’ve built so far and what we can do better. Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying that the soft life era wasn’t hard.
African startup teams, we are resilient. The last couple of years were difficult for every African startup team, but we thrived and collectively built scalable solutions to really hard problems for our people across the continent. Despite all odds, we keep doing the thing and scaled to the first $20 billion in dollars invested.
But let’s be real - it was also the soft life. Cash was cheap, fast and sweet. Investors spent 15 seconds on 2 slides on your Docsend, and signed SAFEs at a crazy dollar premium and sent the cash to your Mercury account by the next bank day.
Along the way, we celebrated ‘fundraising’, when really we were selling equity in Africa’s new economy and ran by serious corporate and criminal issues that popped up across our ecosystem thanks to the help of brave journalists.
Growth always comes at a cost and our foundation wasn’t strong enough. That’s why we’re saying that equity in African VC is broken. Then we’re making a public commitment to contributing to fixing it by building foundational solutions for the next $20 billion era of African VC.
And that’s okay. We’re all used to things that break. Things break at our startups all of the time. What’s more dangerous is when we pretend that something isn’t broken. Acceptance is the first step to build foundations to learn from our mistakes. If we don’t fix these, the cracks will get bigger and bigger over the coming years.