I’ve spent the better part of a decade inside the African innovation ecosystem co-founding startups, managing hubs, running accelerator programs, building ventures inside corporations, and working directly with founders across East Africa.
So when I say I don’t believe in startup accelerators for the African context, I’m not speaking from the outside looking in. I’m speaking from the inside, looking at what I’ve watched fail — quietly, repeatedly, and expensively.
The Narrative We Keep Getting Wrong
There’s a story that gets told in boardrooms in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, and Accra. It goes something like this: Africa has a talent problem. We need to train more founders. We need to coach them on lean methodology, pitch decks, and product-market fit. Then we watch them graduate, wish them luck, and move on to the next cohort.
That story is wrong. And the accelerator model is built almost entirely on it.
Africa does not lack ambitious founders. Walk into any university, any town, any informal market from Arusha to Abidjan, and you will find people who have already built something from nothing or in the verge of building one with no funding, no support structure, no safety net. The ambition is not the problem.
What Africa’s founders often lack is not motivation. It’s operating experience, institutional knowledge, and the structured systems that turn a good idea into a repeatable, scalable business.
Those are not things you can coach someone into in three months.
What Accelerators Were Actually Designed For
The accelerator model was invented in a very specific context. For example, Y Combinator’s founding thesis was built around supporting technically sophisticated founders, many of them engineers with existing domain expertise in need of capital, network access, and pressure to ship fast.
The model works when the founder already has 80% of what they need. The accelerator provides the remaining 20% i,e. the right introductions, the forcing function, the credibility signal.
But what happens when a founder is starting at 30%?
You give them a curriculum, a mentor, a demo day and you send them back into the market with the same gaps they walked in with. You’ve added polish. You haven’t added infrastructure.
That’s not transformation. That’s decoration.
The First-Time Founder Reality in Africa
Let me be direct about something the ecosystem rarely says out loud. The majority of founders going through accelerator programs across Africa are first-time founders.
Many are brilliant. Most are courageous. But they have not built a company before. They have not managed a team before. They have not navigated a sales cycle, structured a cap table, managed investor relations, or made a payroll decision before. They are learning the language of startup while simultaneously trying to build one.
And for those with experience, many of them are coming from a background in traditional business like trading, family enterprise, formal employment where the development playbook is entirely different. Build slowly. Keep control. Grow from revenue. Don’t take outside money until you know exactly what you’re doing with it.
That is not a weakness. That is wisdom accumulated over generations. But it collides violently with the venture-backed startup model the accelerator is trying to teach.
The result? A founder who can now speak the language but cannot yet build the business. And when they leave the program, they’re alone again.
The Accelerator’s Uncomfortable Exit Problem
Again, here is the thing nobody wants to say at demo day that the accelerator’s incentive is to produce impressive-looking graduates, not successful companies.
Success for an accelerator is measured in cohort size, press mentions, and occasionally a portfolio company that raises a follow-on round which happens to less than 10% of graduates in most programs. The accelerator moves on. The founder is left to figure out the hard part alone.
I’ve watched founders come out of well-funded, well-networked programs and struggle for two years afterward because the moment the scaffolding of the program came down, there was nothing underneath it.
The program was the structure. And they’d confused structure with capability.
What Venture Building Actually Means
Let me define this clearly, because “venture studio” and “venture builder” get used loosely.
A venture engine a.k.a venture builder does not mentor a founder through building a company. A venture builder co-builds the company alongside the founder sharing in the risk, the operational work, and the institutional knowledge transfer.
This means:
- Conducting market validation before anything, even before coming up with a fancy startup name
- Building the operational infrastructure i,e. finance systems, HR frameworks, sales processes
- Making early hiring decisions together
- Sitting in customer meetings, not just debriefing afterward
- Navigating regulatory environments that a first-time founder has never encountered
- Providing financial modeling discipline from day one
- Building the business logic and the business simultaneously
This is not coaching. This is co-execution.
And critically, it doesn’t end at demo day. The venture builder stays in the business until it can stand alone. That is a fundamentally different commitment than a 12-week program.
Why This Matters More in Africa Than Anywhere Else
The African market is unforgiving of operational immaturity in ways that more developed markets are not.
Infrastructure gaps like power reliability, logistics, payment rails, internet connectivity are real in Africa. Add a layer of operational complexity that simply does not exist in the markets where the startup playbook was written. Not forgetting that, regulatory environments can change any time, distribution channels require relationship-building that takes years, not months. More over, enterprise sales cycles are long and deeply relational and so on.
A first-time founder, coached on lean methodology and taught to move fast, runs directly into these realities and often breaks. Not because they lack talent. Because they lack the operational depth to navigate systems that more experienced founders have spent years learning.
Venture building gives founders that depth not as theoretical knowledge, but as lived operational experience built inside their own company.
The Counter-Argument I’ll Address Directly
People will say “But accelerators are more scalable. You can run 20 companies through a cohort. A venture studio can only build 3–5 per year.”
Yes. That is true.
And 17 broken companies at scale is worse than 4 strong companies built right.
We have been measuring the wrong thing. We have been optimizing for the number of companies that start, not the number that survive. The African startup ecosystem does not need more early-stage companies that die after raising just because they were just optimizing for valuation not the market needs. It needs fewer, stronger companies that compound.
Venture building is a higher-commitment, lower-volume model. It is also, by almost every measure, a higher-success model because it does not abandon the company at the moment when it is most vulnerable. Venture building optimize operational efficiency, resilience and proper structures that can help the startup survive the market challenges along their path to scale.
What This Means for the Ecosystem
If you are a development finance institution, a corporate innovation function, or a government body deciding how to deploy capital into the startup ecosystem, this matters for you.
Funding an accelerator is cheap and legible. You can point to a cohort of 20 companies, produce a report with headcount and revenue projections, and call it a program.
Funding a venture builder is slower and messier. Progress looks different. But the companies that come out of it are real with operating infrastructure, repeatable processes, and leadership teams that have been stress-tested before the training wheels came off.
The question is what outcome you are actually trying to achieve.
If the answer is “a healthy, self-sustaining startup ecosystem with companies that grow and employ people and generate returns” then the accelerator model is not the highest-leverage use of your resources.
My Conviction
I have run accelerator programs. I have graduated founders who went on to do nothing with what they learned, not because they didn’t try, but because the support ended exactly when the real work began.
I have also built ventures from scratch alongside co-founders, spending months in the operational weeds, building the systems, making the hard decisions together, staying through the chaos.
The difference in outcomes is not subtle. It is structural.
Africa’s founders are not raw material to be polished and released into the market. They are co-builders who deserve co-builders in return. They deserve partners who are willing to do the dirty work alongside them not mentors who observe from a distance and grade their pitches.
That is what venture building is. That is what this ecosystem needs more of.
And that is the work I’ve dedicated my career to.