Africa’s first-ever Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index was launched last month at GEC+Africa in Cape Town. The African Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index (AEEI) was presented at the African Entrepreneurship Research Summit powered by GEN Research. The index was constructed by an international team of researchers and policy experts from the Allan Gray Centre for Africa Entrepreneurship (AGCAE), Utrecht University, Stellenbosch University, and the Innovation for Policy Foundation.
The central goal of the AEEI is utilize big data to develop a more accurate picture about the state of entrepreneurship in Africa, which in turn can be used by policymakers to address critical gaps in African entrepreneurial ecosystems. According to Dr. Phumlani Nkontwana, Academic Director of the AGCAE, the African continent has a “data problem.”
“This is why we have been working for years to generate ventures and ESO data in some of the 27 countries covered by the new Index,” he said. “The ambition has been to build longitudinal data sets through data engineering and study them over time to give us good insights into what is happening in entrepreneurial ecosystems across the continent.”
The AEEI creates an insightful data structure built around seven key challenges that provide context to the entrepreneurial landscape in Africa. These include governance, culture, support, human capital, finance, market access, and physical infrastructure. The platform provides colour coded score cards for each of the 27 countries with full data coverage allowing policymakers and ecosystem actors to quickly identify weaknesses in their ecosystem.
The index also provides an overall ranking which contains more than a few surprises. The GEN Research community was invited to guess which country would place top of the list with nobody successfully pinpointing Mauritius at the summit. In fact, several giant ecosystems such as Nigeria and Kenya were found to be much lower than expected. Crucially, the team points out that even high performing countries like South Africa have much work to do. Whilst they perform incredibly well in areas such as infrastructure and finance, the report card demonstrates that they are falling behind on culture and support.
The AEEI is due to be repeated annually and has the potential to be a hugely impactful piece of research that will kickstart more and better data gathering efforts on the African continent.