Book Proposal: Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa

Authors
All three authors collaborate on a five-year research project (‘Geonet’) based at the Oxford Internet
Institute that seeks to explore Sub-Saharan Africa’s emerging knowledge economies. The project asks
whether the ‘digital revolution’ in Africa represents a new era of development. Specifically, it focuses
on whether the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), broadband Internet,
and other digital technologies affect Africa’s traditional economic dependence, underdevelopment, and
extraversion. While many studies have been conducted into the impacts of ICTs on older industries
and sectors, research into the emergence of a new digital economy in Africa is practically absent. It is
now that we need empirical research to understand precisely what impacts are observable, who
benefits, and how these changes match up to our expectations for change.

Dr. Nicolas Friederici

Address: 1 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3JS, United Kingdom
Contact: nicolas.friederici@oii.ox.ac.uk
Nicolas has a dual appointment as Research Group Lead Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the
Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin and as a postdoctoral researcher at the
Oxford Internet Institute (OII), where he also obtained his PhD. He is interested in the interplay of
digital technologies, geographical contexts, and economic opportunity. For the OII’s Geonet project,
Nicolas studies the practices and processes of digital entrepreneurship in African cities as environments
that are far more challenging than Silicon Valley, Boston, or London. His dissertation research focused
on technology innovation hubs in Africa. The thesis explained how hubs work, and how they differ
from known forms of entrepreneurship support, such as business incubators.
For his comparative grounded research, Nicolas has done extensive fieldwork in thirteen cities across
the Global South, including Accra, Addis Ababa, Harare, Kampala, Kigali, Lagos, Nairobi, and
Pretoria/Johannesburg. In addition to his academic work, Nicolas has published a number of reports
and practitioner articles, for instance, for the World Bank and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
His research was also featured in The Economist. Nicolas was a Fulbright and Clarendon Scholar, and
he is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.

Michel Wahome
Address: 1 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3JS, United Kingdom
Contact: michel.wahome@oii.ox.ac.uk
Michel is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her doctoral research at the University of
Edinburgh investigated the socio-materiality of digital entrepreneurship in Nairobi, Kenya. She is more
generally interested in the interaction of science, technology, and society. Her previous research has
been concerned with the trajectories of adoption for ‘clean’ technologies and financing arenas for
pharmaceuticals for rare and neglected tropical diseases. In recent years, she has turned her attention
to digital technologies. She has worked on studies examining the use of social media with respect to
the topic of security in Kenya. Other work has included analyzing the construction of computer science
knowledge in academic institutions in East Africa. Her current research on the Geonet project has seen
her conduct fieldwork in Abidjan, Dakar, Johannesburg, Kampala, Maputo, Nairobi, and Yaoundé, in
order to investigate how digital entrepreneurship is manifested in these locales. Michel’s professional
background includes practice-oriented research for innovation and science policy advisory for use by
governments and international bodies.

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Prof. Mark Graham
Address: 1 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3JS, United Kingdom
Contact: mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk
Mark is the Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
His research focuses on information geographies and the difference that changing digital connectivities
make at the world’s economic margins. As principal investigator of the Geonet project, his current
work looks at changing ‘knowledge economies’ in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on geographies of
information production, virtual labor and microwork, as well as innovation hubs and the digital
economy in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda.
Recent books include Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing
our Lives (2014, with Bill Dutton) and Research and Fieldwork in Development (2014, with Dan Hammett
and Chasca Twyman). His forthcoming book with MIT Press is titled Digital Economies at Global Margins.
His research has been featured in the Economist, the BBC, the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian,
and other international media. He is an editor or editorial board member of Information,
Communication, and Society, Geo, Environment and Planning A, and Big Data & Society.

Project Description
Brief Description
Digital entrepreneurship is widely believed to be an engine for Africa’s development in the 21st century.
From Mark Zuckerberg to Emmanuel Macron and Paul Kagame, technologists and policymakers have
proposed hopeful narratives, arguing that digital technologies are enabling Africa to “leapfrog” and
experience ground-breaking economic progress. Entrepreneurs and innovators who exploit these
opportunities are construed as the driving forces of “Africa Rising” and the “African Century.”
Accordingly, Africa has seen a digital entrepreneurship boom: in just a few years, hundreds of millions
of dollars have been invested in tech cities, entrepreneurship trainings, coworking spaces, innovation
prizes, and investment funds.
In this book, we unpack aspirations concerning “the digital” and “entrepreneurship,” contrasting them
with insights into what is actually happening on the ground. The book grapples with the large gap
between boundless ambition on the one side and sobering statistics on the other: in any imaginable
measure for digital economies, Africa does far worse than any other continent, and global divides seem
to be widening.
Our book draws on research conducted as part of a five-year research project, including fieldwork in
11 African cities. In doing so, it seeks to go beneath the hype, and explore, document, and analyze the
phenomenon of African digital entrepreneurship. It aims to understand opportunities as well as limits
that the rise of the Internet has brought to ventures in Africa, painting a richer and more realistic
picture than media articles and policy documents have done.
We show that the average African digital enterprise does not grow exponentially, does not scale
internationally, does not attract venture capital, and does not disrupt cumbersome analog value chains.
Instead, we see entrepreneurs who are creatively and productively applying and adapting digital
technologies to their local economic, social, and political contexts. This has many of the wished-for
positive socio-economic effects, just not at the rate and scale that the widespread narratives suggest.
Our book is thus able to build a nuanced review of what the digital revolution means in, and to, some
of the world’s economically most marginal places. The space-transcending, bridging, scale-free, and
zero-marginal-cost properties of digital tools and technology are sometimes in evidence, but can only
be brought into being by select actors in certain places. It is by looking to, not just the successes and
failures, but also the everyday activities of Africa’s digital entrepreneurs that we can offer guidance for
those who look to distinguish between possible, probable, and implausible futures for African
economies.

