Anna Ekeledo on a decade building Africa’s tech hub network at AfriLabs

After a decade of serving as the executive director of AfriLabs, a network of 500 tech hubs across Africa, Anna Ekeledo stepped down in January and is now in the process of hiring her replacement. Whoever gets the role will have their work cut out for them. Since Ekeledo joined AfriLabs, it has grown to over 500 hubs spread across 53 countries, from just 40 when she took over. 

“Even if I run AfriLabs for the next 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, I will still have to step down at some point,” she said on a call. “For us, this is a true test of how strong AfriLabs as an institution can not just grow, not just sustain, but scale beyond me.”

Founded in 2011, AfriLabs operates as a network of hubs that support hubs across Africa, disbursing $2.7 million to hubs and startups in 2025, providing essential support and funding to the hubs that provide a platform to entrepreneurs. 

What started as a way for five hubs in four countries to speak to each other has become a sprawling network of hubs in almost all African countries. AfriLabs grew alongside the hubs that it connected, connecting half of the over 1,000 tech hubs that operated across the continent by 2021.

These hubs grew largely because they plug basic infrastructure gaps like power, connectivity, and office space that individual early-stage founders can not solve alone. While hubs help early-stage founders with incubation and acceleration, funding, working spaces, and networking, AfriLabs advocates with governments for the hubs, creates cross-border collaboration, and funds and trains hub managers. 

Hub networks lower the barrier to entrepreneurship at scale across Africa, but the hubs themselves often face the same capital and sustainability constraints as the startups they serve. The cyclical nature of the grant- and donor-reliant funding model that hubs rely on has meant that hubs have struggled to survive since the post-zero interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP) era that saw global funding reduce in African tech. Creating a funding model around supporting early-stage startups is also unsustainable in Africa, where most startups generate little revenue. 

In her decade-long run at AfriLabs, Ekeledo demonstrated that by funding hubs and startups through hubs and creating a network connecting hubs, influencing policy conversations, and international capital, value is created even as individual hubs continue to struggle.

For this week’s Ask an Investor, I spoke with Ekeledo about her departure, Africa’s funding boom and decline, how grant funding creates hubs, the future of hubs, how Africa’s tech ecosystem should evolve, and how to scale tech in Africa.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You’re stepping down after a decade at AfriLabs. Why is this the right time?

There’s something I’ve always said, especially in my work building the African continent: Africa needs two things: strong people and strong institutions. That’s what the continent needs to create sustainable wealth for our people.

Over the past decade, I’ve been very intentional and made it my mission to build AfriLabs into a very strong institution that positively impacts our community, especially innovation hubs and their supporting communities, the innovators, developers, and startups on the continent, and basically strengthen the African startup ecosystem.

Through that decade, we built systems, strong pan-African and global partnerships, and institutionalised our events, programming, and support to our members. I believe that all the efforts we’ve made over the past decade under my leadership should outlast any single leader. The idea is not to keep on running the organisation but to build an institution that can outlast my leadership.

The true measure of any institution’s strength is that everything developed under a leader can outlive that leader and continuously grow. Being very practical, even if I run AfriLabs for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, I will still have to step down at some point. For us, this is a true test of how strong AfriLabs as an institution can grow and scale—not just grow, not just sustain, but scale beyond me.

What’s the succession plan like?

Last year, we set up a transition committee made up of a few current board members, previous board members, and trustees who are also part of the community. Working with the transition committee, we built a process: we took in applications last year, interviews will be held, then there’ll be a shortlist, and the full board will make a final selection. 

It’s ongoing, and we hope to close that by the end of Q1. We’ll be announcing our next executive director at the start of Q2, hopefully, if all things go well.

Is this severing ties, or will there still be involvement on your end?

As I’m stepping down, I’ll also be joining the advisory council, where I’ll continue to support AfriLabs’ mission while creating space for a new leader to bring in their own vision and approach. It’s not the end of the mission as I step away.

I will continue to mentor the new executive director. I’ll continue to work with the community, but in a non-executive capacity. So yes, the relationship will still be very much alive and growing.

