Yesterday’s investor round table event organized by DEMO Africa is possibly the best tech event this year – as far as Africa is concerned. Not necessarily because it was filled with investors or players in the funding space, but more of the varying individuals and discussions that went down at the event.
I really applaud DEMO Africa with the support of Microsoft, Nokia, CIO East Africa, USAID, and good number of partners including: VC4Africa, iHub, mlab, Silicon Cape, doubledutch, etc., for pulling a crowd of people who will really need to step up to build the tech ecosystem envisioned (excluding the regulatory or policy folks who didn’t show up).
On the panel was Folabi Esan, Eghosa Omoigui and Tokunbo Ishmael, partners at Adlevo Capital, EchoVC, and Alithea Capital respectively. Barbara James, CEO of Henshaw Capital Partners was also on the panel, not forgetting Ayodeji Adewunmi and Chika Nwobi, Partners at Jobberman, Hana Kefela, a project manager with Demo-Africa and Host Representative, Dele Akinsade of Microsoft.
Unfortunately, this is not a press release (that will be coming soon), so the previous paragraph will be the last of a look-alike. I took down notes of top moments from the event which I will be sharing in this post and subsequent ones. So let’s get started.
Collaborative Effort in Building The Tech Ecosystem
The most used word for the day – collaboration or ecosystem? Most speakers whether from the panel or the open room used either of these words. The bottom line; there is need for collaboration to build the ecosystem.
I was happy when a Mr. Tunji, who sat down for a while without saying anything, called the for a understanding of the term ‘ecosystem‘, using other terms such as ‘adaptive‘, ‘organic‘, and of course ‘collaborative‘. It was quite easy to notice that collaboration is almost non-existent in the tech space (both from investors/funding end and entrepreneur end), and it may be attributed to the lack of inter-generational and intra-generational conversations.
In addition the language of the entrepreneur is way different from that of investors, and even in the investor ecosystem with players like the Private Equity firms, Venture Capitalist, Pension Funds (yeah, I didn’t see that coming), Government, and others, there seem to be a problem with organization and identity. On the side of the technopreneurs- access to market, access to talent, and knowledge gap seem to be the top 3 problems.
A good amount of time was spent on finding the lapses and gaps, and that seem to be a good start, especially with DEMO Africa taking up the challenge of championing initiatives and activities that will help provide solutions and bridge the gaps. However, there was a clear call for collaboration and one can but hope everybody (or even half the people) in the room will respond.
Ah! The topic of Incubators did come up and I’d be talking about that in my next post on the DEMO Africa series. Also watch this space for more on DEMO Africa, as Africa’s best tech is ready to launch (or so the slogan goes). Until then, it’s all eyes on Kenya for the DEMO Africa event coming up October 24th-26th, 2012. See demo-africa.com for more.
[image via Flickr/ RocPx]
