A couple of weeks ago, a think piece by Andile Masuku entitled "We simply must not allow investor bias to persist" - featured in African Independent and Business Report - caused a bit of a stir on Twitter. The hubbub surrounded the article's tackling of the sensitive issue of investor bias that appears to be prevalent in Africa's startup finance scene.
Cited in Andile's piece are research findings published in a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded report by the American VC outfit, Village Capital. According to the report, more than 90% of the funding that's gone into East African fintech startups over the past year or two has benefitted firms with expatriate founders. This has lead to some local founders complaining that their ventures aren't being fairly appraised for investibility in terms of their potential and financial viability.
In this episode of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga are joined by Tapsnapp founder and CEO, Vije Vijendranath, to unpack some of the impassioned response to the investor bias debate that's recently surfaced from certain quarters within our tech community and to chat about some possible solutions to the situation.
Then, being that Tapsnapp is surfing the "Uberisation of everything" trend, and given the current push-back Uber is experiencing in South Africa from various stakeholders, Andile, Musa and Vije decided to try and answer the question: how enthusiastically should Africans embrace on-demand marketplace platforms?
Music Credits:
Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Barbro Mutombo Ciakudia is VP for Business Development at Invest Africa. Invest Africa is a private members club based in Mayfair, London and was founded by Rob Hersov in 2013 as a means for business leaders, private investors, and entrepreneurs to gain insight into Africa and to be exposed to the continent's vast opportunities.
They offer a multi-service platform for access and investment into Africa which aims to be a link between capital and expertise into Africa, and information and opportunity out of Africa.
In this chat, Babro gives us a sense of how bullish members of their network are about investing in Africa and talks about what sort of investor support they typically need to act on their enthusiasm.
In this week's episode: We chat with Linux Academy CEO and Founder Anthony James, we play a "Florida Man" edition of Fake News, and Matt Sherman wonders how computers work.