When you first took over, what were some of the challenges you faced, and how did you address them?

I will start by saying we had a very strong community. Our network was about 40 members across 20 African countries, filled with very passionate individuals, all committed to supporting entrepreneurs across the continent.

However, the fragility was more within the infrastructure underneath. As an organisation, we did not have the sort of systems to sustain growth. We were primarily dependent on donor funding, which is, of course, one of the challenges in development on the continent. We had short bursts of projects to execute, with long gaps when there was no funding available. There wasn’t a strong team, basically. So I built the team as an organisation to this stage.

Over the past decade, we have built a strong and largely pan-African team spread across different regions, with our secretariat in Nigeria. We formalised our governance structures, diversified revenue models, and institutionalised a lot of our partnerships, programming, and events.

That way, we consistently built a system where we always provide support to our community members, irrespective of how the funding flows within the ecosystem. In terms of our core mandate of building community and providing support, we’ve consistently maintained that by building strong systems and diversifying our partnership model. We have also grown the community from 40 members to over 500, across 200-plus cities in 53 African countries.

AfriLabs now spans 500 hubs in almost all African countries. How many of these hubs would you say are genuinely sustainable and can sustain themselves independently?

I do not have an exact percentage, but we have significantly more sustainable hubs today than we did a decade ago. When I started, hubs were almost entirely donor-dependent, which meant they were vulnerable to funding cycles. 

Usually, this is how it went: a grant ends, a donor shifts priorities, and suddenly, a hub serving quite a lot of entrepreneurs is at risk of continuing that work.

Over the years, we’ve designed our AfriLabs capacity-building programmes specifically to change that. We’ve built programmes and interventions, including an AfriLabs Academy, the first of its kind, a hub management curriculum focused on two main strands. 

One: supporting a hub to build and run sustainably. Two: providing the right type of support to startups, from the very idea stage to scale, including accessing investments. 

We’ve also implemented peer-to-peer mentorship, toolkits, and resources focused on equipping hubs with the right skills and knowledge to be sustainable.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen hubs diversify their funding sources and find ways to commercialise their value through products and services to a diverse set of stakeholders, while retaining their mandate to impact innovators and startups in their community. We definitely have a lot more sustainable hubs on the continent that have kept their lights on and sustained their impact.

During the funding boom (the ZIRP era), were you seeing anything that was worrying you?

Definitely, because during that time, we saw founders and innovators focus on fundraising as an end goal, rather than a means to an end. We saw hub strategies and startup strategies that basically pivoted to fit funding cycles and not necessarily to meet the real market challenges of their communities. 

Wherever the trends were going, towards what investors wanted to see startups build, towards what funders wanted to see hubs focus on, that’s where the focus was. It was quite concerning.

Another thing I saw was vanity metrics being celebrated more than real business metrics. Metrics focused on raises and sign-ups when it could have been optimised for real customer acquisition instead of generating revenue and profits. Fast growth without profit.

Of course, adaptation is important. If you are building any business, you still have to attract the right stakeholders, including investors. But there definitely has to be a balance between solving for the real market, solving the real challenges in your community, and meeting external priorities.

What would you say are some of the proudest achievements you’ve had in the last decade?

If I put it in one sentence, I would say it’s institutionalising AfriLabs to be a strong pan-African network organisation that now has the capacity to impact a large community of innovation hubs, entrepreneurs, and startups across various sectors across the continent, while also holding space and having a strong, influential voice in global and pan-African conversations.

This is specifically important when we talk about policy. We need to advocate for better policy, and over the years, that’s one of the things I’m proud of. We’ve been very intentional, and we’ve been part of pushing for the right policies. Some of the startup acts on the continent, like the Senegal startup act, the Nigerian startup act, and innovation policies like Rwanda’s and DRC’s, have been largely driven by the participation of the community that we’ve built.

Even now, as we talk about the African Continental Free Trade Area, AfriLabs as an institution is in a very strong place to support the implementation of the AfCFTA agreement while also holding governments accountable. It’s one thing to support startups to leverage it; it’s another thing for the implementation to actually materialise. That’s what I’m most proud of.

