For most magazines and news outlets that cover African startups or attempt to rank them, the urge to quickly google search startups and feed off the news cycle of who’s popular is often irresistible. It’s easy to do and blends just fine with the crowd. The outcome of this approach is predictably inadequate; you end up with the same old group of startups, the same hubs and the same founders again and again. At the Yale Africa Startup Review, we believe that this approach both misses and masks the sheer scale, dynamism and diversity of innovation across the 54 countries in the African ecosystem. It misses the lesser known pre-seed, seed stage and series A startups. It relegates the less “hot” or “not-in-form” verticals to relative obscurity, and leaves the stories of under-the-radar ecosystems in “smaller” countries untold.
YASR does things differently; we believe that the process should come from the ground up and must be driven from the grassroots. We think this kind of data should be driven by those deep in the trenches, sleeves folded, working with entrepreneurs across the continent’s many hubs day to day. We have deliberately chosen not to search the internet for “African startups.” We’ve also decided not to comb through in-vogue magazines for what they think is “hot”. Instead, we reached out to over 300 investors, accelerators, hubs and entrepreneurs from Somalia to Senegal, Egypt to Malawi and asked them to nominate startups to the Review. We are working with the nominated startups, their founders and nominators to get data for further due diligence. It is the hard way, but we think it’s the better way. There’s more brilliance and diversity in this ecosystem than a simple Google search would have you believe. At the Yale Africa Startup Review, we are simply storytellers: the real credit and spotlight belongs to the local startups & ecosystem builders. We’ve just chosen to tell this story differently; to feature, not rank; to drive the process from the ground up - as it should be.
