Venture capital in Africa
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Funding for African tech start-ups is booming. But only if you’re not African. Odunayo Eweniyi, is the co-founder of the first online savings and investment app in West Africa, Piggyvest. She tells Tamasin Ford about how hard it was to convince Western based Venture Capitalists to invest in them. Jesse Ghansah, the Ghanaian Founder of the Fintech company, Swipe says as an African founder he’s still judged differently. Iyinolowa Aboyeji, who’s from Nigeria, set up a financing initiative called the Fund for Africa’s Future. He says rather than looking at the problem of foreign founders in Africa receiving more investment than African founders, people need to look at why it’s happening. And Adaeze Sokan, also based in, Nigeria, is the Director of Design and Strategy at Ventures Platform which is a funding initiative focused on Africa. She says that more start-up money needs to be aimed at women.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Funding for African tech |
| 0:08.2 | start-ups is booming. Great news, right? But only if you're not African. VCs, we give money to a white |
| 0:16.9 | male, for instance, who can convince them that the work I'm doing is necessary. |
| 0:21.9 | But those words coming from a black woman who's also African, for instance, just sound |
| 0:27.1 | the ring hollow. |
| 0:28.4 | Out of the top 10 African-based startups that received the most venture capital last year, |
| 0:34.1 | eight of them were led by foreigners, according to the Guardian newspaper in the UK. |
| 0:39.9 | We have a huge problem with C-stage funding on the continent. And so what has happened is that |
| 0:45.4 | instead of us back in our own country, men and women who are imminently qualified, |
| 0:49.8 | we've left that to whoever is benevolent enough to do that. And this is the consequence, right? |
| 0:55.9 | We find out why and take a look at what needs to be done about it. |
| 1:00.0 | That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:06.2 | Imagine you could take towards multiple goals, invest for the future, saving dollars, and earn |
| 1:12.7 | much higher interest than your bank all from one app. |
| 1:15.7 | With PiggyVest, you can do only send more. |
| 1:18.3 | That's an advert for PiggyVest, the first online savings and investment app in West Africa. |
| 1:23.9 | Odunio Erwinni is the co-founder based in Lagos, Nigeria. |
| 1:28.3 | She knows all too well how hard it is to convince Western-based venture capitalists |
| 1:34.3 | to invest in them if you're African. |
| 1:37.3 | We tried to raise foreign capital and it didn't work out the way we hoped it would. |
| 1:42.6 | And so we ended up raising majorly from Nigeria. |
| 1:45.6 | We still had some foreign participation, but it wasn't what we had hoped for initially. |
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