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Extended Description
What you are doing is the right thing. Get the undersea cable, lower the cost, and
everything will flow to Kenya. You will have flattened the world to which you can do any
work globally.—Thomas Friedman speaking to Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s Permanent
Secretary to the Ministry of ICT in 2006 (Bright & Hruby, 2015, p. 156).

Improving Internet connectivity has inspired hope for drastic positive change in Africa (McKinsey &
Company, 2013; World Bank, 2012). Now that connectivity has diffused and “democratized,” a range
of actors are betting that fundamental economic shifts will ensue (Deichmann & Mishra, 2016; World
Wide Web Foundation, 2014). The analog, traditional economic world is deemed to be on the verge
of “transformation” and “revolution” (Murphy & Carmody, 2015; Ndemo & Weiss, 2017b).
Digital entrepreneurship is widely believed to be a key driver of these changes (Drouillard, Taverner,
Williamson, & Harris, 2014; Ndemo & Weiss, 2017a).1 Policymakers, donors, investors, and media
have fueled a boom around this agenda. For instance, outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon
told an audience at iHub, Africa’s best-known digital entrepreneurship organization, that they “are the
hope of Africa” (Wakoba, 2014). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, when visiting
Nairobi stated that places like iHub are “where the future is going to be built” now that “things [in
Africa] are moving from a resource-based economy… to [an] entrepreneurial, knowledge-based
economy” (Shapshak, 2016). Widely read media outlets like National Geographic, proclaim that
“Africa’s Tech Generation Is Changing the Continent” (Draper, 2017) and Al Jazeera has produced an
entire TV series showcasing how “lives are being changed across the continent by home-grown
innovations” (Al Jazeera English, 2014). Hundreds of other such stories proliferate in the media (cf.,
Nothias, 2014). These hopeful imaginaries of African digital entrepreneurship tend to deploy two
particular narratives.
According to the first narrative, digital technologies enable Africa to experience fast-paced and ground-
breaking economic and technological development (McKinsey & Company, 2013). Notably, Africa can leapfrog
developmental stages which the Global North has already gone through. Africa is thus catching up
with, or even overtaking, richer countries (Bright & Hruby, 2015). Having missed the industrial
revolution, so the argument goes, Africa will now be at the forefront of the ongoing digital revolution.
Young Africans are depicted as the “mobile first” or “mobile only” generation, and low-tech
“inclusive” or “frugal” innovations such as Kenya’s mPesa or the Pan-African eSoko are cited as
examples for this progress (Mbiti & Weil, 2011; Morawczynski, 2009; Omwansa & Sullivan, 2012).
Africa is deemed capable of developing its own innovations for home-grown problems (Avle &
Lindtner, 2016), for instance, “rugged” technology like the Kenyan-made BRCK, a “backup generator
for the Internet” (Sotunde, 2013) that works even in rural areas without cellphone coverage. Kenya’s
president Uhuru Kenyatta, recently argued that “MPESA, M-Kopa, GroIntelligence, Andela and
others, show that we can lead the world with innovations that drive financial inclusion, access to energy,
better data to drive our agriculture, and the essential skills required to support the young innovators of
the future” (Government of Kenya, 2018). Africa is argued to be better positioned than any other
continent due to improving political stability, strong economic growth, and its “demographic dividend”
(Ahmed, Cruz, Go, Maliszewska, & Osorio‐Rodarte, 2016). The continent is seen as a unique
opportunity for financial investors, given that a number of African nations (incl. Ghana, Ethiopia, and
Cote d’Ivoire) continue to be among the fastest-growing countries globally (Bright & Hruby, 2015;
Signé, 2018). As a result of these factors, the Economist coined the slogan “Africa Rising” (“Africa
rising,” 2011), and politicians across the continent have proclaimed the “African Century.”
The second narrative proclaims that, through digital technologies, African entrepreneurs are becoming
part of a globalized and increasingly level opportunity landscape (Autio, Nambisan, Thomas, & Wright, 2018;

1We define digital entrepreneurship as the novel creation of market and opportunity-driven initiatives that is enabled or
deeply impacted by digital technologies (Nambisan, 2017), including the Internet, mobile applications, social media, cloud
computing, and artificial intelligence.

