Africa Must Bet on Itself: Aboyeji on Building From the Continent

Future Africa Was Built to Turn Africa's Problems Into Global Businesses

Future Africa is an innovation fund that partners with founders who are, in Aboyeji's phrase, "ambitious for society". Its purpose is to turn the continent's biggest challenges into global business opportunities, backing founders with capital, coaching and community so they can build from Africa. Over 10 years of investing, the firm has co-built companies worth at least a billion dollars twice, with others he says are moving quickly towards the same mark.

The scale of the ambition is deliberate. Aboyeji points to a continent of roughly 1.3 billion people with a median age of 19, more than half the population under 19. Where others see a hopeless situation, he sees "the future workforce of the world". His core belief is that Africa is not a special case that must settle for lesser outcomes. When people told him early on that Africa could only build "zebras, donkeys, horses" rather than unicorns, his answer was blunt: "If the rest of the world can build unicorns, Africa most definitely can build unicorns." It took building them more than once, he says, for that to become normal.

Global Capital Is Not Coming Back the Way It Did

Aboyeji is unequivocal that the funding boom of 2018 to 2022 was "a moment in time" that will not repeat. Development finance institutions are cutting commitments to Africa in both aid and investment, and global investors are cautious because they can pour billions into OpenAI and data centres elsewhere and ask why they should come to Africa at all. He calls this the biggest miss in the market.

The reason is demand. "There's real organic demand in Africa that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world," he argues, because populations elsewhere are ageing while Africa's young people are adopting technology at a ferocious rate. For every dollar that has gone into African technology, he says, the continent has produced more unicorns than almost every other region in the world, despite the state of its infrastructure, education and government capacity. That, to him, makes Africa "the most asymmetric bet in the world". His prescription for founders is to stop expecting the old model to return and build for the market that actually exists.

Infrastructure and Talent Are the Real Constraints

The binding constraints on African startups, in Aboyeji's telling, are not ideas but infrastructure and talent. Nigeria has barely 45,000 kilometres of fibre, he notes, against almost 500,000 kilometres in a comparably sized Brazil. Rigging Nigeria with fibre might cost around 3 billion dollars, a fraction of the 35 billion dollars he cites for the fibre investment that preceded India's tech takeoff, yet the money does not come. Many startups, he adds, do not even have office space and work out of homes.

Talent is the deeper problem. Scaling founders, he says, simply cannot find the people they need, because "we don't have the talent base to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem". He points approvingly to Nigeria's 3MTT programme, which he says has trained over 150,000 young people against a target of 3 million, calling it the largest talent accelerator programme in the world. Governments, he argues, cannot build airports, power and roads fast enough, but they can train young people into the digital economy as a first step. He also has a warning for the big technology companies, including AWS: those that keep "running away from doing infrastructure" and over-train without building capacity will lose the market, because "the vast majority of the world's global workforce" is on the continent, and "anybody who doesn't teach those people how to use their tools will simply not survive".

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African Capital Bends to Relationships, Not Performance

Aboyeji is scathing about how capital is allocated on the continent. "This is the biggest problem with African capital," he says. "It doesn't bend to performance, it bends to relationships." There is no equivalent of a Midas list; allocations are handed out on relationships rather than track record. He offers himself as evidence, saying that as a venture capitalist with three unicorns in his portfolio he has raised less than 40 million dollars from a fund perspective over his career.

He is equally impatient with the language of "patient capital", which he describes as "just failure that we have refused to acknowledge". His own rule is stark: if a startup does not return the money in five years, it never will. But the sharpest gap, he argues, sits right at the bottom, in the journey from zero to a first 100,000 dollars in revenue, where there is no commercially driven funding, no credit card and no small-business loan. He wants a programmatic product giving would-be founders access to around 15,000 dollars of credit, arguing that anyone who cannot make something happen with 15,000, 50,000 or 100,000 dollars probably never will. On fintech, the sector everyone crowds into, he does not hold back: it "disgusts" him that "everybody just wants to invest in on-ramp, off-ramp payments" while real problems in education, connectivity and healthcare go unsolved.

The Mindset Has to Change Before Anything Else

For Aboyeji, the first fix is not policy or capital but ambition. "Africans have naturally been trained to think small," he says, and the result is that "everything in Africa is subscale". In a continent with hundreds of millions of young people who are the world's major potential consumers of technology, he argues, the failure to think big is the root cause of chronic under-building. "If we don't bet on ourselves, no one's gonna bet on us for us."

He rejects the excuse that this simply takes time, pointing to Singapore, South Korea and China as proof that the decades Silicon Valley took are not a fixed cost. What frustrates him most is the gap between talk and action: "I see a lot of talking, I don't see enough doing." The people who do the work, he says, are too often ignored. His posture on the wider world is to stop waiting for it. "Regardless of what the rest of the world does, east or west, we face forward," he says. "Nobody will develop Africa but Africans. Nobody wants to develop Africa but Africans."

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What Does Aboyeji Actually Look For in a Founder?

Aboyeji has abandoned long metrics checklists in favour of one test. Almost everything about a startup can be fixed if the opportunity is big enough, he says, but one thing cannot: whether you have "an ambitious founder with a unique customer insight about how to solve a really big problem". Everything else, from storytelling and team to operations, sales and fundraising, Future Africa can provide. That combination, he says, is "ridiculously rare". The founders who have it come in all ages but tend to have spent significant time with the problem, working in the industry or living it, rather than being "pitch deck pushers" or "polished MBAs".

Should African Startups Bootstrap or Raise?

The bootstrap-or-raise decision, for Aboyeji, comes down to whether the capital brings more than money. Some problems require political will, regulatory orchestration, technical support, industry knowledge, reputation or a balance sheet to solve, and for those a founder should raise. "If you have everything you need to build your business, you might as well bootstrap it." His guiding principle is that "it's better for you to have no capital than to have the wrong kind of capital", and the founders who get into trouble are the ones who go out "just looking for money".

Will AI Help Africa or Displace It?

Aboyeji sees a case for both outcomes, depending on what the continent chooses to do. He frames AI as a fundamental, transformational technology on the level of the internet, personal computing and the mobile phone, and argues history shows it is harder to retrain existing talent than to create new talent, so "AI is going to rewrite the talent stack of the internet". That, he says, is Africa's opening. On whether the continent should own or merely rent compute and energy, he is relaxed: "We use AWS, and we don't own the service." His recommendation is to focus on building talent that is AI-native and leave the rest until the continent can afford it, while fixing the fact that most AI today does not encompass local knowledge or local languages.