Viridian was an official networking partner at this year’s Sankalp Africa Summit. Claire Jowell represented Viridian at the Summit in Nairobi, and shared some key takeaways in this short blog.
It is important to understand how the landscape is shifting and share the success and challenges of other organisations working to catalyse entrepreneurship in Africa. And importantly, how our work at Viridian aligns and supports these developments.
Here are 6 key takeaways from this year’s Sankalp, and how we are supporting in these areas as Viridian:
- Development finance will be far more focused going forward, and commercialisation and job creation are going to be the priority. As entrepreneur development specialists, we need to deeply understand the context of where we’re working, and support in educating donors and financiers to ensure programmes are designed for maximum local impact.
- Business acceleration in verticals is most effective, and this allows ESOs to understand the sectors and markets at a deeper level to offer more tailored support.
Viridian’s hub specialisation toolkit provides a practical framework for specialising entrepreneur support, and we’ve run several programmes to support incubators/ accelerators to specialise their support for prominent green and blue economy verticals. - There is still a mis-match between acceleration programmes and investors. Pollinate Impact hosted a conversation to understand the challenges between the two groups in Nairobi, and will be sharing their lessons soon.
Viridian has recognised this gap for a while, and we’ve been building out our Raise Ready programme to offer very focused deal readiness training to bridge the gap. - For change to happen – we need Africans investing in Africa on every level. Catalytic funding is needed to maximise the impact of local investors, but we also need to have more honest conversations about what fund structures are working on the continent so that local funds are sustainable.
Our work with the African Angel Academy becomes even more important, to build a large and vibrant active angel ecosystem. - The VC landscape in Africa is still young and there is some success, but we need to be very real about what business models are appropriate for this type of financing and share more examples of alternative funding journeys using (convertible) debt, patient capital and catalytic finance.
Viridian’s angel investor research provides insight into how angels are investing and follow on rounds. We’re also building out both a Debt and Impact Raise Ready programme to support finance-ready businesses along alternative finance paths. - A huge amount of gender bias still exists amongst investors, even amongst impact investors. We need to do more work in creating the business case for women entrepreneurship. This isn’t just a showcase of women entrepreneurs but we need to tell the story of how they built their businesses and illustrate the performance of women led and owned businesses.
The conversations at Sankalp reinforced why we do what we do at Viridian. We’re looking forward to continuing these discussions and driving real impact in Africa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. 🌱