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Mavhunga, 2017; Nambisan, 2017). Markets for software development are globalizing, which is argued
to bring enormous potential for African coders and outsourcing businesses, who can offer
competitively low labor prices (Takhteyev, 2012). Digital entrepreneurship is understood as a global
movement (Auerswald, 2012; Honig, 2017): ideas like the Lean Startup or the business accelerator have
spread worldwide, organizations such as Seedstars, TechCrunch, or the Global Entrepreneurship
Network have run events in most African countries, and online learning providers and elite universities
such as Stanford are offering courses on technology entrepreneurship to anyone with a reliable Internet
connection. As the Internet has made digital tools and infrastructures easily and cheaply available to
startups (Aldrich, 2014; Tilson, Lyytinen, & Sørensen, 2010), entry barriers to digital entrepreneurship
are deemed to be relatively low (Dy, Marlow, & Martin, 2017; Greengard, 2010). The Economist also
coined a phrase for this development, picturing a Cambrian Moment (Siegele, 2014) at which the
Internet enables a plethora of new organizations that create value through technologies in any place
on earth. A key argument is that, while talent has always been distributed equally across the globe, now
the Internet gives everyone the same opportunity to be creative and make money. Paul Kagame,
Rwanda’s president and a respected African leader, sums up that “[d]igital innovation means ideas do
not have borders and cannot be landlocked” (Tumwebaze, 2014).
It is no coincidence that these two narratives are so commonplace when African digital
entrepreneurship is discussed. In this book, we argue that they derive directly from typical aspirations
concerning “the digital” and “entrepreneurship.” Namely, digital technologies and the Internet have
long been framed by African policymakers, international development agencies and the private sector
as footloose and placeless, giving them potential to level economic opportunity and include or upgrade
geographies that had previously been deprived or excluded (Avgerou, 2003; Friederici, Ojanperä, &
Graham, 2017). This aspirational component of digital technologies explains why they have been so
central to African development discourse: digital technologies offer an imaginary within which there is
a pathway for the African continent to overcome and overturn its historically peripheral global position
and its history of colonial extraction, exploitation, and denigration (M. Graham, Andersen, & Mann,
2015a).
Entrepreneurship complements the aspirational component of digital technologies by offering a more
local and bottom-up vision of who will bring about change. Inside and outside of Africa, the actors
who have tried to “develop” the continent in the past are rarely looked at favorably (cf., Escobar,
2011). Multilateral development organizations like the World Bank and IMF have been mistrusted
latest since the Washington Consensus (Easterly, 2001; Moyo, 2009). Multinational corporations have
extracted Africa’s resources without creating significant benefits for its peoples. Bilateral donors,
foundations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are accused of waste and inefficiency, as
well as “distorting markets” and creating “perverse incentives” (Ferguson, 1990). Many African
governments are blamed for supporting particular tribal groups, ethnic groups, or political and
economic elites rather than the public good. In contrast, the grassroots entrepreneur’s image is wholly
unblemished. Young, smart Africans, often with college degrees from elite universities in the US and
Europe, are easily construed as impatient, driven, and astute change makers (Avle, 2014; Bright &
Hruby, 2015; Olopade, 2014). “Entrepreneurship” thus offers the hope that this particular group of
Africans may be better-positioned than any other type of actor before them. France’s president,
Emmanuel Macron, argues that digital innovation is therefore “the best way to provide the solution
made by, and for African people” (Olupot, 2018).
Together, far-reaching aspirations and narratives have paved the way for concrete actions and
interventions: there has been an African digital entrepreneurship boom. The number of African incubators
and innovation hubs2 has risen to several hundred within just a few years (Bayen & Giuliani, 2018;
Firestone & Kelly, 2016) (see Figure 1), notwithstanding a total lack of evidence regarding their
effectiveness (Friederici, 2018). There are no good figures on the number of smaller-scale initiatives,

2 Incubators typically offer a clearly defined set of hands-on support services (e.g., work space, mentorship, networking) while
innovation hubs provide only lightweight support and mostly help entrepreneurs form communities (cf., Friederici, 2017).

