Since 2018, the Digital Africa programme has helped African startups. It just introduced a new early-stage business investment programme called Fuzé. In this interview, Isadora Bigourdan emphasised the program’s whole journey.
French President Emmanuel Macron committed 65 million euros to African companies in 2018 as part of the Digital Africa programme. Can you recall your objectives, challenges, and overall experience so far?
The goal of Digital Africa, which made its debut at Vivatech 2018, is to increase the capacity of African digital entrepreneurs to design and implement disruptive technologies at scale to benefit the real economy. After becoming a Proparco subsidiary in June 2022, Digital Africa is now the only French company in charge of assisting digital start-ups on the continent with non-financial, financial, and advocacy issues, from conception to scaling.
A comprehensive continuum of offerings to support entrepreneurs has been organised by Digital Africa around three primary areas of intervention based on a detailed diagnostic of the requirements of entrepreneurs on the ground.
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First, in terms of skills, we support digital companies with significant impact potential by enhancing the team members’ abilities as well as the founders’, particularly by facilitating access to a talent pool with the skills they need.
Then, on the financial front, by mobilising resources and facilitating access to capital in Africa and beyond to guarantee the expansion of African technological advances.
Finally, through funding research projects that focus on particular, “Africa centric,” challenges, Digital Africa supports “Made in Africa” public policies that are beneficial to creative digital businesses in Africa. We are now unique in the African digital ecosystem in our ability to engage all pertinent levers, always working closely with a network of partners dedicated to the continent’s ecosystems.
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Since 2020, we have started a number of initiatives that show our commitment to providing flexible solutions that can be quickly tailored to the demands of business owners. More than 10 firms have benefited from direct investment made in conjunction with Proparco, which has made many investments in VC funds. 11 startups were able to get a quick line of credit through the Bridge programme to help them with cash flow issues. 280 young people have been taught and put in start-ups through our Talent4StartUp scholarship programme, which aims to address the issue of young talent’s employability by educating them in the skills that start-ups on the continent value.
Our new Fuzé project, which we revealed a few weeks ago, aims to make it possible for startups operating in French-speaking Africa to launch their business and concentrate on their development efforts through tickets priced between €20,000 and €50,000.
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We are providing agritech players with the chance to collaborate to share and organise data through our Data 4 Digital Africa pilot initiative, a data-centric organisation that allows access to open data for our community. To promote African tech changemakers, we also created the Resilient Digital Africa media. Finally, the Africa Next network enabled more than 60 businesses to present themselves in front of 100 investors seeking for business prospects, leading to the funding of 12 of them.
The Fuzé fund, which was just established, is intended for startups that are just getting started. What are the specific numbers required of them, and what requirements must they meet?
In the form of ideation tickets for €20K, follow-on tickets worth €30K, and cumulative tickets worth €50K, Fuzé has an envelope with €6.5 million deployed. The goal is to be able to finance as many companies in French-speaking Africa as possible and to do so indefinitely as long as these startups are expanding. We test a first ideation ticket at launch under the conditions that a startup is first incorporated, i.e. legally constituted, that one of the co-founders is a national of one of the covered countries, that the startup operates in one of the Francophone African countries, and that it has a technological solution.
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We give priority to startups with established support or financing structures out of a sense of community and a desire to help them become anchored in their ecosystem.
An entrepreneur is not opposed to the idea of receiving the maximum amount of money, regardless of the stage of growth of their firm. However, Fuzé does not offer more than 50,000 euros for each project. Why is there a cap?
It is not a limit. This is done to fulfil a particular requirement at a particular point in the startup’s development. Through other initiatives, Digital Africa will continue to assist businesses in later phases of development. For instance, in 2020 we launched Bridge Fund by Digital Africa in collaboration with Proparco, which offers bridge financing with amounts ranging from €200,000 to €600,000, or we collaborated with BPI France on Africa Next, which gathers a community of investors ready to invest in startups looking to raise between €1m and €10m. The concept behind Fuzé is to initially address the start-individual up’s finance needs and then, as the business grows, to integrate it into a continuum with the right tools.
Startups from Rwanda, Morocco, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Tunisia are welcome at Fuzé. What nations will follow when?
We are in a launch phase. We are starting with these countries but the objective is to be able to quickly scale up and target, from the beginning of next year, all 25 French-speaking African countries.
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How has Fuzé been received by entrepreneurs and the ecosystem so far and what do you think its impact will be by 2025?
Already in the first month following the debut, we have seen a sizable influx of applications from both startups and support organisations. Our first agreement with the Senegalese startup Neolean was successfully finalised, and we have already inked other agreements. Thus, we are carrying out our intention to implement the system swiftly. By 2025, we pledge to support more than 100 companies, and with the assistance of our network of ecosystem partners, we’re motivated to find these gold nuggets.
Digital Africa African startups Digital Africa African startups
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh