Approach & Methodology
Applied research aims
The central commitment of this work is that research on African scaling should be translatable - not in the sense of simplified, but in the sense of actionable. The goal is to answer questions that founders, investors, policymakers, and ecosystem designers can use: which interventions work, under which conditions, for which types of ventures, at which stage. That standard is harder to meet than producing descriptive analysis, and the evidence base built through the EADC does not fully meet it yet. Naming that gap honestly is part of meeting it eventually.
The original study
In 2022, the research field on African commercial scaling was thin. There were studies of social enterprises, of startup ecosystems, of macroeconomic conditions - but almost nothing on the specific question of how ventures transition from startup to scale-up in African markets, and what actually determines whether that transition succeeds or fails. The original study drew on over 500 documents spanning academic journals, industry reports, grey literature, and monitoring and evaluation frameworks, combined with 30 formal semi-structured interviews with founders, investors, ecosystem catalysts, and academics, with research support from PhD candidates at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Nairobi. A further 100-plus ecosystem stakeholders contributed perspectives that informed but did not drive the analysis. The integrative review combined scientific literature with practitioner evidence - the only methodology capable of capturing both what the research says works and what actually happens on the ground.
The scope covered sub-Saharan Africa, distinguished from North Africa on the standard geographic, economic, and cultural grounds used across academic research and by institutions including the World Bank. The approach was sector-agnostic - restricting to technology ventures would have produced a systematically distorted picture of what scaling actually looks like across African markets. The specific focus was the startup-to-scale-up transition: post-revenue ventures, growing, navigating the constraints that determine whether growth becomes scale.
Three participatory workshops ran in March 2022 to pressure-test the emerging analytical framework with practitioners. A founders session brought together leadership teams from post-revenue, 30-to-300-employee businesses to examine what made the startup-to-scale-up transition harder than it should have been. An investor session, run under Chatham House rules, assembled local and international VCs and funds to examine ecosystem collaboration, information asymmetries, and the structural constraints on growth-stage capital. An academics session, hosted by the Scaling Business in Africa division of the University of Edinburgh Business School in conjunction with ChangeSchool, examined why knowledge that exists in African institutions does not flow between them.
The East African Data Collaborative
The original study identified a data scarcity problem, not a framework problem. The ecosystem did not lack analysis - it lacked the primary evidence base that analysis should have been drawing on. The response was to build it.
The evidence base covers six distinct areas. State of Startup Innovation reports for Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda document venture valuations, investment flows, employment data, and ecosystem dynamics at a level of granularity that did not previously exist. The Scale Diagnostics study examined high-growth firm performance across all three markets comparatively, identifying management quality, capital structure, operational systems, and market positioning as determinants of whether ventures sustain scaling or stall. The Ecosystem Voices interview programme confirmed what the 2022 original had hypothesised: even experienced ecosystem support organisations were, by their own admission, uncertain what high-growth firms actually needed from them - the gap between programme design and founder need is structural.
The GESI: High-Growth Company Founding study produced the first systematic gender equity analysis across all three markets. Six detailed venture case studies - MARAMOJA Transport, HaHuJobs, MEDANIT, Efashe, Buy2Go, and Jumba - provided ground-level evidence on what scaling actually looks like operationally, each anchored to a distinct scaling dynamic. When Multilaterals Compete and Offshoring African Startups examined the two most consequential structural dynamics distorting the ecosystem - the crowding-out effect of multilateral role collapse, and the structural pressures driving offshore incorporation. These are not founder choices or programme failures. They are predictable outputs of the incentive architecture.
What the EADC taught us about methodology
The most important methodological lesson from four years of applied research is that evidence generation is necessary but not sufficient. Thirty-four publications have been produced. The degree to which that research has changed what founders do, what investors fund, and what ecosystem programmes are designed to achieve remains modest. The dissemination problem - getting the right evidence to the right actors in usable formats at the right moment - is itself a design challenge that has received almost no systematic attention, including within this programme. That is named as a failure, not a caveat.
The second lesson is geographic. The EADC built rigorous evidence for East Africa. West Africa - home to Nigeria, Africa's largest startup ecosystem by funding volume - has no equivalent. Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d'Ivoire are similarly undercharted. The ecosystem prescriptions that emerge from an East African evidence base may not transfer cleanly to West African or francophone conditions, and the degree of variance has not been established. This is named as a gap, not a methodological limitation to be managed around.
How this publication uses the evidence
This publication draws on three layers of evidence. Empirical findings from the EADC programme - country-level data, firm-level dynamics, founder experience - form the primary foundation. Where numbers are cited, they come from named sources. Where a finding is contested or uncertain, that is noted. Academic and institutional research provides the analytical scaffolding. The firm productivity and management literature draws on the IGC, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, the Hsieh-Klenow misallocation framework, Bloom and Van Reenen's management-practice research, Atkin et al's 2026 IGC Evidence Paper on firms, trade and productivity, and Cirera, Fattal-Jaef and Maemir's misallocation work in sub-Saharan Africa. The entrepreneurial ecosystem literature draws on Stam's index and framework, Endeavor Insight's network mapping, and the Kauffman Foundation's measurement work. Venture capital and scaling dynamics draw on AVCA, Partech , Disrupt Africa, Africa: The Big Deal, Mo Ibrahim Foundation's 2025 venture capital analysis, and the Wheeler Institute's DigitalxScale research. Capital architecture and blended finance analysis draw on the OECD's Unleashing SME Potential to Scale Up, the OECD DAC Blended Finance Guidance 2025, the OECD Africa Capital Markets Report 2025, and C3's 2026 catalytic capital study. The BDS effectiveness literature draws on GALI and Argidius Foundation's SCALE framework. Macroeconomic context is anchored by World Bank Africa's Pulse, the IMF's work on informality, the IEA's Africa Energy Outlook 2025, the GSMA Mobile Economy Africa 2025, and Studwell's How Africa Works. Practitioner testimony - 90 expert interviews conducted across the full research programme, plus direct engagement with governments in Ethiopia and Rwanda and with ecosystem actors, investors, and founders across Kenya - forms the third layer. The most useful insights have come from working alongside people managing the conditions being studied, not observing them from outside.
Where these three sources diverge - where practitioner experience contradicts the academic literature, or where country-level data challenges what regional data suggests - the divergence is preserved rather than resolved. Those are precisely where the interesting analytical work sits.
What this publication does not claim
The causal work - which specific interventions actually cause scaling, rather than merely correlating with ventures that were going to scale anyway - remains almost entirely undone. The EADC built the most rigorous descriptive baseline available for East Africa. In doing so, it made clear how far the field still is from causal inference. Rigorous longitudinal analysis, designed to isolate the effect of specific support mechanisms on scaling outcomes, does not exist for African markets at a scale that matters.
Without it, ecosystem designers are still working from strong hypotheses rather than demonstrated causal chains. This matters for how the recommendations in this publication should be read. They are grounded in the best available evidence. They are derived from the most rigorous descriptive analysis of African scaling dynamics produced to date. They are not derived from controlled experiments. The distinction is worth holding onto - not as a disclaimer, but as an honest account of where the field is, and where the next generation of research needs to go.