UNAJUA S1 EP1: How significant is the opportunity for tech companies in Africa? feat. Derin Adebayo
For this Unajua Series opener, Derin Adebayo factors in on the size of the commercial opportunity for tech companies in Africa and offers a take on whether the apparent lack of exits should cause worry.
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Welcome to the first episode of African Tech Roundup's new learning podcast series called UNAJUA. 'Unajua' is a word in KiSwahili that means 'do you know?'
Here's how the UNAJUA Series will work... First, we'll crowdsource pertinent questions from you, The Village, and break them down into 3 to 6 bite-sized sub-questions. Then, we'll invite a revolving door of Villagers who know a little more than a thing or two about how things work in our ecosystem to offer what we're calling 'minimum actionable responses' to these sub-questions—in 15 minutes or less. From here on in, UNAJUA episodes will drop every Monday.
To launch the series, we've sourced answers to the question:
Is the African technology ecosystem at an inflection point?
Factoring in on this question in a three-part response is Nigerian analyst and researcher Derin Adebayo. Derin covers technology, entrepreneurship, and venture capital across emerging markets in his monthly Substack newsletter called Unevenly Distributed.
He formerly worked at the hotel booking platform Hotels.ng and the VC firm, Ingressive Capital. He now works for Endeavor— the global community of 2,000 odd high-impact entrepreneurs spread across 40 emerging and underserved markets.
In this episode, Derin tackles the central theme question by answering two sub-questions for the price of one. First, "How large is the opportunity for a tech company in Africa?" Then, "Should we be worried about a lack of exits?"
Click here (or on the microphone icon on the right of your screen) to leave us a 60-sec voice note with your reactions to any of the topics raised in the UNAJUA Series. (We will include some of your audio takes in future follow-up episodes.)
Useful References:
OP-ED: The Chicken or the Exit by The Subtext
OP-ED: The Fight for Mobile Money 2.0 by Wiza Jalakasi
OP-ED: How Africa’s Airtime Currency Traders Birthed A Fintech Innovation Playbook by Kioneki
PODCAST: How the Stripe acquisition of Paystack will supercharge the African tech ecosystem by The Flip
REPORT: 2021 Internet Report - Southeast Asia's Golden Age: Resilience and Recovery by Asia Partners
Image credit: Nupo Deyon Daniel