Podcasts

Back

Building an Ecosystem for High-Growth Firms in Africa

15
May 2026
By Helmut Sorge & Naomi Kirungu

In this podcast recorded during the Growth Summit, Naomi Kengurungu, Director of Marketing and Communication at the African Management Institute, discusses the key conditions needed for high-growth firms to emerge and scale across Africa. She highlights the importance of enabling ecosystems built on access to finance, supportive policies, strong networks, and business support for SMEs. The conversation also addresses the structural challenges faced by African entrepreneurs, as well as the critical role governments and regional integration initiatives can play in fostering sustainable economic growth across the continent.

RELATED CONTENT

  • May 20, 2021
    Le Policy Center lance une nouvelle émission. Africafé, le nouveau rendez-vous bimensuel présenté par Youssef Tobi, spécialiste en relations internationales, décryptera l'actualité des organisations africaines et du continent avec des experts africains. Pour ce deuxième épisode, Larabi ...
  • May 6, 2021
    The Policy Center for the New South recently partnered with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center on a pair of reports exploring the theme of technology and its impact on Africa’s political and economic future. In its report, The Impact of New Technologies on Employment and the Workforce...
  • April 26, 2021
    La Tunisie a fêté récemment le 10ème anniversaire de la révolution qui a mis fin à l’ancien régime bénalien et défini les principes de la IIème République. Ayant pour principales doléances la croissance économique et la justice sociale, la révolution tunisienne était exclusivement sociale. Or, l’appropriation de la révolution par l’Assemblée nationale constituante (ANC) et le quartet du dialogue national qui ont privilégié le chantier des réformes démocratiques au détriment des réfo ...
  • April 13, 2021
    Technologies and Big Data in Shaping African Public Services: Towards Efficient Digital Solutions for Africa Social Good Can technology and digitalization improve and enhance the value we get from public services? Data can change the experience that individuals get from a public service...
  • Authors
    March 24, 2021
    This report is part of a partnership between the Policy Center for the New South and the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.   New technologies, such as automation, artificial intelligence and industrial robots, are often seen as a real danger for existing jobs and also for future job-creation prospects. There is a perception that they will make work redundant and lead to massive job destruction. However, others believe that automation, like previous technological waves , ...
  • Authors
    Fernando S. Perobelli
    Inácio F. Araújo
    Tomaz P. Dentinho
    March 16, 2021
    Angola’s prospects for reconstruction and development of its poor connectivity infrastructure are heavily dependent upon the export performance of its oil sector. Using an interregional inputoutput table for Angola, we estimate comprehensive measures of trade in value added revealing different hierarchies of interregional and international trade integration, with implications for regional inequality in the country. By encompassing the subnational perspective in the case study of an ...
  • February 24, 2021
    L'intégration régionale en Afrique est considérée comme une priorité par de nombreux responsables politiques et acteurs économiques du continent. Avec la signature de l'accord portant création de la ZLECAf par l'ensemble des pays africains, le défi consiste désormais à mettre en place un marché continental pour les biens et les services et à jeter les bases d'une union douanière continentale. Nombreux sont ceux qui, sur le continent, considèrent la ZLECAf comme un plan d'investissem ...
  • Authors
    Paola Maniga
    Yassine Moustanjidi
    February 15, 2021
    The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new vulnerabilities in social, infrastructure, and governance systems. In the first months of the pandemic, there was a genuine concern about the capacity of the Global South to contain the spread of the virus. African cities were particularly vulnerable, with some experts1, including the head of WHO2, predicting a catastrophe for the continent. Despite the structural and chronic challenges that African cities face, including informality, poverty, a ...
  • Authors
    February 12, 2021
    This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on Africa, focusing on the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, based on information available as of October 2020. We first identify the two key long-term issues of the SSA countries before the crisis: resource dependency and slow productivity growth. COVID-19 has hit SSA countries hard, causing human and economic destruction and wiping out economic progress from the last decade. Instead of growing at 2.9% in 2020, as ...