Landscape: Access to Funding

By Abdulrahman Abdi
Posted on 21 May 2019 (Updated on 21 May 2019)

Back in February this year, we delved into a little expedition of trying to find out what are the difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in Africa. The rationale being that for the African diasporas coming back to launch their startups, among the myriad of issues that they might face, there will be stumbling blocks that will hinder their progress. But what could they be? Here are some of the findings:

• • Access to Funding is a major issue for startups
  • A lack of role models and successful exits, especially in the tech sector
  • Lack of high-quality talent

So we started to work on Access to Funding, and for the next three months we gathered information from aggregated crowd sources. The end results, which is still ongoing, are the following insightful analyses of funding for SMEs across Africa. We deep-dived into highlighting the funding gaps in emerging markets and to have a better understanding of who the funders are, what types of funding is provided and which countries are they present in, and/or which other countries do they extend such facilities to.

What’s Next

In order to have a better understanding of the growth prospects in Africa, budding global African entrepreneurs in developed countries, who aspire to launch their startups back home, need such vital information. We are going to continue with this adventure and are planning to drill-down further, and find more information that highlight additional funding factors.

If you have any inquiries, please feel free to reach out to us at kc@propel.africa.