Several of these case studies were produced by Systemic Innovation and GrowthAfrica under the FCDO-funded RISA Fund research programme, using a standardised diagnostic framework developed in partnership with ScaleUpNation. Each is anchored to a distinct scaling dynamic: market localisation, market creation through data infrastructure, informal economy activation, infrastructure-as-competitive-moat, the gender-scaling intersection, and physical goods distribution.

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Founded in 2015, MARAMOJA Transport is a Nairobi-based ride-hailing and transport logistics venture built on a foundational insight that much of sub-Saharan Africa's transport culture is relational - people access transport through people they trust. Where Uber replicates taxi dispatch, MARAMOJA digitises the trusted-network model, enabling customers to connect with curated drivers through their own social networks. The platform allows customers to select preferred drivers who are offered to them automatically when nearby, creating a social layer above the typical ride-hailing infrastructure. Over 30,000 drivers are registered on the platform, and the corporate segment has grown to over 100 corporate clients with more than 100,000 users in Kenya.

The multi-vertical Mobility Marketplace the venture has publicly described - extending to logistics, rentals, and B2B services - is the stated next strategic move. Two years on from the original case study, the transition from network aggregator to multi-vertical platform remains work in progress; the pace of that transition is itself the scaling question the venture faces.

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HaHuJobs is the foremost data-driven job-matching and labour market information platform in Ethiopia. Founded in 2019, the venture has facilitated 110,431 labour demands for industrial parks, aggregated 152,750 job vacancies, and matched over 9,000 high-skilled job seekers.

The venture emerged as a strategic pivot from Minab IT Solutions PLC. CEO Kaleab Mezgebu identified that the employment agency sector in Ethiopia was generating revenue primarily from advertising vacancies - not from actual placement - and that vacancy data itself was unstandardised and effectively invisible to labour market analysts. HaHuJobs' core innovation was not the job board itself but the data infrastructure behind it: taking vacancy advertisements, standardising them against international classification frameworks, and making structured labour market data available for the first time at scale.

HaHuJobs' evolution through 2025 deepens the case for market creation as the venture's analytical signature. The HaHuMuya Public Lecture Series launched at ALX Lideta Capstone in May 2025, and the STEEP Project - a STEM education initiative working with partner schools including Menelik II and Kokebe Tsibah Secondary - signals the platform's expansion from labour-market intermediary to labour-market ecosystem actor. The data infrastructure built through industrial-park vacancy aggregation is the platform on which these broader labour-market interventions now operate. The Ethiopian labour market sees itself more clearly than it did before HaHuJobs; that clearer view is itself a public good the platform has created.

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Founded in 2021, Buy2Go is an Ethiopian e-commerce platform focused on revolutionising the distribution of fast-moving consumer goods across Ethiopia. The venture operates as a B2B marketplace connecting small kiosk retailers with manufacturers and distributors, sourcing directly from producers - including Coca-Cola - and applying narrow margins of three to five percent to provide price advantages unavailable through traditional wholesale channels. Serving approximately 31,000 retailers at the time of the original case study, Buy2Go offered an extensive range of products from essential staples to household items and beverages, targeting the small kiosk network that remains critical to retail distribution across Ethiopian urban and rural areas.

The Buy2Go case illustrates informal economy activation. Ethiopia's small kiosk retail sector is essentially informal, fragmented, and operating outside the data visibility of conventional market analysis - and yet it represents an enormous aggregate demand that Buy2Go, by providing digital ordering and reliable delivery, has been able to activate at scale. The strategic moves announced through 2023 - the June 2023 merger with Zmall Delivery combining Zmall's motorcycle fleet with Buy2Go's truck logistics, and the NinjaCart partnership signed at GITEX Africa 2023 to extend into agricultural supply chains - positioned the combined entity for scale across FMCG and agri-distribution. Public reporting on execution since 2024 is thin. Post-merger revenue growth, the scale of the NinjaCart integration, and any subsequent equity round are not publicly disclosed - a pattern typical of Ethiopian venture reporting, where equity-round disclosure remains limited and operational metrics are not systematically tracked by public trackers. The analytical lesson is not specific to Buy2Go. It is that Ethiopia's scaling ecosystem is still building the disclosure infrastructure that would let any outside observer distinguish announcement from execution.

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Future Dynamic Innovations was founded as a technology services and custom solutions development company in 2013, before its gradual evolution into Efashe - Rwanda's leading fintech aggregation platform. The Efashe platform provides digital aggregation, merchant payment solutions, shared agency banking, and value-added services including bulk SMS and USSD aggregation, accessible through a nationwide agent network. With 3,000 agents across Rwanda, Efashe processes more than 10 million SMS messages monthly and drives more than 30 billion transactions annually, making it a core component of Rwanda's digital financial infrastructure.