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such as innovation prizes, hackathons, and events, but it is safe to say that thousands per year happen
in cities across Africa, sponsored by a mixture of philanthropists, development organizations,
technology corporations, and (more rarely) local governments. To name just three recent and high-
profile examples: the GSMA Innovation Fund3 injected mentorship and between $1 and $2.3 million
into African digital enterprises in just its first round (Mulligan, 2017); the World Bank’s XL Africa
program created an elite community of 20 startups from across the continent and connected them to
investors (Kapil, Andjelkovic, & Lu, 2018); and Google’s Nigeria-based accelerator recently funded
startups with $3 million, in addition to in-kind support (Jackson, 2018). The Tony Elumelu
Entrepreneurship Programme has committed $100 million in grants for African early stage
entrepreneurs. In 2018, the French Development Agency launched the Digital Africa initiative,
committing around $76 million to a startup fund (Olupot, 2018). The large-scale technology park
Konza City in Kenya will cost the government and investors an estimated $14.5 billion. Similarly
ambitious—and similarly expensive—plans exist in Senegal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ghana, and South Africa
(Giles, 2018). An illustrious group of celebrities and decision-makers—from Mark Zuckerberg through
Christine Lagarde to Bono—has visited places like iHub in Nairobi, CcHub in Lagos, MEST in Accra,
or kLab in Kigali, showering these organizations with praise and encouragement.
Our book probes into this boom – offering insights into what is actually happening on the ground. It
will explore whether any of these high-flying ambitions are translating into palpable economic
development, or if they simply risk to mislead and distract from real potentials and opportunities.
Thereby, the book grapples with the large gap between boundless ambition on the one side and rather
sobering statistics on the other. In practically any proxy measure of digital entrepreneurship that is
available, Africa does far worse than any other continent. Internet and smart phone penetration has
been growing, but growth has recently stagnated, and Africa is still far behind the rest of the world.
The gaps are even wider for bandwidth and affordability (Chen, Feamster, & Calandro, 2017;
Deichmann & Mishra, 2016). While apps like YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook have achieved
continent-wide reach (Chen et al., 2017; Stork, Esselaar, & Chair, 2017), there are no African-made,
African-owned, or Africa-based smartphone apps that are widely used within or outside of the
continent, and even leading African nations only represent a fraction of the global app economy
(Caribou Digital, 2016). Few software developers outside of the continent take note of those within it
(see Figure 2). Similarly, for measures of digital production available at global scale, Africa barely shows
up in the statistics (see Figure 3).
Against the backdrop of these sobering statistics and powerful imaginaries about the potentials for
change, our book draws on research conducted as part of a five-year qualitative research project in 11
African cities. In doing so, it seeks to go beneath the hype, and explore, document, and analyze the
phenomenon of African digital entrepreneurship as it has become observable in recent years. It aims
to understand opportunities as well as limits that the rise of the Internet has brought to ventures in
Africa, painting a richer and more realistic picture than media articles and policy documents have done.
Our mission is therefore to ground the conversation that scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have
begun, without getting lost in the descriptive detail on any particular success story or aspect.
While no book could perfectly capture the diversity of African cities while also discussing the continent
as a whole (Cheeseman & de Gramont, 2017; Noorloos & Kloosterboer, 2018; Phillips, 2014; Watson,
2015), we will attempt to do justice to local contexts without losing sight of continent-wide themes
that have emerged from our analysis. Namely, we will mostly highlight generalizable patterns, but go
into contextual detail whenever locally specific findings defied these patterns or gave them a particular
shape. For instance, we will explicitly discuss variations in dimensions of digital entrepreneurship which
we found to vary rather starkly across the continent, such as the size of domestic digital markets and
the local labor force. Similarly, we will elaborate on cultural and policy-induced differences across

3 The GSMA Innovation Fund also illustrates how the agendas—and funds—of development organizations and technology
corporations are co-mingled in the support of African digital entrepreneurship: the fund is administered by GSMA but
financially supported by UKaid and AustralianAid, which contributed undisclosed amounts.

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entrepreneurial ecosystems (e.g., locally specific narratives about particular barriers or the role of
certain actor groups). Moreover, we will include an appendix with factsheets for each case study we
analyzed, directly focusing on local idiosyncrasies. We excluded North African nations from our
analysis for two reasons: first, Sub-Saharan Africa4 has been shown as only poorly integrated in global
digital production networks (Carmody, 2013; Ojanperä et al., 2017), and second, most Sub-Saharan
nations (with South Africa as the primary exception) have a shared Internet connectivity history, as
submarine and overland fiber-optic cables arrived in these countries later than almost anywhere else in
the world (M. Graham, Andersen, & Mann, 2015b).

4We are aware of criticism that the division of Africa in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa can be understood as a
postcolonial and racist social construct. We use the term “Sub-Saharan Africa” in a strictly geographical sense, referring to
nations that are situated South of the Sahara Desert.

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Figure 1: Technology innovation hubs in Africa mapped by World Bank. Source: Firestone & Kelly (2016).

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Figure 2: Number of connections in the GitHub follower network. This graph derives from Geonet’s research into
Africa’s presence within the world’s largest repository of software (GitHub). Users upload code and follow each other for
updates. We see that Sub-Saharan African users are followed only by 1,767 users outside of the region (i.e., the “inflows”
represent 0.4% of the total follows between regions). This means that only an insignificant fraction of software developers
worldwide takes note of coders in Africa. Conversely, 5,292 users based in Sub-Saharan Africa follow others outside the
region, illustrating that coders in Sub-Saharan Africa are three times more likely to follow someone from outside of the region
than being followed. The graph also shows the very low level of GitHub activity in Sub-Saharan Africa in absolute terms.

