Startups Funding: Investors Overlook Francophone Africa for Anglophone

• Startups Funding: Investors Overlook Francophone Africa for Anglophone

The growing interest in Africa’s startups is not even despite proximity and potentials as interested investors continue to focus on Anglophone Africa.

In the last 10 years, annual reports on startup funding on the continent typically show Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya as the three top investment destinations in Africa.

The surged in funding to these Anglophone African nations has helped built viable tech ecosystems in these three countries.

Presently, Lagos is Africa’s most valuable startup ecosystem at US$2 billion, followed by Johannesburg and Cape Town at US$1.36 billion and US$0.172 billion, respectively.

While Nigeria and South Africa secured almost half of the total US$334.5 million worth of investments that came to the continent in 2018 and total Africa’s investment rose by 71.5 percent from a year ago, startup funding in Francophone Africa actually declined, according to a report by Partech Ventures.

This, experts attributed to language barrier and economic viability as most Francophone economies are smaller when compared to Anglophone Africa.

An entrepreneur and chair of Afrilabs, Rebecca Enonchong, said some of the disparity in funding is rooted in cultural differences as obvious and simple as language. “Most tech publications are in English. They would be unlikely to read press releases in French,” she says. But beyond language, Enonchong, a Cameroon-born tech entrepreneur, says there’s further potential for a culture clash.

“Francophone startups tend to be more formal and long-winded and few journalists or investors have the patience to read through tons of pages of detailed documents to explain a solution,” she says. “This formalism is sought in Francophone educational systems as evidence of knowledge and expertise. So founders tend to replicate this in their communications to investors and journalists.” As a consequence of several factors, “Francophone startups generally don’t have access to the same networks that those in Anglophone Africa do,” she admits.

General partner at Partech Africa, a pan-African $140 million fund, Tidjane Dème, agreed to the “language barrier, among other factors, limits the ability of investors to access information and engage in these markets.”

The Senegal-born investor, however, explained the importance of addressing the finding gap beyond Francophone countries, “We must point out that there is actually a much larger issue with only three markets (Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa) attracting 77% of investment,” he tells Quartz Africa. “It’s really about three very visible markets getting most of the attention and everybody else sharing in left-overs. So what goes on in Cameroon and Ivory Coast currently applies to Uganda and Ghana.”