Building A Thriving Innovation Economy
Growth of community, acceleration and an explosion of opportunity
AfriLabs found a base in Abuja, Nigeria in 2016 and the secretariat has grown from a team of one to a team of over thirty with team members spread across three countries - Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and growing. The AfriLabs community has grown exponentially in the last 10 years, from 5 centres in 2011 to over 300 in 2022. AfriLabs hub members together support over one million innovators across the African continent who are solving the continent’s most pressing issues.
end of 2021 had been held in Ghana, Egypt, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nigeria. The gatherings attract thousands of registrations and offer an opportunity for the AfriLabs community of innovators to network and co-create with other members of the ecosystem from host government agencies to corporates and local universities. AfriLabs innovation hubs are increasingly finding their niche with many building and implementing sector-specific programs. In 2020, about 50% of surveyeWd AfriLabs member hubs were focusing on education programs while just under 40% were focused on agriculture, artificial intelligence and financial services. 1
The AfriLabs Annual Gatherings previously hosted in Berlin, on the margins of an international conference, are now held across the African continent and by
Surfacing of fundamental challenges
Innovation hubs quickly began to see skill development as a vital component to their success and over the years have focused on learning and then teaching principles of program design and delivery, partnership development, leadership, fundraising and relationship building between innovators and investors. 2 Models for hub sustainability and technology skills continue to be pain points for hubs across Africa with only 18% of AfriLabs hubs reporting financial sustainability, 30% breaking even and 52% not financially sustainable in 2020. 54% of hub staff members had low levels of experience in key business skills, including finance management, marketing, communication, and technology. 3 At a secretariat level we could see the impact our work had but we struggled to quantify it. For example, while we knew hubs were benefiting from the community we fostered and that being part of
the network amplified individual and collective work of our members because they told us, we had not collected the data and processed the evidence to share this impact publicly and convincingly. In our formative years, because of pressure on finances and a rapidly changing African innovation ecosystem, we were unable to develop long term recurrent programs for our community and relied on short term partnerships, and on organic growth and interaction of the community. While we began to experience an increase in innovation positive conversations and actions from international, national, regional and local organizations, and also from innovation hubs and other innovation communities, the disjointedness was palpable which translated to replication of a lot work, restricted access to data and learnings, and a perceived battle for resources.
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