African Innovators Are Reinventing Their Regulators

Yinka’s view

Africa’s innovators are discovering that building a new product or service often also means building a new relationship with the government.

Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola told me this past weekend that the leading fintech player learned that lesson “the hard way” after regulatory challenges in Kenya back in 2022. “We have to engage in advocacy. We have to influence policies,” Agboola said, explaining that Flutterwave began treating the regulator as a “stakeholder in our business.”

That is a useful lens for African innovation. Often these types of companies are described as technology businesses, but many of the problems they are trying to solve are institutional. Of course, businesses the world over lobby governments to shift regulations in their favor. But in developing economies, innovators must go further — building payment rails, logistics networks, or healthcare systems that companies in richer countries take for granted. In parts of Africa, working with the government, and sometimes helping reshape it, becomes part of the innovation itself.

Food4Education founder Wawira Njiru told us at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion last week that she started feeding 25 children in Kenya in 2012 and now feeds more than 700,000. To do that, her organization built kitchens and supply networks, but also worked with county governments to fund school meals, even where those responsibilities did not fit existing mandates.

“I always say, meet them where they are, not where you wish them to be,” Njiru said of regulators. That meant understanding government incentives, finding champions, and figuring out what agencies could actually fund.

Scaling across Africa means navigating regulatory regimes, financial systems, and government institutions. Companies that understand those institutions are learning — but also shaping — how the economies where they operate actually work.

African companies will need to do more than build apps, raise money, or deploy AI. They will need to make new ideas work inside the economies around them — and bring government along.

The View From Rwanda

Rwanda turned a logistics solution into national infrastructure after asking Zipline to solve a difficult healthcare delivery problem, according to the company’s Africa CEO.

Speaking at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion in New York, Caitlin Burton said the government initially asked Zipline to improve blood deliveries around the clock and in all weather.

The company built more than a drone network, adding an ordering portal, inventory management system and air traffic management tools for regulators.

“When we delivered on that, they changed their whole system around it,” Burton said. “That was really impressive to us, and that’s how we learned that this is how it becomes national infrastructure.”

The drones may be the symbol of Rwanda’s “flying ambulances,” but Burton said Zipline’s bigger feat was designing a system that fit what the government needed, not simply what the technology could do.

Notable

• Regulatory convergence can cut costs of non-tariff regulations by 15-30%, the UN Trade and Development office said in a recent report.