African entrepreneurs with bridge funding impact programs gets support from digital Africa

Digital Africa helps to promote more inclusive and sustainable development by equipping Africa’s tech entrepreneurs with capabilities to design and scale-up breathtaking innovations for the real economy.

Digital Africa helps:
* In supporting high impact digital start ups.
* Fund raising and sourcing finance to scale up Africa’s tech innovations.
* Advocating public policies.

The bridge fund by Digital Africa helps to respond to challenges affecting young innovative. African companies, whose development is harmed by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Digital Africa is backed by French government on a goal to support Africa’s tech entrepreneurs thus providing tech assistance, and also supporting businesses. It was launched in 2018 by president Emmanuel Macron, Digital Africa has a community of about 6000 entrepreneurs and has other programs including Talent 4 Startups and Africa Next. Talent 4 Startups helps support the training of talents in tech and digital professions on the African continent. Talent 4 Startup is in partnership with make – IT in Africa, whilst the Africa Next is focused on co- investment in fast growing business. Their best connection is through partnership this helps organization, and government to work on projects to provide basic support for startups.

This collaboration helps to spread resources that are developed to support small scale business in the ecosystem. For example the bridge fund partners with French government to provide quick funds for startups. Such will help Boost Africa’s economic and also play a major role in new businesses and government structures will be strengthened. They also help to bring multinational community of partners to support Africa’s digital businesses financial institutions, and also assist in nurturing projects, helping them to grow into successful initiatives that can change the lives of the African people. This will help to support young African’s business owners hence improving the standard of living of an average African youth. African youth needs empowerment with digital skills to have access to technology and market that are digitized.

Digital Africa set up the 5million euro bridge fund with Proparco in 2020 and has disbursed seed funding of about 175000 euros and 600,000 euros to 10 companies. A record 5billion in startup capital was raised in Africa last year. The initiative as at few months ago planned to shift its focus beyond the nodes of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya which is almost four fifths of the money raised by African startups. In Africa there has been an impressive increase of funds in entrepreneur and tech space. Digital Africa is a public funded organization, and so there are a lot of processes which requires funds to be disbursed, adding with the need to be very responsive in how we respond to funding requests can be challenging as well.