Exploring Alternative Solutions

Let’s be honest—Africa isn’t Silicon Valley, and no amount of slick pitch decks or buzzwords like "disruption" will change that. The latest Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) startup in Kenya is already on the brink of collapse just months after raising millions. This isn’t surprising. The model wasn’t built for us, and history keeps proving it. I remember my parents buying a Singer sewing machine from Amedo Cente, a company that mastered hire purchase in its time. Back then, businesses like Kenya Credit Traders and Africa Retail Traders (ART) thrived because they understood their customers—civil servants, salaried workers, people with predictable incomes. Even Fred Obachi Machoka’s iconic radio show, 'Sanyu Juu, Sanyu Tops,' was built around marketing hire purchase deals. It wasn’t just advertising; it was credible commerce. Compare that to today’s FM radio scams where celebrities peddle non-existent land, leaving families stranded. The old hire purchase model helped people build assets—furniture, appliances, even land. Today’s BNPL? It lures people into debt for groceries, airtime, and cheap electronics. Then there’s the solar "Malipo Ya Pole Pole" scheme, leaving rural families blacklisted by CRB, stuck with broken systems that become e-waste. Meanwhile, the CEOs hop from one conference to another, boasting about "impact" in glossy reports. Who really wins? Not the grandmother in Migori still waiting for her solar system to work after a year of payments. The truth is, Africa already has a BNPL model—one that works. It’s the shopkeeper who says, "Nikae na deni kidogo." No algorithms, no predatory interest, just trust. But VCs won’t fund it because it doesn’t fit their "scalable" Silicon Valley fantasy. Too many African startups today are just Special Purpose Vehicles—flashy pitches with no real roots in the problems they claim to solve. If you don’t have a white or "international" co-founder, good luck getting funding. Meanwhile, traders in Nyamakima and Gikomba move millions daily without a dime from VCs. Why isn’t that celebrated? At the end of the day, those who control capital control the narrative. And until that changes, we’ll keep watching startups rise on hype and crash when reality hits. We don’t need Silicon Valley’s playbook—we need solutions built to last.

In Ghana, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso, women in rural cooperatives produce some of the world’s finest shea butter- by hand, in conditions many global consumers will never see. Locally, it’s sold raw for $1 to $2 per kilogram. That same shea butter, once exported, repackaged, and labeled “organic” or “artisanal,” can sell in the U.S. or Europe for $30 to $50 or more. The difference? Branding. Packaging. Storytelling. Access to global markets. It’s not just shea butter. It’s coffee, cocoa, hibiscus, moringa, baobab oil- Africa exports raw, and imports wealth back in the form of marked-up goods. Meanwhile, the women who do the hardest work in the value chain often remain in poverty. This isn’t just an economic issue. It’s about power and narrative. The current system rewards ownership of the story, not just the substance. So what needs to change? 🔹 Investing in African-owned brands that can go beyond raw exports 🔹 Building infrastructure for local manufacturing and distribution 🔹 Creating access to retail markets, both on the continent and abroad 🔹 Shifting from “supplier” to brand owner, from “producer” to value creator Africa doesn’t need saving. It needs more control over its own value chains, and support for the people, especially women, who are the backbone of its raw material economy. Let’s stop asking why global brands profit from African goods and start asking what it takes to build our own. Image cred: @tanziehq #Africa #RawEconomy #ValueChain #Entrepreneurship #OwnTheNarrative

