Tongayi Choto
If you ask any founder, one thing that is key to building a startup is data. Besides asking yourself about your numbers, projections or customer acquisition cost (to mention a few metrics), you also need to know how big your market is or at least how big the problem is that you are solving.
While building AfriBlocks with my co-founder, Roger Roman, we did our research just like any founder. What we quickly began to realize was that there was little to no information about the African market, particularly when it comes to the subject of “The Future of Work.”
We would find some research from other people who also realized this problem and took it upon themselves to provide valuable data pertaining to Africa’s Future of Work. This data has been helpful, however, sometimes we would find conflicting information on the same subject from different sources. I remember reading an article from TechCruch titled “Did African Startups Raise $496M, $1B or $2B in 2019.”
Shout out to Max Cuvellier and Maxime Bayen for compiling a list on African-focused investors and deals, as well as their most recent “Funding Raised By Startups in H1’ 21.’”
The full database is available at https://lnkd.in/drf9GCG (note the paywall)
A dearth of data also exists globally for Black people. Some of the latest statistics on Black-owned businesses were from as far back as 2017. I remember in one of our meetings, Roger and I jokingly said, “Brother, at this rate, we might as well do the research ourselves.”
Well, this thought just turned into reality. They say if you feed a machine the wrong input (data), it will produce the wrong output. One thing we do realize is, it takes a whole lot more time and resources to produce a helpful and reliable report, but we said with the little resources, little time and huge passion we have for our community, let’s create an annual report on Africa and the Future of Work. We have to start somewhere, right?
I’m pleased to announce our first edition of “Africa and the Future of Work,” a FREE resource for anyone to download and learn from our findings. We are now looking for partners willing to help us on the next 2022 edition by adding more data points year by year.
This is our small contribution to the future we want and are building.
