There was no honest playbook for building in Africa. So we wrote one.
There was no honest playbook for building in Africa. So we wrote one.
What We Do
Three activities, one body of knowledge.
The foundation of everything else.
We work directly with African ventures, over months, on the questions that decide survival: what to sell, to whom, at what price, and how to know it is working.
These engagements are where the craft is made. Every method in the library and every claim in our writing traces back to a real company and a measured result.
We take no equity and hold no portfolio, which means we are free to work with the companies nobody selected.
Inside every engagement, three kinds of work
The few measures that actually signal health, fast experiments, and choices made through a process instead of guesses. We surface what the founder actually wants and put the real options on the table, because we want founders to have agency over their company.
We research what the market needs, where the winnable ground is, who opens doors. And the unglamorous skill underneath it all: knowing where the money is and how to be positioned to get it.
Capital reads the story before it reads the business, so a real company can lose to a better-told one. We fix that from the true side: we translate the story already hiding in the numbers and make the business legible to the people who fund it.
In the record
Eneza Malipo · Kenya
Terralima · Kenya
Archivart · Tunisia
A craft spreads through the people who touch many companies.
Accelerators, investors, development institutions and universities have commissioned our work across cohorts in eleven countries: programme design, venture support, investment readiness, and the training of the people who deliver them.
Institutions we have worked with
In the record
Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropies · Pan-African
Goethe Institut · Tunisia · Libya
A field advances on its negative results as much as its wins.
What proves itself gets written down and released. The method itself. The tools we use with founders. The data we assemble. And the writing, including the honest record of what failed, because a field advances on its negative results as much as its wins.
From the library
