For decades, popular business culture has promoted a seductive idea: that entrepreneurial success is the product of some innate, ineffable quality. The “it factor.” The X factor. Something certain people are born with and most aren’t. The TED talks, the Forbes covers, the origin myths all reinforce this story.
For most of my career, support for MSMEs in Kenya was a side conversation. It happened in donor workshops, in the last agenda item of trade forums, in policy papers that circulated among the same fifty people. The businesses themselves were somewhere else entirely, doing the work, largely unwatched.
That has changed, and this week confirmed it.
Every few weeks, a video goes viral. A freshly minted entrepreneur, visibly frustrated, detailing how their corporate client took forever to pay, kept moving goalposts, or buried them in bureaucracy. The comments fill up with solidarity and shared war stories. I understand the frustration. But the framing bothers me. Because calling a corporate “evil” or…
Large corporates quietly run supplier dependency assessments on their vendors. Most SMEs have never heard of this process. Here’s what it is, what triggers a risk flag, and what you can do about it before the conversation changes. Somewhere in your largest corporate client’s procurement team, there is a structured evaluation running on your business….
Stop Blaming Red Tape: The Real Reason Africa Is Stifled Is Predictability You think you know why African economies struggle, right? Overregulation. Too many rules. Endless permits. That’s the easy, comfortable answer. But our analysis says you’ve been looking at the wrong variable. The problem isn’t the quantity of rules. It’s the sheer, unpredictable mess of how they’re enforced. That…
In business, success often hinges on the details. As entrepreneurs, we live and breathe due diligence, understanding every facet of our companies, from financials to market opportunities. But here’s something you may not have considered: just as a distorted financial report can mislead investors, a distorted map of the world can shape perceptions that limit…
Rethinking Africa’s Risk Premium For decades, Africa has been labeled “too risky” for serious investment,volatile, fragile, unpredictable. But what if that perception is based on outdated maps? At a recent economic forum, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), presented data that challenges this narrative: “The rate of loss in Africa is…
Building With Purpose — and With Users “If you’re building without talking to your users, you’re not building for them — you’re building for yourself.” Silas doesn’t mince words when it comes to product design and SME growth. For entrepreneurs trying to launch or scale in African markets, he argues that the most dangerous assumption…
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