A fairer way to share the funding pie. Kind of.
North, West, Southern, and East Africa are attracting similar amounts of equity funding in 2023 so far
As of the end of August 2023, start-ups in Africa had raised $1.3bn in equity ($2.2bn if we add debt), 57% less than in the same period last year. As the size of the proverbial pie shrinks, one may wonder whether some regions are cutting themselves a bigger slice of it?
First of all, this is a fair question to ask, because it has definitely been the case in the past. If we look back at 2021, of the equity funding deployed to start-ups where we could pin down the HQ to a specific market/region (basically removing the Chipper Cash deals), 50% had gone to Western Africa. Actually, 42% of all the equity funding on the continent had gone to Nigeria alone.
Fast forward to 2023 (the first two thirds of the year, at least), the numbers are telling a very different story, one of balance between the four regions that have historically attracted 99% of the funding on the continent: North, West and Southern Africa have attracted very similar amounts of equity funding, roughly a quarter each. Only East Africa has a sightly smaller share of equity funding (18%), though this is somehow compensated by the fact that Kenya has been the country where most debt has been announced this year so far (nearly $400m, 50% of the total). While funding raised in Central Africa remains orders of magnitude smaller than in other regions, with 3.5% of the equity raised in Africa in 2023 so far, its share is much higher than it’s ever been since 2019 (below 1%, expect in 2022: 1.3%).
While we have focused on regional funding for this analysis, it is very clear from the graph that the four largest markets (Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya) continue to attract the lion’s share of the funding. In fact, in 2023 so far start-ups in the Big Four have claimed 89% of the equity funding in Africa, an even higher percentage than in the past four years. The share of each Big Four market in the total funding raised in their respective region is also higher for each region compared to 2021 and 2022.
🌊 Are you ready to make waves in the Blue Economy space? TECA recently launched African Blue Wave, with the aim to support up to 50 fellows from Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Comoros, and Madagascar who wish to pursue entrepreneurship in the Blue Economy space. If you think you’re the right fit, or if you know someone who could be…
Is it me or is September being particularly busy? Let’s hope this also translate in terms of fundraising for start-ups in Africa, because so far September hasn’t really been the busiest month on that front… Thanks a lot for your feedback on the new model we laid out in our last post, which overall has been very positive! We might have been overambitious on the Linkedin Live front for the quarterly update, but at the minimum you’ll get a deck, if not a live presentation. Still hopeful someone might be able to help. Oh, I almost forgot: as usual, you brave readers get access to our database of deals with a discount. Make sure to us this link!