Developing African Local Startup Ecosystems
Attracting infrastructure capital for building Wakanda in Africa will take more than just mere words of discussion rather it will require an intense amount of strategic actions and innovation.
Huge stories and articles with researches have being made around the subject of how to build an Utopian in Africa. But I would also like to argue that next to an Utopian community is the popular concept of Wakanda. By this I mean to say that, if an Utopian community isn’t much of a reality , sure we could have Wakanda. Wakanda would then be defined as a state of industrial and economic development in the way of life of the people led by continuous innovations and great discoveries.
A brief history of Wakanda :
Wakanda (/wəˈkændə, -ˈkɑːn-/) is a fictional country appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.[2] It is located in sub-Saharan Africa, and is home to the superhero Black Panther. Wakanda first appeared in Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966), and was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.(you can choose to study up more on all thats highlighted here; ref: Wikipedia).
So if you are in Wakanda , here are a common things you will notice: Smart cities; smart technologies ; Super apps; hyper-speed trains ; Elon Musk’s vertical landing spaceship systems and a lot more great technologies. But this is not what I am discussing today .
Building startup ecosystems across African cities would help us unleash a time of great innovations and build value adding products . This products would be solutions to defining problems that different people across different countries of the world face daily. This will bring us to discussing the importance of building global products
Developing ecosystems that will therefore encourage this level of technological advancement will be of great benefit to us African people because it will help us to combat the issue of lack of employment opportunities and this will set precedent for a future in which everyone is gainfully engaged.
This entire article will document my practical opinions built on my continuous search for knowledge and great insights, accompanied by my continuous effort to work with others in developing working startup ecosystems in cities across Africa. For the records, I am currently and consistently working with other people to develop the Startup Ecosystem in my residential city.
This I am doing in a bid to help the young people community come up with products that will define their growths, provide value and help setup profitable ventures. I have being on this journey for 5 years and I am daily contributing my very best.
So I am going to therefore document my thoughts with an expectation for someone to find my articles and be inspired by them enough to create a sweeping change in their own various cities. Let’s to be organized by following practical Steps to building a local startup community:
Number 1:
Be very sure someone else has not initiated the move already in your city. Look around, ask , talk to people and be sure to know the state of startup ecosystems in your community. Don’t assume no one is building what you are building . Its best to find people already working on developing startup ecosystems in your community . Search for existing startup communities, like Startup Grind , Founders’ Square etc. which might exist in your city. All these communities are very much needed in the process. We’ll later discuss the three ingredients for a successful startup ecosystem. But if you don’t get to find anyone or communities, don’t panic , this show the bulk of the work will be in your hands and that of your team.
Number 2:
Believe in your city and believe well enough that you don’t need to run out of your city before you can be in a successful startup ecosystem.
One of the major ingredient for success is knowing exactly what you want do and believing in it up to the point you are very ready to get the job started. Unlike many others would think , creating an ecosystem in your community not only benefits you but it also blesses all the people that live in such communities. This is because everyone will then be given an opportunity of learning how to build value driven products and services. And it will eventually be a matter of time , like Singapore, your community will have over 10 Unicorns( 1 billion dollar startups) , lots of community programs, 3000 startups etc.
I will continue on this discussion in my next article . Don’t forget to check my upcoming articles also.
Thank you for reading.
