DIGILOGIC at the virtual AfriConEU Policy Roundtable event in Ghana

On September 20, 2023, Olufemi Adewumi, the Program's Director of MEST Africa, represented DIGILOGIC at the AfriconEU Bootcamp event organized by HapaSpace.

AfriConEU is a consortium of 11 partners that have received funding from the European Commission to build the first transcontinental networking academy to support digital innovation hubs in Africa and Europe.

Hapaspace and the AfriconEU consortium organized The AfriConEU Bootcamp as an opportunity to connect with Digital Innovation Hubs from Portugal, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Uganda, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Tanzania, and Ghana. The convergence of diverse perspectives unlocked new opportunities and possibilities for all participants. The goal was to facilitate meaningful connections, inspire groundbreaking ideas, and promote cross-border growth.

Femi discussed how MEST and Digilogic are supporting the startup ecosystem in Africa and from there went on to address the following topics:

The trends in the African investment landscape - here he addressed the fact that though startup investment seemed to be slowing down in advanced economies, the reverse seems to be the case in Africa with Tech startup funding growing by 55% in 2022.

The drivers of investment into Africa -

The top driver is the global push for Digital Inclusion. This is a central theme in the EU/AU engagement. This is also seen in most major donor discussions. After financial inclusion, digital inclusion is perhaps the biggest driver of grant funding in Africa. NGOs are prioritizing digital inclusion in Africa because they believe it is a way to solve some of the big problems, e.g. of poverty or food sustainability.

Investors also have developed a big appetite for tech businesses. The reason of course is obvious, the Silicon Valley success has taught Investors that tech gives outsized returns (the most valued companies in the world are tech businesses), and being behind in tech adoption, Africa is seen as having huge potential for growth.

Lastly, Africa is also behind in development and it is believed that Tech is the way to accelerate African growth.

The industries of interest to investors - Agriculture has become one of the largest drivers for donor funding and riding on this, is the huge interest to digitize the agriculture value chain. A MEST portfolio company, Complete Farmer, recently received $10m series A funding, this is following FarmerLine which received about $14m capital injection last year.

Supply chain and logistics is another area of interest. With the increased demand for eCommerce in Africa, the need to fix the supporting supply chain and logistics has attracted a lot of investor interest with companies like Sendy receiving about $40m in funding to expand their services into West Africa.

Fintech and ECommerce have undoubtedly attracted the most funding in Africa driven by successes like Jumia, Interswitch, Flutterwave all of which have attained Unicorn status in their valuations. Lastly, Healthtechs have become very interesting since the pandemic and we see success stories coming from here as well e.g. MPharma and ZuriHealth.

The top technologies being invested in - in addition to industries of interest, investors also indicate technologies they are interested in. The current darling on the block is AI (Artificial Intelligence) following the huge success of ChatGPT, based on Large Language Models (LLM). However, not only are LLMs attracting interest, but other AI technologies e.g. Extended Reality, Machine Learning, and Visual Recognition are also areas of interest for investors. Before the AI wave, for many years, blockchain and Web 3 attracted the most attention of investors with the promise of bringing transparency to commercial transactions amongst other benefits. Internet of Things and Big Data (both related) are also areas that attract significant interest.

After his presentation, Femi had a session where he responded to questions from the audience.