Seeds of Opportunity: The African Growth Series
November 2022 | Issue 1
In this week's issue, you will learn more about:
- COP27 - The Ai African NDC Investment Summit & Awards
- Innovation in Africa's Travel & Tourism Industry
- Lami, Africa's Top Female-owned Start-Ups
- Accelerating Women in Tech, East Africa
COP27 - The Ai African NDC Investment Summit & Awards
Frost & Sullivan Africa is very excited to be partnering with Africa investor and the African Green Infrastructure Investment Bank (AfGIIB) at this year's COP27 at #sharmelsheikh, Egypt from 6 November 2022 to 18 November 2022. On 8 November, the Ai African NDC Investment Summit & Awards (an African Green Infrastructure Investment Project showcase), will be held at the ICC Pavilion, The Blue Zone. The African NDC Investment Summit & Awards, will showcase NDC projects, initiatives, investment strategies, as well as energy projects and M&A opportunities. The Summit will reconcile these projects with “Just Transition investment models and innovative institutional investor-public partnerships (IIPP’s) legal and regulatory frameworks, to mobilise capital at scale and deploy that capital at speed for Africa’s $3trn of Nationally determined contribution projects (NDC’s), and green hydrogen investment projects seeking capital. The NDC and Climate Investment Initiatives Showcase session at 11h15 brings together leaders who will showcase catalytic private capital mobilisation and project pipeline initiatives at scale for Africa’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), and energy investment projects.
The panel led by Dr. Hubert Danso, Chairman of Africa investor Group and the Chair of the NDC Awards Adjudication, includes expert speakers:
• Dr. Sharon Fitzgerald, Partner, DLA Piper
• Sharon Thorne, Global Chair, Deloitte (tbc)
• Hendrik Malan, CEO, Frost & Sullivan Africa
• Theis Simonsen. CEO, DECARD
#helpingafricagrow #ai #cop27 #TogetherForImplementation #climatechange
Innovation in Africa's Travel & Tourism Industry
The continent of Africa is a diverse landscape, housing a myriad of cultures, traditions, and artifacts. As such, the travel and tourism industry for many countries in Africa plays a vital role in the gross domestic product (GDP) of each nation. In fact, the International Finance Corporation estimated that this industry contributed to the employment of over 24 million people in Africa in 2019. However, due to the travel restrictions necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, this industry recorded a loss of nearly US$ 55 billion in travel and tourism revenues by July 2020 alone. In addition, countries most reliant on tourism reflected a real GDP loss of 12% during the pandemic. Despite the clear reliance on this sector, start-ups within this industry are low within the continent – a clear example is Nigeria, where only 33 new companies in this sector have been founded since 2005. In fact, while tourism is the third largest sector in Africa, the industry has been said to be halted due to operational inefficiency. However, the opportunity in this space has been indicated through the development of Purple Elephant Ventures, a Kenyan-based ‘start-up studio’ which raised over US$ 1 million in seed funding to combat the lack of innovation in this sector. Purple Elephant Ventures has generated three businesses that work to create a perfect travel economy. The first, Nomad Africa is a C2C (content-to-commerce) platform that is geared towards selling travel packages to members of the African population based on reliable content. The second, is Elephant Bookings, a B2B SaaS aimed at hotels currently reliant on international business, to build a more sustainable and direct business model. The third is a supply chain start-up that services the hospitality industry. These three start-ups are just examples of the growth opportunity in this sector, as well as the need for change in the industry.
Lami, Africa's Top Female-owned Start-Ups
Despite having 17% of the world’s population, Africa has one of the world’s lowest insurance penetration rates, below 3%. The lack of insurance leaves millions of Africans vulnerable to bear the costs of medical emergencies, funerals, damage to property, and many more. Lami, a Kenyan insuretech start-up founded in 2018, aims to address the low insurance uptake in Africa by bridging the gap through technology. This end-to-end digital insurance platform and API allows businesses of all sizes and sectors to easily embedded their insurance products. Lami further links companies with underwriters to streamline the process by providing customers with a better experience.
Lami is one of Africa’s top female-owned start-ups, having raised an estimated USD 5,6 million as of August 2022 (USD 3,6 million comes from its most recent seed round in August this year). Lami is currently working with underwriters in different markets to create an all-risk cover for buy now, pay later transactions. Accordingly, Lami has partnered with Lipa Later Group, a buy now, pay later (BNPL) company, to offer its consumers access to reliable and affordable insurance against all products purchased using the Lipa Later platform. With this partnership, all Lipa Later customers across its current markets, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Nigeria, will have their purchased products covered with the all-risk insured.
Accelerating Women in Tech, East Africa
African tech startups have raised US$2.7 billion in total funding in the first 9 months of 2022, almost 30% more than the US$2.1 billion total raised in 2021. These record-breaking numbers foster a spirit of hope and entrepreneurship as people seize the opportunity to tackle the continent's high unemployment rate and jump into the tech startup ecosystem. This interest is evident in the 60 startup accelerators and 1,031 innovation hubs. Whilst celebrating these milestones is important, we cannot ignore that 93% of the 2021 funding went to male-led startups and women only made up a third of people in tech. To tackle this, 'Women in tech' initiatives are sweeping the continent, with East Africa taking the lead. The region holds more than half of Africa's accelerators and programmes, such as the Ethiopian-based Tech African Women (TAW) programme, Women In Technology Uganda (Witu), Nairobi's AkiraChix, Miss Geek Rwanda, Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi) in Kigali and Burundi’s BiHub initiative all seek to teach girls the hard skills to make it the tech ecosystem. Above this, Linda Bonyo, Evelyn Ngatia and Audrey Cheng are three Kenyan women whom each founded Lawyers Hub Africa, TechaWatt and Moringa School to educate and inspire schoolgirls who want to build a future in tech.
To find out more about opportunities in Africa, please contact Lynne Martin.
