Building A Thriving Innovation Economy
Executive Summary -Nekesa Were, Director of Strategy
O ur strategy design process has been an extremely fulfilling experience. We have had consultative sessions with our community that have taken the form of needs assessments, listening tours, feedback surveys and roundtables. These have helped us to better understand, articulate and address the needs of our community. We have also spoken to several friends and partners of AfriLabs to understand their impressions and expectations for our network. These conversations have challenged us, validated us and given us more clarity on our partner engagement efforts and our positioning in the African innovation ecosystem. We have had several internal co-creation sessions as well as a major organisational audit. Through these sessions we have defined our core AfriLabs personas, clarified our purpose and defined our organisational values. Having taken stock and spoken to multiple stakeholders, we have identified needs we are uniquely positioned to address. We have also found points of convergence and opportunities for collaboration and we are now well on our way to delivering an end to end value chain for innovators and entrepreneurs across the continent. Our 2021-2031 strategy, “Building A Thriving Innovation Economy - Setting Africa up for Success” is our roadmap to do this conclusively and these identified needs, points of convergence and opportunities for collaboration have formed the foundation for our strategy.
propose iterations to the way that we work. For example, lack of impact data is highlighted as an area to be addressed and is incorporated into all our strategic priorities through plans for constant monitoring and evaluation as well as plans to use this data to represent evidence and learning for the ecosystem. Having highlighted our experiences, the document moves on to describe the context in which we work, highlighting youth related data and the benefit to Africa if we harness it well. The document also explores different players and the work they do highlighting our disjointedness and making a case for the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
The strategy begins by taking stock of the last 10 years and surfacing lessons learnt. The rest of the document seeks to borrow from these lessons to
The strategy moves on to vision cast, listing our community aspirations which are aligned with
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