Can nature outcompete war? In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, conservation often centers on loss: forests cleared, wildlife reduced, conflict spreading across landscapes that once held some of the richest ecosystems on Earth. At Virunga National Park, these pressures meet. The park, Africa’s oldest, spans glaciers, volcanoes, forests, and wetlands. It also sits within a region shaped by decades of instability, where armed groups, informal economies, and weak governance are part of daily life. Emmanuel de Merode, who has led Virunga since 2008, approaches this setting from outside traditional conservation. Trained as an anthropologist, he treats ecological decline as a result of underlying economic and social conditions. Forest loss, poaching, and insecurity, in his account, follow from how people earn a living and how authority operates. Around Virunga, choices are immediate. Charcoal production and small-scale agriculture provide income. Conservation, by contrast, offers benefits that are less visible locally and often realized elsewhere. This imbalance shapes daily decisions about land, fuel, and work. A turning point came in 2007, when seven mountain gorillas were killed during a period of intensified violence. Investigations linked the killings to the charcoal trade supplying Goma. The episode underscored a broader point: pressure on the park was tied to energy demand and livelihoods. Virunga’s response has been to build an alternative system. Small hydroelectric plants supply power to surrounding communities, supporting businesses such as milling, welding, and food processing. Financial services are linked to electricity use, allowing firms to access credit based on consumption data. Security efforts have been adapted to respond more quickly to threats to villages, often alongside economic projects. These elements form what de Merode describes as a competing economy. The aim is to shift incentives by creating viable alternatives to extractive and conflict-linked activities. The Green Corridor (Couloir vert Kivu-Kinshasa), established in 2025, extends this model beyond the park, linking eastern production with western markets while maintaining forest cover. The effort faces challenges. Conflict persists, infrastructure is vulnerable, and political dynamics remain unresolved. Even so, the approach tests whether conservation can be tied to an economic system that depends on keeping forests healthy and productive. 🌱 The interview: https://lnkd.in/g4Fi-jB3 📸 Silverback mountain gorilla killed in Virunga in 2007. Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images.

We hit $100K ARR with zero coding experience. If you think you can’t grow your business without a technical co-founder, here's why you're wrong. When we started Chezie, neither my co-founder nor I knew how to code. And guess what? We still managed to build our product, onboard customers, and hit $100K in ARR before ever bringing on a technical hire. The traditional startup playbook will tell you that you need a technical co-founder from day one. Yes, it helps to have someone on board with a tech background eventually, but there are smarter, faster ways to get started. Here’s how we did it: - Leveraged no-code tools. We used platforms like Bubble to quickly build and test our product. And we kept things lean by focusing on the simplest version of our solution. Sometimes, that meant delivering a service first to figure out what the product needed to be. - Combined existing tools. We didn’t reinvent the wheel—we stitched together existing products and workflows. There’s no shame in being scrappy and repurposing tools to fit your needs in the early days. - Brought in technical talent only when we needed it. When it was time to scale, we opted for part-time technical help instead of rushing into a co-founder relationship. Hiring fractional tech advisors or engineers let us stay flexible without giving up too much equity or control too early. Not having a technical co-founder shouldn’t hold you back. Start where you are, use the tools available to you, and figure things out as you go. Bringing in technical talent later—on your terms—can be just as effective, if not better, than rushing into a partnership. So to all the non-technical founders out there: Don’t wait. Get started. The perfect co-founder may come later, but you’ve got everything you need right now to build something great. How have other non-technical folks got started with their companies? Share in the comments!

For decades, the investment model in Africa has been simple: extract resources, export profits, leave almost nothing behind. Mining companies strip the land. Big agriculture takes the yield. Foreign capital flows in, and the returns flow straight back out to London, New York, and Dubai. The continent has often been treated as a balance sheet to be optimised, not a place where people are trying to build lives. We opened our Cape Town office about two years ago. I'll be honest - when we first set it up, my thinking was mostly operational - better time zone coverage, that sort of thing. But having a team on the ground in Africa means that we also have a real responsibility to do something other than extract. GoCab is a good example of what that can look like. It's a London-based startup that sells vehicles to taxi drivers and couriers across Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, and Morocco. Drivers pay daily instalments over 3 years, with maintenance and insurance included. At the end, the car is theirs. Before GoCab, most of these drivers had no path to ownership. They leased from hire companies, built zero equity, and owned nothing no matter how many years they worked. Now they're earning around $500 a month - roughly 4x the local minimum wage. Once the car is paid off, net monthly income can exceed $1,000. GoCab has over 120 staff across 5 countries, $17m in annual recurring revenue, and just closed a $45m round. Forbes covered it this week - link in the comments. I'm also pleased to share that the USD Income Fund at Cur8 Capital also deploys into this opportunity. Capital from our investors flows into a financing facility, which flows into a vehicle, which flows into a driver's hands in Abidjan - who then feeds his family, hires his cousin, and starts building real wealth for the first time. That is what ethical investing in Africa could look like. Not extraction. Capital that builds something and leaves people better off than it found them, and also generates a decent return for investors. If you're interested in learning more about investing into the USD Income Fund, the link is in the comments alongside the Forbes piece. As always, please keep me and rest of the Cur8 team in your prayers 🤲

