Rewiring Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Across Africa, we have become very good at announcing ecosystems. We launch hubs, we convene summits, we run bootcamps, we publish cohort photographs. What we have been less good at is building the thing an ecosystem actually is: a set of durable relationships between entrepreneurs, capital, markets, knowledge and policy that continue to function after the funding cycle closes.

An ecosystem is not a calendar of programmes. It is connective tissue. And connective tissue is unglamorous work — it does not photograph well, it rarely fits a twelve-month reporting window, and it is almost never attributable to a single institution. That is precisely why so little of it gets built.

The programme trap

Most enterprise support in our markets is organised around the programme as the unit of delivery. A donor or corporate funds an intervention, a delivery partner recruits a cohort, training is delivered, a demo day is held, a report is written. Everyone involved behaves rationally. And yet two years later, the businesses that were supported are often no closer to finance, no closer to formal markets, and no closer to the people who could unlock either.

The programme trap is not caused by bad intent or weak execution. It is caused by a design assumption: that the binding constraint on entrepreneurship is the capability of the entrepreneur. In my experience running enterprise support across sectors and markets, capability is rarely the first constraint. The first constraint is usually connection — to a buyer who pays on time, to capital priced for the risk actually being taken, to a peer who has already made the mistake you are about to make.

“Judge an ecosystem not by what it launches, but by what survives it.”

What connective tissue looks like

Connective tissue is concrete. It is a standing investment vehicle rather than a one-off fund. It is an offtake relationship written into a contract rather than a memorandum of understanding. It is a set of financial records a business keeps because the market demands them, not because a facilitator asked. It is a group of founders who call one another on a Tuesday afternoon without an intermediary in the room.

When we designed the Ghana Climate Venture Facility, the ambition was never to run a facility. It was to leave behind a permanent capability for financing climate-facing businesses. What emerged — Wangara Green Ventures — outlives the programme that produced it. That is the test. Not how many businesses passed through, but what institution now exists that did not exist before.

Four shifts

First, shift from cohorts to pipelines. A cohort ends; a pipeline compounds. Every business that is assessed, structured and made investable should enter a pipeline that other capital providers can draw from for years.

Second, shift from training to transaction. Capability built in the abstract decays quickly. Capability built while closing a real deal, meeting a real standard, or servicing a real contract is retained because it is immediately useful.

Third, shift from grants to instruments. Grant capital has an important role at the frontier of risk. But an ecosystem matures only when a business can move along a ladder — grant to concessional debt to commercial debt to equity — without falling off at each rung.

Fourth, shift from attribution to accumulation. The most valuable ecosystem work is jointly produced and hard to claim. Institutions that insist on clean attribution will systematically underinvest in exactly the infrastructure the ecosystem needs most.

The longer horizon

Rewiring an ecosystem is a decade-scale task in a sector organised around three-year funding cycles. That mismatch is the central management problem of enterprise development in Africa, and it is solvable — but only by leaders willing to accept slower recognition in exchange for longer consequence.

The essays that follow take up four pieces of that work: the design of capital for small and growing businesses, the treatment of food systems as economic infrastructure, the kind of leadership that builds institutions, and what actually persists in a business after the support ends.