The Motivation for the Afritech XYZ Program

Thanks to research carried out by key players of the African tech ecosystem, GSMA, VC4A, Orange Digital Ventures, Techcabal and Briter Bridges over the past year, we have finally been able to put numbers to anecdotal evidence we've been collecting for years. Some of the key finding of the year have been:

• There are 442 tech hubs active across the African continent
• In 2018 $729M was invested in African tech in we expect over $1B in funding to have been invested in 2019

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Of the Africa-based, VC-backed startup founders that have raised over $100K:

• 97% of the founders have a bachelor’s degree, 58% have a Masters degree
• 1 in 5 founders went to 1 in 7 universities (none of which are in Africa)
• 66% of the founders have studied in the UK, US, or in France.
• 1 in 2 of the founders has over 5 years international work experience(expats are usually from the US, UK, and France)

With this information in mind, we sought to discover the difference between these funded founders and the African born, raised and educated founders not yet in receipt of funding.  
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We carried out our own research and found that the overarching barrier is access.  

• Access to domain experts
• Access to tools and resources that make scale and growth easier
• Access to investors
• Access to later stage founders

With this in mind, we created AfriTech XYZ; a program that supports high potential, early-stage startups across 6 African countries through an individualised mentorship program supported by skilled volunteers around the world. Here's a quick snapshot of our volunteer community:

• +120 - The number of mentors we currently have in our network
• 70% - The percentage of them based in the UK
• 40% - The percentage of them that are technology experts
• 20% - The percentage of them based in Africa
• 15% - The percentage of them that are investment professionals
• 10% - The percentage of them based outside the UK/Africa

We are extremely excited and incredibly humbled by the interest of this group of truly wonderful people from large companies, startups, government departments, VC firms and so on. 

Much more news to come on the progress of this program in 2020, but we believe we’ve stumbled on something that could significantly impact the African tech ecosystem and allow for a stronger, more effectively supported pipeline of startups to grow out of the continent. 

In Africa, we support the democratisation of access to key opportunities and information that will catalyse the growth of startups and their ability to get funded. We’re working to ensure that we can bridge as many of those gaps as possible through the AfriTech XYZ program. 

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