Story: Franklin ASARE-DONKOH
The Timbuktoo Project Head and Chief Innovation Officer of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Regional Bureau for Africa, Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin, has revealed that Africa has only 0.2 percent of global startup value.
She explained further that 83% of the 0.2% is foreign capital, and the worst is that a whopping 87% of the 83% of foreign capital is spread across just four African countries.
Dr. Gabre-Madhin made this revelation at the lively timXAccra event held at the Labadi Beach Hotel, Accra, Ghana.
The Timbuktoo Project Head and Chief Innovation Officer at UNDP indicated that the situation calls for a new paradigm shift to bridge the gap.
To this end, UNDP Africa launched the Timbuktoo Hubs initiative in 2021, and the project aims to engage a large number of private and public sector partners to establish eight (8) Timbuktoo Hubs in recognised leading startup ecosystems, potentially in Accra, Nairobi, Cape Town, Lagos, Dakar, Kigali, Casablanca, and Cairo, among others.
Each Hub will be operated privately and will focus on a single industry vertical, including Fintech, Agritech, Healthtech, Greentech, Creatives, Tradetech and Logistics, Smart Cities and Mobility, and Tourismtech.
The structure of the massive undertaking includes a parent fund of catalytic grant capital, in partnership with impact-minded catalytic partners, which would finance the network of hubs and also a headquarters. The Parent Fund would also inject a minority share in each of the Hub Venture Funds, which are commercially oriented, in the form of guarantees or first-loss capital.
The Timbuktoo Hubs initiative has three (3) priority areas, which are: to increase early-stage risk capital, better integrate the ecosystem, and expand the market.
It is envisaged that eight private-sector driven pan-African Timbuktoo hubs will be established across Africa, each focused on a different priority sector and each housing a Venture Builder and a Venture Fund.
The exciting vision behind Timbuktoo, according to the initiators, is that each pan-African hub will attract top startup talents from across the continent, with the aim of nurturing and growing “One Africa Market and beyond”.
“Timbuktoo is a new approach for UNDP in line with our vision of a future-smart Africa that transcends old development paradigms,” Dr. Gabre-Madhin stated.
She explained that plans are afoot for the establishment of the Timbuktoo headquarters and the launch of the University Innovation Pods (UniPods), in the fourth quarter of 2022.
The parent fund setup will come on stream in the second quarter of 2023. The establishment of four out of the eight proposed hubs will be completed during the third quarter of 2023. While the remaining four hubs will be established in the second quarter of 2024, Dr. Gabre-Madhin announced.
The Project Head and Chief Innovation Officer at UNDP explained that the Timbuktoo initiative intends to mobilise and invest one billion dollars in public and private capital over ten years, with the aim of sparking the startup revolution in Africa.
The ambitious vision set by Timbuktoo is to galvanise Africa’s tech and tech-enabled startups, aiming to achieve over 1,000 startups, achieving significant scale and having an impact on over 100 million livelihoods as well as environmental impacts. This, in turn, is to generate a ten-fold return, amounting to over ten billion dollars in terms of wealth and value creation for Africa’s economies.
