The narrative about African startup ecosystems tends toward extremes. Either it is an untapped opportunity of enormous potential, or it is a difficult environment where most startups fail to find capital and scale. Both framings are true and neither is useful on its own.
Here is a more grounded picture, based on working directly with founders, programs, and institutions across East Africa.
What Has Genuinely Improved
The number of programs available to founders has grown significantly. Accelerators, incubators, fellowship programs, and grant schemes exist at a scale that did not exist ten years ago. Founders today have access to structured support that previous generations had to build informally or do without.
Capital has also moved closer to early-stage companies. DFIs, foundation grant programs, and pre-seed funds are now active in markets where they were largely absent a few years ago. And the density of founder-to-founder knowledge sharing has increased. A founder building in Nairobi today has access to more relevant intelligence than at any previous point.
What Has Not Improved Enough
The quality of program delivery has not kept pace with the number of programs. There are more accelerators than ever and more founders going through them. The outcomes per cohort are harder to find. Programs optimise for the selection process and the demo day. What happens to founders in the months between those two events is less well-designed.
The capital gap at the growth stage remains significant. Pre-seed capital has become more accessible. The $500K to $3M round that takes a validated startup from early traction to scale is still difficult to raise locally and requires relationships that most founders do not have and programs do not reliably provide.
And despite the growth in community, the ecosystem remains fragmented. The best opportunities, introductions, and intelligence are still concentrated in a small number of networks. Founders who are not inside those networks are operating with a structural disadvantage that no amount of program participation fully resolves.
Where the Real Opportunity Is
The gap between program participation and real business outcomes is the most significant opportunity in East African ecosystem development right now. Programs are effective at giving founders structured time to think. They are less effective at changing what founders do in their businesses the week after the program ends.
The organisations that can bridge that gap, by building the connective tissue between learning and implementation, between program completion and investor introduction, between founder community and actual deal flow, will build the most durable and valuable position in the ecosystem. That is the work we are focused on at Romel Ventures.