Building and strengthening ecosystems, building capacity, and ultimately providing better support and services to entrepreneurs are moving up the agenda of many funders. European development partners are at the very front of this focus. They are trying to fully understand our African ecosystems, capacity gaps, and opportunities for collaboration. Exciting opportunities.
The EU-supported initiative ENRICH in Africa – EiA is comprised of the consortium partners Steinbeis Europa ZentrumImpact HubEBN – European Business & Innovation Centre Network and @Sociedade Portuguesa De Inovação (SPI, Portugal) is one of the collaborative platforms – and GrowthAfrica is happy to be one of the African partners of Enrich in Africa. Our colleague Wangu Ngari attended the “ENRICH in Africa Congress 2022” hosted in Nairobi.
More than equipping and resourcing entrepreneurs to support the development and growth of their businesses is required. As ESOs, we are all working towards the same goal, and more impact can be created if we form a fleet instead of working in silos. “The storm we face is the same, but we are all currently using different roads. If ecosystem players each focused on their strengths, it would be easier to collaborate and accelerate business growth in these two continents.” Philip Kiracofe
Being a part of the Enrich in Africa network champions, as they call it, is the first and one of the steps towards strengthening the ecosystem through effective collaboration and synergy across accelerators and incubators in Africa and Europe. It’s exciting to see peers, governments, corporates, and entrepreneurs come together to discuss how best we can offer support to each other to better support entrepreneurs.
“There is no way you can be in the journey of innovation and work in silos; we need each other, Ninon Duval Farré.
Enrich In Africa supports knowledge transfer in the ecosystem, and we are eager to explore what this network will mean for the future of AU-EU collaboration. As GrowthAfrica, we are pro-sharing of ideas, experiences, and processes; and we urge peers to join the ship with the hope of seeing significant growth of the ecosystem collaboration across the two continents. Joining will also see us strengthening the relevance of the resourcing provided to our ecosystem instead of the prescribed capacity, which doesn’t match our realities and needs. We have and should take the opportunity to define and co-create what will enable us to support even stronger African entrepreneurs.
We look forward to building this collaboration with Enrich In Africa and the EU and European partners.
Akinwande AkinsulireKeva J. Richardson, Faith Blakemore, Danielle JoubertIgor Vidal, Catarina Milhazes, Eduardo Herrmann, Robert SandersRubén Carrandi CortinaDawit DagnewEduin MATTA CASTILLOBenoît LarielleLaura Atienza