The Efashe case is the clearest illustration of infrastructure-as-competitive-moat. A decade from founding as a technology services company to emergence as a regulated payment service provider with meaningful market coverage - a trajectory that investors calibrated to short-cycle SaaS returns cannot easily support. Efashe does not serve end customers directly but provides the rails on which banks, telecom operators, utility companies, SACCOs, and government services interconnect. The integrations it has built with every major Rwandan financial and utility institution represent years of regulatory and technical relationship investment that no fast-moving competitor can replicate. Efashe has launched operations in Malawi and Zambia, with plans to enter Zimbabwe and ultimately expand to many more African countries.

Two 2025 developments strengthen the Efashe case. First, the company's migration to Akamai cloud infrastructure - documented in Akamai's October 2025 customer story - reflects the kind of operational investment in scaling discipline (provisioning time in minutes, uptime approaching 100 percent) that ventures at Efashe's stage typically defer. Second, Rwanda's National Fintech Strategy, announced in May 2025 with a $200 million investment target and a stated goal of 80 percent fintech adoption by 2029, provides direct regulatory tailwind for licensed Payment Service Providers operating at Efashe's scale. The national strategy aligns the regulatory environment with what Efashe has been building for a decade - a rare case of an African venture's scaling trajectory arriving at a moment where government strategy materially amplifies it rather than competing with it.

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MEDANIT was founded in 2021 by Bamlak Alemayehu, a medical professional whose background spans clinical nursing, social work, and medical tourism. The platform combines telemedicine consultations, medical appointment booking, medication delivery, and laboratory referrals in a single mobile application, designed to address the access gaps that characterise a health system where specialist capacity is concentrated in Addis Ababa while healthcare need is distributed across a population of 125 million. By 2024, MEDANIT reported approximately 38,000 patients, 18,200 telemedicine consultations, 2,000 prescriptions delivered, and 10 million birr in revenue. The platform's core service operates via hotline (6636) at 6 birr per minute alongside video consultations, with medicines delivered within an hour of online prescription upload. Alemayehu was recognised as Promising Entrepreneur of the Year at Global Entrepreneurship Week 2025.

The MEDANIT case illustrates the gender-scaling intersection in Ethiopian digital health - a sector where female founders are significantly underrepresented, and where Alemayehu's clinical expertise and government relationships rather than traditional investor networks drove the platform's early credibility. MEDANIT's partnership with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health around referral-system digitisation was the most visible manifestation. The founding capital stack - approximately $85,000 in grants from health-focused development partners alongside equity - reflects what is available to women-led healthtech in Ethiopia: patient capital and development finance, with traditional venture capital largely absent from the table.

The analytical point is not about MEDANIT specifically. It is the capital architecture available to women-led healthtech ventures operating in sectors where government is both a partner and a potential direct actor. A venture building credibility through clinical relationships and state partnerships, capitalised on grants and patient equity, has no commercial cushion against competitive entry or shifts in how the state chooses to participate in the same digital infrastructure. The Capital Architecture Mismatch documented in Chapter 10 operates with particular force on ventures in this quadrant - women-led, physical-digital health systems, dependent on government partnership, under-capitalised by conventional commercial standards. Ethiopia's digital health ecosystem is increasingly populated with private platforms, state-led systems, and partnerships between them; the architecture has not yet produced capital stacks calibrated to the operational horizons this kind of scaling requires.

Full case study: forthcoming on publication.

Jumba is a Kenyan construction-tech venture tackling one of the most structurally difficult distribution problems in the East African economy: the construction materials supply chain. Kenya's construction sector is large, growing, and fundamentally inefficient - dominated by fragmented, cash-based, relationship-dependent supply chains that inflate costs for the end customer and create significant working capital challenges for the small hardware retailers and developers who constitute most of the market's volume. Founded in 2022 by Kagure Wamunyu, former Country Manager at Uber Kenya, and Miano Njoka, Jumba began as a B2B marketplace focused on structural materials - cement and steel - operating across 60 percent of Kenya's 47 counties by 2023. The venture raised $1 million in pre-seed in 2022 and a $4.5 million seed round in February 2023 led by LocalGlobe with participation from Enza Capital, Foundamental, Seedstars International, Speedinvest, FirstCheck Africa, and others.

In October 2025, Jumba launched the Jumba App at a public event at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi - a strategic pivot from B2B structural materials to a comprehensive digital marketplace serving developers, contractors, and homeowners. The app connects users directly with verified suppliers across cement, steel, tiles and finishing products, with real-time price comparison, digital ordering, and delivery tracking. The stated rollout is the Nairobi metropolitan area initially, expanding to all 47 counties.

The Jumba case - co-authored by George Windsor and Scott Walker for the Edward Elgar Casebook on African Scaling edited by Simon Raby - is analytically significant on two counts. The first is how Jumba built the credibility infrastructure (supplier relationships, quality assurance, credit facilities) necessary to displace incumbents in a high-value, high-friction market. The second is the strategic shift the October 2025 app launch represents: from integrated marketplace to software-first platform with the supplier network and credibility infrastructure as the underlying asset. The physical goods distribution problem remains the hardest form of scaling in the East African economy. Jumba's pivot is a live test of whether the credibility infrastructure accumulated through the integrated model can sustain a software-first expansion. The Jumba case link will be added here upon publication.