Figure 3: Content creation across continents. This graph stems from a Geonet study (Ojanperä, Graham, Straumann,
Sabbata, & Zook, 2017) examining Africa’s knowledge production in comparison with other world regions. The study
juxtaposed a traditional form of knowledge production (academic articles) with Internet-enabled forms (GitHub commits,
that is, contributions to the world’s largest coding platform, and website domain registrations). The findings confirmed prior
research showing Africa’s extremely limited share of academic work globally, but they also highlighted that Sub-Saharan Africa
seems to play an even smaller role for global digital production: despite having about 13% of the world’s population, only
0.5% of GitHub commits and 0.7% of domain registrations come from Sub-Saharan African nations.
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Ultimately, our book provides readers with a broad-strokes summative overview of African digital
entrepreneurship, while also offering analytical depth and highlighting previously undiscovered effect
chains and patterns. Our arguments can only ever be as strong as the evidence we have to support
them, and so we have sought to gather a compelling and comprehensive assembly of datasets and
observations on African digital entrepreneurship. To this end, we draw predominantly from the
Geonet project at the Oxford Internet Institute, which all of the authors have been involved in. For
this five-year research program, field-based case studies on the digital entrepreneurship landscapes
were completed for 11 African cities: Abidjan, Accra, Addis Ababa, Dakar, Johannesburg/Pretoria
Lagos, Kampala, Kigali, Maputo, Nairobi, and Yaoundé. This effort included 202 of in-depth research
interviews conducted between January 2017 and March 2018, including with 143 digital entrepreneurs.
Further, we draw from access to Geonet’s quantitative mapping and digital outsourcing work, as well
as a previous project on the business process outsourcing sector in Kenya and Rwanda, providing us
with a wide-lens view of Africa’s emerging digital economies. Finally, two of the authors (Friederici
and Wahome) have completed doctoral theses before joining the Geonet project. They investigated
digital entrepreneurship organizations in Nairobi, Kigali, Accra, and Harare, conducting strategic
ethnographies and sociologies of digital spaces, including 166 interviews. This means that we have been
deeply immersed in African digital entrepreneurship for years: together, we have conducted months of
fieldwork across the continent, conducted and rigorously analyzed hundreds of interviews, interpreted
hundreds of charts and maps, participated in dozens of events, and read hundreds of media articles
and thousands of tweets. This book captures the essence of what we have learned during this process,
codifying what we find to be an accurate, realistic, and insightful account of African digital
entrepreneurship in the early 21st century.

Table of Contents and Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1: Deconstructing the Boom Around Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa
Chapter 2: Taking Stock
Chapter 3: Digital Market Boundaries and the Lure of Scalability
Chapter 4: Africa’s Digital Entrepreneurs
Chapter 5: Innovation Hubs and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
Chapter 6: Reach and Inclusion
Chapter 7: Global Asymmetries of Place and Power
Chapter 8: A Path Forward: Acknowledging Limits and Making Long-Term Investments

Each chapter will have 8-10,000 words (or 30-35 pages).

Chapter 1: Deconstructing the Boom Around Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa
Digital connectivity is now a norm for the majority of the world’s population. 2018 marks the first year
on record where there are more Internet users in the world than non-users. Even in Africa, the
continent with the world’s lowest penetration rates, over a third of the total population is online. To
many, these statistics herald a radical moment of change. Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda,
perhaps best captures hopes for change with his famous quote:
In Africa, we have missed both the agricultural and industrial revolutions [but] in Rwanda,
we are determined to take full advantage of the digital revolution. This revolution is
summed up by the fact that it no longer is of utmost importance where you are but rather
what you can do–this is of great benefit to traditionally marginalized regions and
geographically isolated populations.

Digital tools and technologies have properties that seemingly allow their users to transcend traditional
constraints to economic activity. By being relatively cheap and ubiquitous, and by embedding their
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users in a global network, they suggest previously unthought-of market opportunities for entrepreneurs
