Project Background Overview

This publication is the output of four years of applied research conducted by Systemic Innovation across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, in partnership with the institutions, founders, investors, and government actors who made the work possible.

The research programme was designed to close a gap the 2022 original analysis identified: the absence of systematic, firm-level evidence on how African ventures actually scale. Four years later, 34 publications, 90 expert interviews, six venture case studies, and three country-level ecosystem analyses form the evidence base this publication draws on. The full catalogue is freely available at yumpu.com/user/systemicinnovation.

The sections that follow set out how the research programme was structured, who funded it, who contributed to it, and how to engage with the team whose work it represents.