The Realistic Optimist is a subscriber-funded publication.
This allows for deep, nuanced and sponsor-free articles.
About the author of this op-ed
Leslie Ossete is the co-founder of M-Studio, an Abidjan-based venture studio launching startups serving francophone West Africa.
Before founding M-Studio, Leslie was growth lead at Wave and regional operations manager at Bolt. Right out of university, she co-founded a startup (Buupass) in Kenya, which still operates today.
A tale of two cities
Africa has seen a schism between its francophone and anglophone startup ecosystems. The latter have vastly outperformed the former, carried by Nigeria and Kenya. Francophone Africa has had a late start to the race, despite ecosystems like Tunisia becoming legislative pioneers in the field.
Multiple factors explain the dichotomy, each of them linked.
First, anglophone Africa implemented foundational infrastructure such as mobile money earlier than its francophone counterparts. M-Pesa, widely recognized as mobile money’s paragon, hails from Kenya.
Mobile money has been the cornerstone of many African startups’ strategies, representing a convenient halfway between burdensome but prevalent cash and efficient but rare online payments.
This infrastructure fomented startup creation, putting pressure on the local job market to form startup-ready talent, such as developers. This gave rise to companies like Nigeria’s Andela, tasked with pumping out that tech-literate workforce. A similar trend is picking up pace in francophone Africa through companies like GoMyCode, but the initial infrastructure delay has retarded subsequent steps.
This initial lag domino-affected VC funding. In Africa, a group of countries known as the “Big Four” (Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa) received over 75% of the continent’s 2022 VC funding. As the astute observer will note, anglophone Africa boasts three members in that group, compared to francophone Africa’s zero.
These three linked reasons explain the logical, visible reasons for the lag. More subtle differences may have contributed as well.
Anglophone African countries tend to enjoy a more entrepreneurial culture compared to Francophone ones, owing to divergences between English and French economic dogma (laissez-faire vs dirigisme). With an important fraction of African VC funding coming from the United States, francophone founders also face a substantial linguistic challenge when pitching in their second or third language.
This overarching anglophone business culture led to the launch, as early as 2010, of formative tech hubs such as iHub and Co-Creation Hub in Nairobi and Lagos respectively. These encouraged knowledge sharing and skill building, crucial to exposing local talent to startups’ intricacies.