Africa’s next chapter belongs to the entrepreneurs, builders and young people creating solutions for Africans, by Africans.
Dear Changemakers,
There is a lot of conversation about entrepreneurship in Africa.
We tell young people to start businesses.
We encourage them to innovate.
We celebrate founders, side hustles and startups.
But I think we need to push the conversation further.
What exactly are we building and who are we building it for?
I recently had a sat on a panel for the Investec Round Table where we engaged in conversations about entrepreneurship, marketing, technology and youth development that reminded me of something I have believed for a long time:
Africa cannot simply be a consumer of the next technological revolution. We have to become builders of it.
And that starts with entrepreneurship.
Starting is only the beginning
Starting a business is exciting.
Building one is something else entirely.
The entrepreneurial journey is rarely the clean, linear story we tell afterwards. There are false starts. There are ideas that don’t work. There are cash-flow problems, difficult decisions, changing markets and moments when the vision is much clearer to you than it is to everybody else.
That is part of the work.
Entrepreneurship teaches you that an idea has very little value until it meets a real problem, a real customer and a sustainable business model.
For young African entrepreneurs in particular, this matters.
We don’t need another generation that believes entrepreneurship is simply about having an idea.
We need problem solvers, builders and owners.
People who understand their communities deeply enough to see opportunities that others overlook.
Marketing has fundamentally changed
The same is true of marketing.
There was a time when brands could largely control the conversation.
They bought media.
They broadcast messages.
Consumers listened.
That world is disappearing.
Today, the consumer is simultaneously the audience, publisher, critic, distributor and sometimes even the creator.
Social media has fundamentally changed the relationship between businesses and the people they serve.
But the next shift is even more interesting.
Marketing is increasingly becoming a data and technology discipline.
Every interaction tells us something.
What people watch.
What they ignore.
What they search for.
What they share.
What communities they form.
What problems they repeatedly discuss.
The challenge for African businesses is not simply to collect more data.
It is to understand our own data.
Because context matters.
African consumers cannot always be understood through models, assumptions and platforms developed somewhere else.
Our languages matter.
Our cultural nuances matter.
Our informal economies matter.
Our payment behaviours matter.
Our communities matter.
Our realities matter.
The platform question
This brings me to something I think we should be talking about far more seriously.
Who owns the platforms on which Africa’s digital economy is being built?
Every day, millions of Africans communicate, transact, advertise, create content and build businesses on platforms we did not create.
Those platforms have unlocked enormous opportunity. There is no question about that.
But there is another question worth asking:
What are we building ourselves?
Where are the African platforms?
Where are the technologies designed around African problems?
Where are the datasets that properly represent African consumers?
Where are the algorithms trained with African realities in mind?
Where are the digital ecosystems that allow African businesses to create and capture value rather than simply participate in someone else’s ecosystem?
This isn’t an argument for isolation.
It is an argument for agency.
Technology for Africans, by Africans
Africa has one of the youngest populations in the world.
That fact is often presented as an economic opportunity.
But a young population only becomes an advantage if young people have the tools, skills and opportunities to participate meaningfully in the economy.
That means our conversation about youth development must evolve.
We cannot only prepare young Africans to find jobs in the economy that exists.
We must prepare them to build the economy that comes next.
Teach them how to code.
But also teach them how to sell.
Teach them about artificial intelligence.
But also teach them about customers.
Teach them how to analyse data.
But also teach them how to identify problems worth solving.
Teach them how to use global platforms.
But, importantly, challenge them to build platforms of their own.
Because the biggest opportunity presented by technology is not simply that Africans can use it.
It is that Africans can shape it.
From consumers to creators
The next chapter of African entrepreneurship cannot only be about creating more small businesses.
It must also be about creating intellectual property, technology, platforms, data and scalable African enterprises.
Imagine what becomes possible when African entrepreneurs combine:
- entrepreneurial thinking
- deep cultural understanding
- marketing intelligence
- African data
- emerging technology
That combination is incredibly powerful.
Because some of the people best positioned to solve African problems are the people who live with those problems every day.
The opportunity before us is therefore bigger than entrepreneurship.
It is about ownership.
It is about participation.
It is about ensuring that when the next generation looks at the technologies shaping their lives, they don’t only recognise themselves as users.
They recognise themselves as builders.
Africa doesn’t need permission to participate in the future.
We need to build it.
Let’s stay brave,
Musa Kalenga
CEO, Brave Group
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