Another map of Africa 🌍
What would the map of Africa look like if land area was proportional to start-up funding?
For this week’s post, we thought we’d try something different and bring you a more visual representation of the geographical spread of start-up funding in Africa, with a map where countries have been distorted to reflect the relative amount of equity+debt funding raised in each market since 2019:
What do we see here?
The domination of the Big Four, and of Nigeria in particular which has claimed more than a third of all funding since 2019 ($4.2b) and a staggering 300 $1m+ deals. Kenya, South Africa and Egypt are neck and neck, with around 200 $1m+ deals each, quite behind the Nigerian giant.
Seven markets have claimed more than $100m during the period: Senegal, Ghana, Algeria, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, and DRC in this order. As often though, there is more than meets the eye. Indeed, while Ghana has been home to 42 $1m+ deals since 2019, some other markets’ performance relies heavily one a handful of deals, sometimes even a single venture. This is the case with Yassir in Algeria which raised $180m, i.e. 97% of all the funding raised in the country, and to a lesser extent Wave in Senegal (78%).
Another group of six countries does not quite reach the $100m mark, but claimed at least $500k of monthly funding on average over the period: Benin, Morocco, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Zambia. On this list, Morocco deserves a mention as it is not only one of the markets where a single deal/venture isn’t responsible for most of the fundraising, but also because the number of $1m+ deals since 2019 (22 in total) is higher than for most countries in the $100m+ club above.
11 markets make up the rest of the list with less than $25m raised since 2019, sometimes much less. Except for Zimbabwe (9), each of these markets only has one to three start-ups for whom we have tracked activities since 2019, though our thresholds might mean we have missed some $100k+ deals in 2019 and 2020.
A total of 20 countries are completely absent from this map, as we have recorded no funding activity since our tracking started in 2019.
The thousands of deals and billions of dollars behind this map can be found in our deals database, updated monthly, for less than $12 a month. If you think that’s still not cheap enough (really?), use this discount link, and you’ll pay just above $10 a month. I have a little favour to ask though: if any of you knows a good free tool to generate anamorphic maps/cartogrammes for the continent, I’m a taker! Have a good day :)