The following text contains extracts from remarks by GEN President Jonathan Ortmans to open GEC+Africa in Cape Town on March 13, 2024.
A Decade of Progress for GEN in Africa
Prompted by a call to action from the African delegations to the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Liverpool nearly 12 years ago, I am pleased to report GEN has made progress in Africa led by some inspirational leaders who have been anchors of the GEN community since its inception.
We opened 13 GEN chapters to lead the implementation of our programs across Africa.
We campaigned for more U.S. investor and government interest on the continent – implementing two Global Entrepreneurship Summits with the White House, one attended by President Obama in Kenya, and one attended by then Vice President Biden in Morocco.
In collaboration with EBAN, Europe’s leading early-stage investor network, we helped advance the Africa Business Angels Network founded and led by Tomi Davies who has served on the board of GEN’s global early-stage investor operations.
We created dozens of locally-led Global Entrepreneurship Week campaigns, which celebrate and inspire entrepreneurs in most African countries every November.
We worked with the majority of governments in Africa and their ministers on developing and documenting entrepreneurship-friendly policies and programs.
We’ve built startup communities, one entrepreneur at a time, through our Startup Huddle program hosted in startup communities across the continent.
Working with the U.S. State Department and the United Nations, we designed, developed and launched multiple government platforms to handle small business registration, de-registration and regulatory reporting.
With our partners, we have engaged thousands of startups in our accelerators, GEN Starters Club and most recently the Entrepreneurship World Cup. A dozen of these founders will be pitching in the regional showcase during GEC+Africa.
But over the course of the decade, one of the very best things we did was believe in Kizito Okechukwu, without whom none of this would have been possible. He brought the Global Entrepreneurship Congress to Africa in 2017 and was the brains and the impetus behind creating the largest startup campus in Africa nine months later – 22 On Sloane – all ten thousand square meters of which now stands strong and resilient in Johannesburg despite a pandemic and a challenging economic climate.
Entrepreneurial Milestones, Opportunities, and Leadership
The results of this work are promising. Fresh data shared with GEN gives us some good news. Although the total number of exit events is down from 2022, they are up 50% from 2020, and the 2023 exit value from African ecosystems is up 20% from 2022.
The data also highlights challenges that we need to address. In particular, the beneficiaries of this success have not been equal. Roughly 75% of VC deal count went to the top five African ecosystems – Nairobi, Lagos, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Accra. In fact, 27% of total VC funding came from three deals alone: Sunking, Flutterwave and Yassir raised $260M, $240M and $150M respectively.
A central voice in this story is President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team. He and our indefatigable host, Minister Ndabeni-Abrahams, has been present every step along the way, rolling up their sleeves and even travelling outside Africa to learn from and mentor other nations.
When Richard Branson came to open 22 On Sloane in 2018, President Ramaphosa’s leadership team was there.
When I am in South Africa for our Global Entrepreneurship Week campaigns, they are there to help inspire those still on the fence to test an idea, take a risk and start a business.
While the rest of the world talks about “Africa’s century” - citing cliches about this continent’s “demographic destiny” - the leaders here today know that demographics and rhetoric alone won’t allow African entrepreneurship to achieve its potential. It requires thoughtful, deliberate policies, programs and patience.
While no governments we know of oppose an innovation and entrepreneurship agenda and there is no left-wing or right-wing version of entrepreneurship policy - there are only a few who understand that “only the person who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat”. They test what works, adapt, put in the sweat labor and with grit take as much risk politically as a startup with no promise of returns.
Minister Ndabeni-Abrahams and President Ramaphosa are cut from that cloth. On behalf of those dreaming, building, hoping, taking risks, and trying their best to improve lives – thank you. You and your team – alongside the likes of the team at 22 On Sloane are an example to us all. We are all humbled and grateful to be working alongside you.
Builders and Founders: GEN’s North Star
To the builders and founders who remain, as always, our north star, you are creative, global, green, inclusive, open-minded, connected, generous, curious, fun, social, and disciplined. You want to do well but hand-in-hand with good, you are focused on the possible. You have an ability to succeed, influence your own outcomes and take ownership of your lives.
You have compelling goals that keep you future-focused and intrinsically motivated, driving you to be self-directed, action-oriented, and highly engaged. You have an optimistic interpretation of adverse events and see problems as potential opportunities, becoming highly resilient, resourceful, and solution-oriented even within highly uncertain, resource-constrained environments.
