The number of tech hubs across Africa has grown by nearly 50 percent over the past year.
As startup and innovation culture deepens across the continent with success stories ranging from big-ticket funding rounds to a billion-dollar IPO, tech hubs are sprouting across the continent. A joint report by the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator program and Briter Bridges identifies 618 active tech hubs across the continent. GSMA said there were 442 active hubs on the continent in March 2018, which was up from 314 in 2016.
Story from Quartz. Story by Yomi Kazeem.
The report defines tech hubs as organizations with physical addresses which offer support and
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 59: Brandon Tory, PT 2 They discuss the high stakes for Black America not scaling up in technology and the potential to weaponize tech against us, whether hip hop dumbs the people down and what a hip-hop summit would look like in 2019.
Nigeria and South Africa—home to the continent’s most valuable tech ecosystems—continue to lead the way for tech hub presence. Lagos is ranked as the leading innovative city by number of hubs: over the past two years, the city has welcomed hubs led by major innovation stakeholders including Facebook and Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST).
But, keeping up with an established trend, the report also notes “several non-capital cities are emerging as new, sophisticated cradles of innovation.” As such, the diffusion of innovation culture means that several African countries have main cities where tech ecosystems are developed as well as “secondary, fast-growing satellite ones.”
Read more at Quartz.
