Authors’ note

There are no shortcuts to scale.

That was the opening line of this work when it was first published in June 2022. It was a provocation - a challenge to an ecosystem that was moving fast and not always thinking hard. It remains true. But four years of building the empirical foundations that the original called for has given it a different weight. In 2026, it reads more like a verdict.

The African scaling ecosystem has been through its reckoning. The funding boom that was cresting when we published the original analysis peaked in 2022 and contracted sharply in 2023 and 2024. Ventures that had grown on the back of abundant donor capital and growth-at-any-cost logic faced the consequences. Some failed. Some retreated. A smaller number discovered that they had built something real. Unit economics that held. Management teams that could navigate difficulty. Products that customers actually needed, at prices they could actually pay.

The correction was painful. It was also clarifying. It revealed, more precisely than any research programme could, which ventures had scaled and which had merely grown. The difference, as this publication documents, is structural.

A second correction is now underway - one that the venture capital reckoning did not reach. The donor funding architecture that sustained the ecosystem support infrastructure for two decades is contracting faster than endogenous institutional capacity can replace it. The scale of the contraction, and what it does to ecosystems built on programme architecture rather than endogenous capability, is the most urgent question in African ecosystem development right now - and the one this publication is most directly positioned to address.

What has changed in four years

The empirical base that did not exist in 2022 now exists. Through the East African Data Collaborative - established with primary funding from the FCDO's RISA Fund - Systemic Innovation built open data platforms in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda and produced 22 research deliverables: 12 insight reports across scale diagnostics, state of ecosystem analysis, gender equity research, donor funding, and ecosystem voices; six venture case studies; and four thematic scaling articles co-produced with ScaleupNation drawing on joint analysis of 50 ventures. A further eight independent formal publications, alongside the Ecosystem Provocations series, extend that evidence base across ecosystem analysis, political economy, offshore incorporation, multilateral dynamics, and AI. The library that our 2022 interviewee said did not exist now has at least one substantial shelf.

We know more than we did - about the capital structure of East African scaling ecosystems, about why female founders are systematically underfunded despite sometimes stronger revenue efficiency at early stages. And we can now see that the shift from Nairobi to Delaware is not a founder decision, but a system outcome. We also know what we still do not know. West Africa, home to Nigeria, Africa's largest startup ecosystem, is largely uncharted at the level of analytical depth we have achieved in East Africa. The correction-period natural experiment - what distinguished the resilient ventures from the collapsed ones - has not been systematically analysed. These are the gaps this publication names honestly, not as admissions of failure but as a research agenda.

The information environment has also changed. AI tools now make more information accessible to more analysts, and the analysis that any researcher can produce from a given evidence base has improved materially. The floor has risen. But raising the floor is not the same as producing a comprehensive systems lens on the structural factors shaping African scaling. That lens requires four years of fieldwork, multiple methodological registers operating in combination, and the kind of cross-domain pattern recognition that emerges from sustained engagement with the same ecosystems over time. AI accelerates the analysis of evidence; it does not substitute for the evidence itself, nor for the structural argument that links capital, policy, talent, market, and political-economy dynamics into a coherent account of why African ecosystems produce the outcomes they produce. That is the work this publication contributes that AI-augmented analysis alone cannot.

What has not changed

The structural conditions that make African scaling hard are substantially unchanged. The programme-rich, capability-thin dynamic. The capital architecture mismatch. The capability trap. The 2022 publication identified them. This publication explains, in more precise terms than was previously possible, why they persist - and who benefits from their continuation.

The twenty recommendations of the 2022 publication have mostly not been implemented. Some were structurally blocked. Some were insufficiently specific to generate action. Some were simply ignored. Any honest author's note in a 2026 update has to reckon with that directly: generating evidence is necessary but not sufficient. The mechanism by which evidence reaches and changes the behaviour of practitioners, investors, and policymakers is itself a design challenge - one this publication acknowledges and has not yet fully solved.

What this publication does differently

Four things make this publication unlike most African scaling analysis.

Its evidence base is built rather than assembled - three ecosystems studied in depth over four years, with the open data platforms to show for it. Its findings are published at no cost, because an evidence base that sits behind paywalls may exist, but remains functionally unusable to the ecosystems it is meant to serve. Its critiques name funders and programmes directly, including the ones that commissioned the research, because honesty is more useful than access. And it closes with an institutional proposal rather than a recommendations list, because the field has accumulated enough recommendations already.

None of this means the work is finished. The gap between evidence generation and practice change is real, and it applies to our own work as much as to anyone else's. This publication is the most complete account of what we have learned. It is also a starting point for what comes next.

There are no shortcuts to scale.

There are equally no shortcuts to the kind of ecosystem change that scaling requires. What exists is a standing invitation - to collaborate, to challenge, and to act on the evidence that now, finally, exists in sufficient depth to support confident prescriptions.

Scott Walker 

CEO. Systemic Innovation Ltd 

May 2026

Originally co-authored with Belinda Bowling, June 2022. The intellectual foundations of this work are hers as much as mine.