You surround yourselves with an intentional community of positive influence and critical guidance. You are lifelong knowledge seekers with a focus on micro-experiments as learning opportunities to test ideas, cultivating curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. You display a high level of reliability, understanding that following through on simple solutions can lead to unforeseen opportunities. You are other-focused and understand that one creates value by looking to solve problems for others.
We have just two things to ask of you. Firstly, keep learning on-demand from peers, tracking trends and technologies, dreaming and building. And secondly, be precise and specific about what you need from your backers and governments.
Government Support for Entrepreneurship in Africa Gets an A+
For governments, there are dozens of policy levers to achieve this – many of which are now documented in our GEN Atlas compendium of entrepreneurship policies – but it is your task to determine the right configuration for your economy.
Your tasks are two-fold. First, know what you are solving for. Listen to entrepreneurs and be precise about the problems that need to be addressed.
For example, policymakers in Tunisia saw that some employees with innovative ideas are reluctant to take the risky leap from employee to entrepreneur, unable to abandon their careers and salaries and lose their ability to pay rent and support their families.
In response, Tunisia implemented a year-long career break program that allows employees to take “Startup Leave” from their employers by providing monthly stipends for founders during the vulnerable early stages of business creation. The program allows for business failure without stigma or crippling financial penalties. The Tunisian Startup Act will help convert cautious employees with suppressed ambitions into full-time job creators.
Our GEN Atlas now documents hundreds of similar problems addressed by policymakers – from Algeria’s Finance Law to the Nigerian Startup Act and South Africa’s Red Tape Reduction Unit.
Your second task as policymakers is impact assessment. Be rigorous, precise and ruthless when it comes to the impact and ROI of programs.
GEN and partners like the OECD have published comprehensive guides on capturing the right information, and the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network is assembling some of the world’s leading experts on ecosystem performance and program evaluation. For example, I would like to mention the work of the Allan Gray Centre for Africa Entrepreneurship, a new research flagship initiative out of Stellenbosch University doing remarkable work to map and evaluate the work of entrepreneurship support programs.
The Key for Ecosystem Leaders and Entrepreneurship Support Organizations: Welcome Everyone
Simple math tells us that economies suffer when any individual is excluded, and they suffer exponentially when entire communities are excluded for reasons of historical disadvantage and discrimination. Many transformative ideas have been lost because the pool of talented individuals working on them is restricted by barriers of race, gender, class, and education.
For example, the fact remains that the average number of female founders in a given startup ecosystem is just 15%. In Sub-Saharan Africa that figure is 14% which is higher than the 12.6% recorded in Europe. Data also shows us that entrepreneurs from ethnic minority groups remain at a substantial disadvantage.
Harness the full entrepreneurial potential of all your citizens regardless of their background and you will develop at a faster pace than those who fail to support marginalized communities.
We know that entrepreneurial dynamism needs a strong pipeline of talented individuals. To guarantee this stays strong for the future, we need to disrupt education. It’s long overdue. New models of developing human capabilities are at our doorstep if only we grasp the opportunities of AI and digitalization. It is vital that the benefit of these technologies reaches every corner of the developing world and do not become the preserve of wealthy nations.
Actions to Take Today
Each of us has our role within the ecosystem be it as a founder, investor, policymaker, or enabler.
The world needs more entrepreneurs. Pledge today to light the candle of entrepreneurship in at least one person in 2024. Show people what entrepreneurs do and show them that they too can craft an idea that changes the world.
I urge you to get involved in the glorious, messy world of entrepreneurship.
- Startups: Enter the Entrepreneurship World Cup. This is your first step into the gateway of GEN help, from cross-border investor and mentor networks to accelerators, prize competitions, founders’ clubs, and community support groups and more.
- Community builders: Become a Startup Huddle organizer and build your personal brand in your neighborhood or community among startups, investors, and entrepreneurial support organizations.
- Investors: Join GEN Invest. Access our startups and peers of global investor networks.
- Governments: Join our GEN Policy community of ministers and their teams focusing on enabling policies to increase rates or new firm formation - getting access to the people behind some of the most innovative policy levers in the world.
- All: Start now planning to get involved in your Global Entrepreneurship Week campaign in November. Host an event in your community and help a new community kick the tires of entrepreneurship, opening their eyes to possibilities.
- Sign up for our future GECs both here in Africa and coming up soon in Puerto Rico and Indianapolis and join the movement to build one global entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Let me leave you with the words that Robert Kennedy spoke to the students at Cape Town University 58 years ago when he visited South Africa:
“We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people – before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous – although it is; not because the laws of God command it – although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.”
Spreading entrepreneurship is the right thing to do and I hope you will continue this mission with us.