What does AfriLabs look like without Anna?

The first thing that came to my mind, to be honest, is stronger and better. This is where succession is very important. Over the past 10 years, I have built partnerships, platforms, systems, and a team, and grown the community to a point that the next leader just needs to come in, take all of this, and fly. Literally. 

Without Anna means taking everything that Anna has done and scaling the impact, scaling the work, and driving investment into the ecosystem.

For example, one of the platforms that we’ve built over the past two years, which we’re looking to really launch this year, is the AfriLabs Connect Deal Room, which connects investors from all over Africa and beyond to startups for follow-on funding. We have investors with billions of dollars in assets under management who have pledged to access it. The next leader coming on board as I step down next quarter will come in to help operationalise that. That’s just one example.

We have policy conversations that are ongoing. We have partnerships. And we have a community—I came on board in 20 African countries; now we’re in over 53. The entire continent is covered. The next person would come in to build and scale. We have built the foundation for AfriLabs to multiply its impact.

You grew AfriLabs from 20 countries to 53, with over 500 hubs. What did you learn about scaling when building a network to this level?

There are so many ways to answer that question. But within the African context (scaling across the African continent), which is one of our main mandates, supporting startups to scale through innovation hubs as launchpads and nodes, we can’t achieve scale at scale without harmonisation of policies. One of the biggest challenges we face is the fragmentation of policies and regulations across the continent, and this cuts across the board.

Another one is ease of movement. In implementing one of our flagship events, the AfriLabs Annual Gathering, which we run in a different African location every year, we have held 10 so far in nine countries, including those hosted by the African Union and United Nations in Kenya and Ethiopia, and one virtual during COVID. One of our biggest challenges was movement. We had to build relationships with governments to provide visas. We had to lobby—some countries were easier, while others were harder.

When it comes to supporting startups to scale, if you are a fintech or a healthtech in any one location and you want to scale to new countries, you have to start the regulatory process all over again. You have to get new licences, which are sometimes expensive. Sometimes you have to adapt your business model. And then getting your team to settle into the country – the immigration laws are different, and there are employee laws for foreigners and all of that.

So I would say one thing I’ve learned about scale is that for us to scale, whether we’re scaling businesses, business models, or impact across Africa, we definitely need to work harder together, collectively, towards harmonising our policies across the board.

Innovation hubs across Africa have been hit hard by the funding downturn. Many depend on grant funding, and we know how the US—the world’s biggest provider of grant funding—is rethinking that now. How can hubs survive in the current funding environment? Do they need to evolve?

Yes, I think hubs need to evolve, because everyone needs to evolve. That’s the whole idea of innovation, and hubs are already evolving.

Over the years, we have had hubs that have diversified their services from just supporting entrepreneurs, which they had to rely on external funding for, to supporting a target group that could afford their services, especially in less mature ecosystems. They had to evolve from having just one model of delivery or one customer segment to engaging other stakeholders. 

We have hubs that have evolved to providing consulting services to corporate organisations, supporting open innovation strategies, working with development partners and governments to run capacity-building programmes for innovators and women’s businesses. We have had hubs that have developed different business models, set up funds, and the like.

Hubs have been and will continue to constantly evolve their business models, the customers they serve, and how they serve them. It’s also evolving based on the maturity of the ecosystem. In less mature or nascent ecosystems, hubs are primarily focused on building awareness around entrepreneurship and digital skills. In more mature ecosystems, the conversation has gone beyond startup policies to: what are our AI policies, data sovereignty policies, market access policies? The evolution of hubs has always happened and will always happen.

What kind of support can change a founder’s trajectory?

The support depends on the stage of the startup. At the very early stage—the idea stage—what matters is helping a founder refine their business idea, build an MVP, and validate the model in the market with real users. And then, in the case of needing capital, raising seed funding, most startups raise from family and friends. But where a founder doesn’t have that, just connect them to angel investors who can buy into their idea.

After that, market access. Paying customers. Connecting a startup to one business customer, or two or three or five, that can help them achieve their goals of generating millions of dollars a year, is way more valuable than just providing capital. At a certain stage, when the business model has been validated and the technology has been built, market access is very important.

