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Jumanne Mtambalike in a Tanzanian entrepreneur and technologist.  Jumanne is best known for championing stable innovation ecosystems in Africa. He is a founder of Sahara Ventures, the parent company of Sahara Sparks event, Africa's largest event on innovation and technology entrepreneurship,  and Sahara Accelerator.  Jumanne started Sahara Ventures in 2015 as a group of companies with the specific focus of helping start-ups and entrepreneurs to identify potential opportunities and partners to build sustainable businesses, accelerate them by providing technical assistance and help them to connect with potential sponsors and donors.  

Sahara ventures include three separate businesses, Sahara events, which hosts business events, the accelerator program that helps businesses get investor ready and a consulting arm centered around investment, technology, and innovation.  

Jumanne talks about the difficulty generating accurate post-program data from accelerator program participants and the reticence of African entrepreneurs to disclose when they have raised follow-on funding. This adds a level of challenge on the part of incubators and accelerators to accurately communicate the evidence of the impact of their efforts.

Jumanne also shares his thoughts on the impact of COVID-19 on entrepreneurs and SMEs in Africa and how Sahara Ventures is helping SMEs to capitalize on the digital economy. Though COVID is a crisis, there are opportunities for African entrepreneurs to adopt technologies to manage and even thrive through the crisis and beyond.

He also talks about the missing gap in scale and growth funding for African entrepreneurs where there are smaller funds to start-up seed funding and then the available funding jumps to $1M+ and investors will complain that entrepreneurs are not investment ready but the issue is that there is a gap in the flow of funding which contributes to the problem.

Investors are more interested in investing in SMEs that are established with a track record to minimize their risks. They are less interested in start-ups with a novel idea. Fintech however leverages more investor money with the success of M-pesa.

We talked about localized African investors and Angel Investors. Jumanne touched on the need for capacity building for local angel investors for them to understand how start-ups work. They are more accustomed to investing in more traditional assets such as land and real estate where they can understand how they will make money. There are other issues around the weak participation of local investors connected to weak regulations that bar local investor support for local ventures looking to scale and grow.

Examples of African venture funds include: Ghana Venture Capital Trust Fund, East Africa Venture Capital Association

You can check out Sahara Ventures on their website and follow them on LinkedIn and you can read Jumanne’s articles on entrepreneurship and the African ecosystem on Medium.