African financial institutions (think pension funds and the like) hold a whopping $4 trillion. But they invest that money in things like US treasuries instead of African infrastructure. Samaila Zubairu, CEO of Africa Finance Corporation, sees that misalignment as the real crisis. And the foreign aid collapse? He calls it an opportunity. "I'm actually happy it happened," he told me last week. That's a jarring thing to say when hospitals lost funding and health workers lost jobs. He knows it. But his point cuts deeper: in his view, the aid model kept Africa dependent while African capital sat idle, financing someone else's development. Samaila’s focus is forward: redirecting African capital to roads, power grids, and other infrastructure that transforms economies. His prescription for multilateral banks and others? Stop trying to do everything yourselves. "Partner with us instead." That principle came up repeatedly last week at The World Bank and International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings. At InterAction, Tessie San Martin shared with me the need for a new model of development – African institutions leading complex deals, shared systems that eliminate duplication, competition based on cost per outcome. Perhaps a real conversation is shifting in this sector from "can Africa lead?" to "are multilaterals ready to really partner instead of control?” #development #finance #africa

There is a notable shift happening in how we see informal economies: from seeing them as deficient and as lab-like environments to launch experiments to seeing them as thriving ecosystems of existing solutions that work. African societies are experiencing an accelerating urbanization boom. Where will the necessary skills and jobs come from for the youth and the new migrants? We argue that solutions already exist, plenty of them, and they are to be found within informal economies of Africa's vibrant cities. In this article, we leverage and apply the Asset-Based Approach to Business in pursuit of Socio-Economic Vibrancy. Interested? Here are four opportunities to reframe our mindsets and tools. 1️⃣ Redirect the portfolio approach: Reframing the portfolio approach to be asset informed, rather than problem centered, opens an opportunity to identify a range of collective solutions that already exist in an informal economy. 2️⃣ Recognize human development in informal economies: Strengthening the ability of urban informal economies to absorb the large projected influx of migrants to African cities may mean investigating informal apprenticeship systems and identifying ways to enhance their capacity to train and accommodate more workers. 3️⃣ Build and collaborate with community-based organizations that prioritize research: We see an opportunity for long-term research capacity to be developed through research-driven, community-based organizations....As many such organizations already exist across the African continent, development efforts must therefore support these organizations as they build inductive research capacity, which can be more cost-effective than broad, multisite interventions and can also, importantly, generate critical and unexpected insights. 4️⃣ Demarcate formalization, professionalization, and growth: An asset-based approach is not necessarily at odds with formalization, business professionalization, or growth. Rather, these transformations should happen without undermining existing social and economic support systems. 🍀 Open access article: https://lnkd.in/eEkQSqeE Joint work with Joel Bothello published in Stanford Social Innovation Review where we synthesize our recent publications in Journal of Business Venturing and Organization Science. #informal #informaleconomies #cities #Africa #business #econdev

You don’t need a tech cofounder. But you do need a tech plan. First-time Startup Founders often feel pressure to “find a technical cofounder” as if that’s the only way to validate the business. It’s not. What most founders actually need is someone to help them think: - What’s the right architecture for our product? - How do we avoid the pitfalls of no-code tools? - What’s the actual roadmap to ship version 2? That’s the kind of clarity a fractional CTO brings to the table. You get CTO-level thinking without committing to a cofounder, a full time salary, or a blind hire. I’ve seen too many founders rush into partnerships just to check a box. They give away 30% equity before they even know what they’re building, or how hard it will be to build. There’s a smarter way: Start with strategy. Validate the problem. Map the path forward. And when it’s time to bring on a full-timer, you’ll know exactly what you’re hiring for.

