As a health
innovation incubator operating in East Africa, Villgro Kenya has borrowed
heavily from Villgro India’s incubation model which majorly involves supporting
local early-stage startups with funding, mentorship and providing access to
relevant networks in the ecosystem.
After over 5
years of operation in both countries, Paul Belknap gives his observations on
the innovation evolution path of India vis a vis East Africa in an interview
with Ordia Akelo.
In terms of the stage of evolution,
without necessarily following the similar path of India, what do you think
about the EA ecosystem?
Paul: Kenya
certainly is not as far along the journey as India is. I think it is moving
faster but mainstream entrepreneurship in India is far ahead in terms of the
number of exits and the size of the companies it has created.
Mentorship
is key to increase the number of successful exits
We have not
seen much of the willingness and ability of successful entrepreneurs to give
back in terms of mentorship to startups is also lower. This can be due to the
fact they are early into their entrepreneurial journey than most of the
successful Indian entrepreneurs were when they were able to start giving back.
The fact
that we have not been able to have as many successes yet means that there are
less mentors.
The role of support Organizations
One of the
positives is that there has been a lot of support organizations that have come
in here relatively quickly and that is accelerating the pace of progress here.
If I say India might be 15 years ahead I don’t know if that means 15 years, it
might mean 7.
Those
organizations are effective they should be able to help East Africa catch up to
India.
It’s really
difficult to lump together East Africa, you can look at a few sectors like
fin-tech & solar, they are certainly further ahead than India. The
Healthcare sector has started to pick up in the last year or two.
Capacity Building within the
Ecosystem
If you look
at our pipeline numbers and loosely assign some quality ranking to the
pipeline, quantity x quality has improved dramatically in the last 3-5 years
that we have been active. It is much easier to find quality companies today
than it was years ago.
This can be
attributed to more capacity building avenues like hackathons, workshops, and
conferences within the ecosystem. These have been able to equip innovators with
information on how to innovate for their end-users to ensure it is a
product/service people actually need.
There are
interesting differences between Kampala and Nairobi but if you were to try to
average things up there is some room to catch up but it is on the right track.
What are
some of the things that need to happen next at the ecosystem level – you
mention support systems but as Kenyans what are some of the things we can do to
accelerate our progress
Collaboration within the ecosystem
Paul: A lot
of it boils down to collaboration, that is one thing that you saw a lot of in
India and at least I haven’t seen quite as much of it here.
People’s
openness to sharing things that have worked and things that haven’t with other
entrepreneurs, this needs to happen more. On thinking about how to as much as
possible to skip further ahead in the trajectory/evolution of
BPO-CopyCat-Innovation.
It is in
some ways an organic growth mechanism to go through that kind of evolution
because the skills and ability to build innovative stuff, it’s hard to go
straight there so you have to go through that journey to some extent but as
entrepreneurs, people can try as much as possible to think innovatively.
A lot of the
support organizations are already working in that space but more can be done to
encourage that collaboration.
More Innovation Events
There is an
emerging interest in Medtech entrepreneurship in Kampala and they have had
events that have convened most of the people interested in that space.
There needs
to be more. Some of the work we are trying to do around the Medtech Biotech
ecosystem is critical to getting people talking.
Big Wins
Some of
these companies need to grow. We need a few more big successes. That will help
drive further success. If we can have a company from our portfolio listed on
the Stock Exchange for example or acquired by Big Private Equity money they
will have demonstrated the ability to go from small beginnings to showing there
is a path to commercial success that will drive more sophisticated investment.