And then, supporting startups to close deals. I think this is something people underestimate in the ecosystem. It’s great to support startups with introductions. It’s great to put together networking events where they have access to potential investors or clients. But providing that support up to the point of closing the deal can make a ton of difference and save a startup literally months or years of constantly chasing and pitching.

What makes you optimistic about the African startup ecosystem right now?

The growth, even though I recognise that growth is not evenly spread across the continent. But generally, I believe we’ve grown to a point where we have recognised that we need to build for the continent. This realisation is coming from a collective perspective—the hubs, the startups, certain governments, different stakeholders, and even development organisations that used to come with external priorities. There’s definitely more alignment now towards cooperation, as opposed to being told what the blueprint is.

We’re increasingly solving for real market challenges. Yes, fintech still tops the investment inflow. But when you see more logistics tech companies receiving funding, that’s interesting, especially with the focus on intra-Africa trade and governments more committed to breaking down barriers.

There’s also more interconnectivity. The structural barriers still exist, but we see more startups taking bold moves to build for multiple markets. Even startups in a really large market like Nigeria are building not just for Africa but for the global market. That’s exciting to see.

And then the rise of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). We had a time where everyone basically built what they needed to build in different sectors. With the funding downturn about two years ago, startups had to pivot and think of other models. As we see more M&As, what we envision is stronger, better-built and better-run African businesses as a result of the coming together of different startups.

When we look back at this time 10 years from now, what do you think will define this period?

If we continue on this path, I am quite optimistic. I would say we would see that we have built more for the African continent, for our markets. We have learned to focus more on our priorities and solve for our own markets. And most importantly, we would have broken down a lot of the structural barriers and regulations that have kept us fragmented.

Ten years from now, we will say this was a pivotal moment that led to harmonised policies. Any fintech or health tech or logistics tech building in any one African market—whether in Djibouti—can easily scale to South Africa or Kenya or Côte d’Ivoire, because the policies are harmonised. There’s support infrastructure from the regulatory bodies: wherever you are, if you want to register a company, you just go on a platform. It is streamlined and digitised. We have the Digital Protocol on Trade that covers harmonisation of e-commerce, data protection, and data flows. And ease of movement—we hope we’re not still having the same conversation about visa applications that take three weeks, while the business opportunity is gone.

First: building an ecosystem on our own terms, for our own priorities and markets, and our own definition of success. Second: breaking down structural barriers that make it hard to scale. And third—which is needed for the first two to happen—mobilising domestic public and private capital.

All of the concerns about dependency on donor funding during the startup boom were also down to the fact that we don’t have enough domestic capital mobilised, from our governments and our private sectors. But we’re seeing an uptake. Angel investors, VCs, and PE firms have increasingly raised capital for African startups. In 10 years, I’m optimistic that the majority of the funding going into African startups will come from domestic capital, from Africans.

You’ve operated across different regulatory environments. Where have you seen governments really support startups?

Some governments have made very positive strides. I’ll start with Nigeria, where the AfriLabs secretariat is situated. In 2021, the Nigerian Startup Act was enacted. That was a positive signal by the government to say: We are listening to you. It came from years of conversations. Now we constantly see policies at the state and federal levels geared towards supporting the innovation ecosystem. There’s still work to be done, but for the most part, the political will is present.

Rwanda is another very intentional country, specifically in attracting startups from other countries. Rwanda has broken down its barriers to entry. Ease of movement is easy; as of last year, they completely scrapped the e-visa requirement. They’ve made it easy to set up a business; you could register online within a few hours. They’ve invested heavily in digital infrastructure and connectivity, and they’ve strengthened their academic ecosystem to provide the talent needed to support startups.

We also have Tunisia. Algeria has Algeria Startup Ventures, with which we partnered a few years ago. South Africa has various interventions. Last year, we were hosted by Kenya for our Annual Gathering. Kenya is very bullish about driving the AI ecosystem and supporting startups building solutions in AI. So, we have different countries implementing policies and interventions for the ecosystem.