in Dakar, Addis Ababa, Maputo, Cape Town, and everywhere in between. Digital products can be
reproduced at close to zero marginal cost, and products and services can now be delivered to the
furthest corners of the world almost instantaneously. These possibilities have sparked an
unprecedented rush into digital entrepreneurship across Africa. Eager to transcend local constraints,
investment has poured in, innovation hubs have been set up, and technology parks have been built.
This chapter surveys both the breadth of African digital entrepreneurship activities and the imaginaries
they are based upon. Decades of research in the Global North have shown that, far from eliminating
the frictions of distance, local economic geographies continue to matter, while digital technologies can
often amplify inequalities rather than transcend them. Why then do policy makers, investors, and
entrepreneurs themselves continue to reproduce visions of the profound change that the ‘digital
revolution’ can bring about in Africa? By unpacking some of the most prominent African digital
entrepreneurship hopes, and comparing them to earlier literature and theory on imaginaries of
technological transformation (S. Graham, 1998; Marinetti, 1909; Massey, 2005; McLuhan & Fiore,
1967; Mitchell, 1996; Standage, 1999), this chapter lays the groundwork for the research presented in
the rest of the book. By unpacking hopes, visions, and proclamations, this chapter establishes what
people expect to change, as well as the mechanisms and processes through which they expect this
change to occur. It thereby sets the stage for the remainder of the book, which will analyze where and
for whom those hopes turn into realities.
Chapter 2: Taking Stock
This chapter establishes a basic understanding about the realities of African digital entrepreneurship,
providing further contextual knowledge for the remainder of the book. To this end, it collates an array
of sources with reliable descriptive evidence. This is more difficult than it may appear at first glance:
digital entrepreneurship is a dynamic phenomenon with fuzzy boundaries, and statistical sources are
unavailable or of low quality for most African countries (Jerven, 2016). Against this backdrop, the
chapter’s contribution is to present a unique compilation of existing data sources which are proxy
measures for digital entrepreneurship or its specific facets, such as financing. In effect, the chapter
does not claim to measure digital entrepreneurship directly, but it uses triangulation across data sources
to arrive at a representation of the phenomenon that is as complete and accurate as possible. Data will
be visualized through rich maps and data visualizations. Data sources will include established ones,
such as World Bank indicators, the Global Entrepreneurship Development Index, and industry
reports, but also non-traditional ones collected by our research cluster at the Oxford Internet Institute,
such as geo-coded GitHub and StackOverflow data and subsets of the Online Labour Index (Kässi &
Lehdonvirta, 2018). We also distill descriptive information from interview data, presenting those
findings that were reported most consistently by participants.
The analysis first delineates common practices and strategies underlying business models and traction
in various locales. For instance, it highlights that firms catering to other businesses (B2B) are more
likely to thrive in most contexts, given the multi-faceted and systemic shortcomings in digital consumer
markets (Drouillard, 2017; Onsongo, 2017). The chapter then shows three broader trends that emerged
from analysis. First, Africa is far behind the rest of the world in digital production–even when data are
normalized by GDP or Internet penetration (Ojanperä et al., 2017). It is, for instance, further behind
in the production of digital codified knowledge than in traditional codified knowledge (such as
academic articles). Second, stark divides exist within Africa: a few countries (South Africa, Kenya,
Nigeria, and Egypt) account for almost all digital entrepreneurship activity. Countries such as Ghana,
Tanzania, Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, Tunisia, Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius, and Rwanda
account for a noteworthy but much lower level (cf., Wentrup, Ström, & Nakamura, 2016). Most
African nations show activity levels that appear negligible in international comparison. Also within
countries, extreme divides exist: interview data from all case studies show that the user base for most
types of digital products can be found almost exclusively in large cities, that is, close to where the
enterprises themselves are located. Third, we show that digital enterprises in Africa predominantly