In times of housing crisis, 'build, build, build' is a very tempting motto, but the results of recent years show that this is not always the solution. Too few new homes are being developed, even fewer are being built sustainably, and even 'affordable' homes are out of reach for many people. The Platform Woonopgave's Action Agenda consists of ten points aimed at tackling the Dutch housing crisis in an affordable, sustainable, fair, and future-proof way. The collective asks simple but crucial questions that create opportunities for linking: Who needs the homes? Where should they be built? What about future demand? What adjustments can be made to the existing building stock? How much new construction is really needed? This led to the 10 points Action Agenda to address the housing crisis: 1. Find homes before building new 🔎 "1 to 2 million homes can be 'found' by redistributing existing (living) space through house division, transformation, renovation, plot division and topping." 2. Affordable housing for all, now and later 🏡 "What the government defines as 'affordable' is unaffordable with an average income: for an 'affordable' home of €390,000 (!) more than two salaries are needed." 3. Do not demolish but repair 🔁 "Renovating instead of demolishing is more 'sustainable' than 'sustainable' construction." 4. Make new buildings healthy and sustainable ❤️🩹 "There are many great examples of bio-based building, recycled materials and nitrogen-free construction methods. A sustainable home is a healthy home." 5. Build in neighbourhoods, not in nature ❌🌱 "The costs for suburban construction seem lower, but due to additional costs for infrastructure and climate damage, they are ultimately much higher." 6. Anticipate the future, right now 🔮 "We must now anticipate the suitability of the soil in 50 years, sea level rise or flooding that meet future housing needs." 7. Prioritize values over financial profit 📉 "The housing challenge is now mainly one-sidedly financially driven and is seen too much as a real estate challenge. An integrated social approach is lacking." 8. Prioritize residents & quality of life 🪩 "In the emphasis on numbers and speed, the need for a 'good' home has been completely forgotten." 9. Make room for research & experiment 🧪 "While the composition of the population and households is becoming increasingly diverse, homes have become standard products. We need creativity and experimentation." 10. Make public housing great again! 🥇 "Inequality within the current housing system is increasing. While (young) people are forced to pay too high rent in the private sector, others have money to make their owner-occupied home more sustainable." What if we reformulate the task: Instead of 'building 1 million homes', 'creating 1 million places to live'? What are your thoughts? #housingcrisis #regeneration #living #housing #architecture tijntjoelker.substack.com 💌

Why is one Danish startup selling out every month while alternative protein meat sales decline elsewhere? 🍄🍔 Copenhagen-based Matr Foods has raised €40M in total funding (the largest amount secured by a Danish #foodtech startup) to build a commercial factory capable of producing 4,000 tonnes of #mycelium #protein annually by 2027. Founded by CEO Randi Wahlsten, former executive at Danish dairy giant Arla Foods, alongside Noma co-founder Claus Meyer, Matr Foods uses #solidstate #fermentation to inoculate beetroots, potatoes, lupins, peas, and oats with #fungi #spores. The mycelium binds ingredients together whilst releasing #aminoacids and starches that deliver flavour depth and enhance browning during cooking. The results speak for themselves: products containing 8.5g of #protein and 10g of dietary fibre per 100g, with a #carbonfootprint 94% lower than beef. The company has sold out its entire production capacity every month throughout 2024 and 2025. This matters because Matr Foods is defying industry trends. While #plantbased meat sales have declined across the US and UK, Matr's clean-label approach of using only recognisable ingredients with minimal processing resonates with changing consumer priorities. The €20M Series A round, co-led by Novo Holdings and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, signals renewed investor confidence in #alternativeproteins after two years of declining investment. Thomas Grotkjær from Novo Holdings notes their investment criteria focus on three elements: #biotechnology, #gastronomy, and #scalability. The new Ansager facility will create approximately 60 jobs and enable international expansion into Germany and Switzerland. Matr Foods products are currently available at Gasoline Grill, Rørt, and all Sticks'n'Sushi locations across Denmark, Germany, and the UK. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/guM3-thb Know someone in #mycology, #sustainablefood, or #foodinnovation looking to #collaborate or #invest in mycelium-based proteins? Pass this along or tag them in the comments.