The greater Cape Town area, including Stellenbosch, is Africa’s tech capital. This, according to a report entitled Evaluation & Network Analysis of the Cape Town-Stellenbosch Tech Sector by Endeavor Insight.
The unveiling of their research was done yesterday, at the Bandwidth Barn in Woodstock.
Endeavor is a global non-profit organization that supports high-growth entrepreneurs and ecosystems.
Endeavor Insight is the organization’s research division and it has conducted research on entrepreneurial ecosystems all over the world.
From The South African. Story Andile Sicetsha.
The report, which aimed at discovering the present state of the Cape tech entrepreneur community and identify where the opportunities for growth lie, was commissioned, with the support of the Western Cape Government, by the Cape Innovation & Technology Initiative (CiTi), Wesgro, and the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation.
Interviews were done with 150 local technology entrepreneurs and more than 450 local tech founders and their companies were researched.
Karen Gabriels, Head of Finance and Operations for Allan Gray Orbis Foundation, said: “With South Africa’s current unemployment challenge, the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation believes the study was important so as to understand the tech entrepreneurial ecosystem in Cape Town which has a great potential to accelerate meaningful jobs creation.”
According to the research, 450 – 550 entrepreneurial companies in the Cape Town-Stellenbosch area, employ between 40,000 to 50,000 people. This is more than double that of the tech sectors in Lagos and Nairobi, which respectively employs 9000 and 7000 people.
Comparable to Nairobi’s 1% and Lagos’ 2%, 3% of local companies have reached scale (100+ employees).
Read more at The South African.