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create value by digitizing segments of existing value creation processes in close geographical proximity,
while they rarely attain scaling economies or reach customers abroad.
Chapter 3: Digital Market Boundaries and the Lure of Scalability
This chapter further explores one finding from the previous chapter that is particularly at odds with
African digital entrepreneurship narratives, namely that African digital enterprises rarely scale across
pre-existing analog barriers, such as city or national borders. In many of the interviews we conducted,
participants specifically mentioned that they hope that digital technologies would help their enterprise
scale quickly. The chapter thus adopts an entrepreneurial strategy perspective (Ott, Eisenhardt, &
Bingham, 2017), juxtaposing the assumption of unbounded digital markets (Amit & Zott, 2001; Huang,
Henfridsson, Liu, & Newell, 2017) with an analysis of why enterprise scaling is actually slow and
spatially confined for African enterprises.
Our findings show that African digital enterprises are almost always users of new global digital
infrastructures, but this access rarely helps them scale across distance. Instead, we observe that the
home locations of digital enterprises in African cities consistently play a residual bounding role. Our
findings suggest that those digital technologies enjoy high deployment that best integrate into local
ways of doing, as well as those able to recruit or replace pre-existing economic structures (cf.,
Drouillard, 2017; Ekekwe, 2017; Olayinka David-West & Evans, 2015; Onsongo, 2017). For those
businesses that seek users in the general populace, having the resources to develop extensive
distribution and logistics infrastructures or relationships that enable them to latch onto those of more
established entities is a must. As African digital entrepreneurs thus recognize and pursue opportunities
through a contextually specific lens, they become further and further enmeshed in the analog realities
of their local geographies. Digital tools and global platforms undoubtedly allow some enterprises to
pursue distant opportunities. Yet, such distant markets tend to either be piecemeal or dominated by
better-resourced enterprises based outside of Africa. These findings lead us to argue that, the more
digital (and thus layered and scalable) products are, the less likely they are to be created and controlled
by digital enterprises founded in economic peripheries. We also highlight areas of opportunity for
African digital enterprises going forward.
Chapter 4: Africa’s Digital Entrepreneurs
This chapter evaluates how actors’ identities, values, and visions influence their decisions and practices.
The data has been coded with the aim of bringing out these particular themes. The richness of the data
enables us to produce and reinforce cross-cutting findings. We will also pull from specific cases and
experiences and highlight them in ‘boxed’ vignettes in order to bring the cross-cutting findings to life
and illustrate them in practice. The chapter discusses how actors’ interpretations of digital
entrepreneurship and its promises impacts their characterization of opportunity and success, as
individuals and as a collective. It aims to engender an understanding of how they perform digital
entrepreneurship, and the kinds of knowledge and skillsets that enable them to pull off this
performance (Katila, Laine, & Parkkari, 2017; Mainela, Pernu, & Puhakka, 2011).
Our findings reveal that entrepreneurs are acting based on a nuanced understanding of the
opportunities and constraints that are specific to their situations (cf., Avle & Lindtner, 2016). This is
especially true of those who have been involved in this arena for some time. They are better able to
navigate the paradoxes of the logics of digital entrepreneurship as interpreted and enacted in their
geographies. Thus, we encounter actors who, aside from having to know how to run a business
organization, also need to know how to wield mythologies and expectations embedded in the global
digital entrepreneurship agenda in order to drive interest and resources towards digital
entrepreneurship in Africa.
Chapter 5: Innovation Hubs and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
In this chapter, we examine more closely the social contexts within which African digital entrepreneurs
are operating. We first look at support organizations, with particular emphasis on innovation hubs as
the dominant organizational form across the African continent. We then examine contexts at the city-
11
level, analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems that have emerged. To avoid imagining entrepreneurs as
acting in isolation, the chapter aims to identify key stakeholders of African digital entrepreneurship
ecosystems, and also highlight how ecosystems have developed.
Our analysis highlights that the number of innovation hubs and other support organizations has
undoubtedly increased sharply in just a few years (Bayen & Giuliani, 2018; Firestone & Kelly, 2016),
with financial and in-kind support coming from a wide range of sponsors, such as international
foundations, corporations, multilateral development organizations, and local governments (Friederici,
2018). Yet, we also show that organizational models and practices had to be revisited as hubs and
incubators have struggled with sustainability and with gaining legitimacy locally (cf., Tracey, Dalpiaz,
& Phillips, 2018). We further highlight how such organizational dynamics interrelate with ecosystem
evolution (Dutt et al., 2016; Friederici, 2017; Goswami, Mitchell, & Bhagavatula, 2018). At the
ecosystem-level, we first identify commonalities across Africa, highlighting a number of typical
bottlenecks towards generating sought-after catalytic effects of support interventions. In this context,
we also discuss African governments’ support efforts and the relatively larger influence of foreign
development organizations, highlighting why their support has mostly fallen short of bold ambitions
or had significant unwanted side effects. Finally, we show locally specific dynamics, stressing the
diversity of African entrepreneurial ecosystems and illustrating the most important contextual
differences.
Chapter 6: Reach and Inclusion
In many locales, digital entrepreneurs are seen as the progressive, modernist vanguard. This a factor of
the sociomaterial contexts and institutional logics of digital entrepreneurship (Davidson & Vaast, 2010;
Hill & Mudambi, 2010; Katila et al., 2017) which characterize digital entrepreneurship as futuristic and
scientific (cf., Suchman, 2011). As a result, their roles extend beyond commercialization of technology
into leadership and activism on behalf of mores associated with progressiveness and development.
Some ventures’ self-representation as “social enterprises,” seeking to attract “impact investment,”
reflect such quests for legitimacy and status. At the same time, the knowledge and skillsets associated
with digital technologies are often considered to be relatively accessible. There is a sense that digital
technologies represent an opportunity for livelihoods to be supported anywhere. The chapter shows
some of the tensions, contestations, and politics arising from this contradiction (Marttila, 2013). For
example, we highlight how funding is often reserved to particular small social groups (Strachan
Matranga, Bhattacharyya, & Baird, 2017), and a number of other instances where digital
entrepreneurship ambitions may not translate to situated realities. Some of the contestation is visible
in discourses around whether to challenge predominant narratives or play into them (Dolan & Rajak,
2016; Seth, 2016; Suchman, 2011). For instance, the institutions that have proliferated in the wake of
enthusiasm for digital entrepreneurship (like hubs, incubators, and government agencies) have recently
had to justify their existence, sometimes by attempting to reignite the earlier sense of optimism and
opportunity, sometimes by developing new and more practical arguments.
Beyond these wider observations, we find that African digital enterprises are inspired by narratives
around supposedly vast rural development and market potentials at the “bottom of the pyramid;”
however, they experience difficulties turning these expectations into sustainable businesses. Ironically,
digital or digitized value chains that reach rural customers (especially subsistence farmers)
fundamentally depend on analog connectivity (e.g., transportation infrastructure, face-to-face
interactions, etc.). This implies that distribution cost per customer often becomes prohibitive for the
most remote areas, and that businesses’ understanding of rural consumers remains limited. Another
issue is that of technological affordances in technology design. Often technologists make assumptions
about market readiness based on rates of uptake of mobile technologies and other digital services. Low
rates of uptake of technologies often reflect an inability to take into account end user capabilities
(Wyche & Steinfield, 2016). Digital enterprises thus suffer from rural market access challenges that are
surprisingly similar to those of analog businesses. This leads to tensions with the donor landscape, as
funders typically expect the opposite to be the case. Entrepreneurs respond with a critique of donor

12
funding infrastructures that generally provide small grants relative to the vast amounts thought to be
available through investment financing. Ultimately, the chapter thus shows the pitfalls of seeing digital
technologies as counterforces to exclusion: market access but also identification and understanding
remain hampered by analog divides.
Chapter 7: Global Asymmetries of Place and Power
Following on from the discussion of local ecosystems and inclusive development, this chapter will
discuss the continuity between Africa’s historical and current place in the world, and how this global
positioning might impact on the continent’s technological aspirations (Mavhunga, 2017; Nyairo, 2015;
Zeleza, 2009). This analysis builds directly on the previous chapters and their engagement with the
topics of the development of local capacities, accessibility of capital, and access to markets for the
purpose of building the ideal digital entrepreneurship ecosystem. Previous chapters have challenged
the assumption of the universality of the opportunities that digital entrepreneurship models present
(Saldanha, 2012; Suchman, 2011). We show that the hegemony of Silicon Valley looms large over the
digital entrepreneurship imaginary (Avle & Lindtner, 2016), and we illustrate in detail the effects of the
influence of this model. Given that the logics of digital entrepreneurship have been spawned in
Western sites, primarily Silicon Valley, can actors from other geographies capably enact them? One
observation emerging in chapter six is that the entrepreneurs that are most successful at navigating the
promissory landscape of digital entrepreneurship and signaling legitimacy are those that are steeped in
‘Western’ modalities (Ascione, 2016; Fan, 2016; Gikandi, 2001; Seth, 2016; Suchman, 2011).
The chapter shows that global asymmetries of privilege and capability are replicated in the local
microcosm. They are clear in patterns of mobility and relocation, that is, which actors (and firms) are
able to travel and settle in new areas. Asymmetries are also made evident in the institutional practices
of financing technological commercialization. ‘Pattern recognition’, a process through which
predictions and expectations about startups are generated, leads to white, male entrepreneurs securing
financing at higher rates and valuations than their non-white counterparts (Strachan Matranga et al.,
2017). In order to compensate, local actors then develop the strategy of ‘white fronting’ as a means of
recouping their agency. This chapter goes on to reveal how the constitution of local polities and global
geopolitics are integrated. It is evident in the sites where digital enterprises emerge. As the previous
chapters have shown, activity is centered in urban areas with cosmopolitan credentials. The meta-
narrative is the pervasive marginalization of some places as non-modern (Ascione, 2016; Fan, 2016;
Law & Lin, 2017; Suchman, 2011), which reinforces age-old asymmetries.
Some actors have expressed concern about the ‘fetishizing’ of digital entrepreneurship in lieu of other
strategies for mitigating against inequality. The question is whether places are able to develop their own
strategies or whether they must constantly appropriate others’ agendas in order to meet their own
needs and aspirations (Seth, 2016). These questions and critiques engage with broader critical
discourses in development, post-colonial studies and science and technology studies (Anderson, 2017;
Ascione, 2016; Fan, 2016; Gikandi, 2001; Law & Lin, 2017; Mavhunga, 2017; Mbembe, 2001;
Mosselson, 2016; Nugent, 2009; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Zeleza, 2009) and relate it to the framing of
digital entrepreneurship and technology adoption as a means to bridge inequality. Discourse on the
coloniality of modernization is often overlooked within digital entrepreneurship scholarship (Gikandi,
2001; Mavhunga, 2017; Suchman, 2011). This chapter not only points to the gradients of power within
its logics but also questions how these frameworks can be modified to take into account the agency of
local actors, if at all.
Chapter 8: A Path Forward: Acknowledging Limits and Making Long-Term Investments
This final chapter summarizes the key findings of the book and analyzes their implications. African
and international media, policymakers, and analysts have overly focused on success stories and
aspirations, glancing over thorny issues such as digital entrepreneurship’s impacts on inequality,
countless vicious cycles in development processes, or the slower-than-expected pace of change. In
sum, the average African digital enterprise, according to our findings, does not grow exponentially,
does not scale internationally, does not attract venture capital, and does not disrupt cumbersome analog
13
supply chains and economic processes. Instead, we see digital enterprises that are creatively and
productively applying and adapting digital technologies to their local economic, social, and political
contexts. This has many of the wished-for positive socio economic effects (e.g., improved efficiencies
and service quality, high-quality job creation, etc.), just not at the rate and scale that the widespread
narratives about African digital entrepreneurship suggest. In line with this, we also see significant waste
and misguided efforts in the entrepreneurship support landscape: it appears that most supporters are
too removed from the realities of digital entrepreneurs to design helpful and effective interventions.
By reviewing the ways that African entrepreneurs are harnessing digital tools, and contrasting the
changes that they bring about with the transformative hopes shared by so many, this final chapter is
able to build a nuanced review of what a digital revolution means in, and to, some of the world’s most
economically marginal places. The space-transcending, bridging, scale-free, and zero-marginal-cost
properties of digital tools and technology are sometimes in evidence, but can also only be brought into
being by select actors in certain places. It is by looking to, not just the successes and failures, but also
the everyday activities of Africa’s digital entrepreneurs that we can offer guidance for those who look
to distinguish between possible, probable, and implausible futures for African economies.
Appendix A: Ecosystem Factsheets
For each of the 11 cities that were analyzed as case studies, 2-page factsheets of entrepreneurial
ecosystems are provided. Key information about 9 ecosystem facets will be summarized in a short
paragraph for each case study, including:
1. Digital Markets
2. Entrepreneurial Mindset, Knowledge, and Culture
3. Business Models and Value Creation
4. Narratives, Symbols, and Myths
5. Failures and Pitfalls
6. Local Talent and Skill
7. Entrepreneurship Support Organizations
8. Finance and Resources
9. Government and Universities
Each factsheet will also provide a list of further information resources. Factsheets will thus make
context-specific information easily accessible, making them particularly useful for practitioner and
policy audiences with an interest in a particular city.
Appendix B: Methodology and Primary Data
For scholarly audiences and interested others, we provide in-depth methodological detail. In particular,
we describe the nature of our data, listing which stakeholder groups were interviewed in which city,
when interviews were conducted, and how we analyzed the data.

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