Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa

The hope and hype about African digital entrepreneurship, contrasted with the reality on the ground in local ecosystems. In recent years, Africa has seen a digital entrepreneurship boom, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into tech cities, entrepreneurship trainings, coworking spaces, innovation prizes, and investment funds. Politicians and technologists have offered Silicon Valley–influenced narratives of boundless opportunity and exponential growth, in which internet-enabled entrepreneurship allows Africa to “leapfrog” developmental stages to take a leading role in the digital revolution. This book contrasts these aspirations with empirical research about what is actually happening on the ground. The authors find that although the digital revolution has empowered local entrepreneurs, it does not untether local economies from the continent's structural legacies. Drawing on a five-year research project, the authors show how entrepreneurs creatively and productively adapt digital technologies to local markets rather than dreaming of global dominance, achieving sustainable businesses by scaling based on relationships and customizing digital platform business models for African infrastructure challenges. The authors examine African entrepreneurial ecosystems; show that African digital entrepreneurs have begun to form a new professional class, becoming part of a relatively exclusive cultural and economic elite; and discuss the impact of Silicon Valley's mythologies and expectations. Finally, they consider the implications of their findings and offer recommendations to policymakers and others

Fabricating Silicon Savannah

This PhD research thesis offers an historicised account of Silicon Savannah, a digital technology entrepreneurship arena in Nairobi, Kenya. Silicon Savannah is an opportunity to study the appropriation of technology innovation and commercialisation models in a lower income, developing economy. Fieldwork took place over 2015-6, a period when this embryonic ‘arena of development’ (Jorgensen and Sorensen, 1999) is subject to scrutiny about its high, but largely unverified, hyped expectations. As a result, this thesis dwells on how actors develop strategies to adopt and adapt to processes over which they have no discretion. Actors in Silicon Savannah individually and collectively develop strategies and gaming systems for enacting legitimacy and attracting resources. The analytical frame reveals a dimension of persistent colonial modality inherent in the practice of global capitalism of which the digital economy and ICT developmental projects are a part. This is indicated in policy discourses of digital entrepreneurship that disclaim alternatives and multiplicities, and take for granted that there is a standardised typology of progress. The result is a paradox where entrepreneurs are incentivised to demonstrate alignment with discourses that might not reflect their experience. The study aims to produce a ‘view from Nairobi’ by integrating the interpretive frameworks of the subjects of the study with the researcher’s analysis. Thus, it relies on ethnographic interviews and observations, and historical reconstruction using resources preserved in internet-based repositories like weblogs, emails and social media. Through this empirical work, this study makes several contributions to knowledge: First, it produces a rich historical account of Silicon Savannah as a zone of friction between ecologies of knowledge and practice. In this way, it is conversant with ethnographies of policy implementation and academic research interested in interactions between received prescriptions and local milieu. Second, it its discussion of actors’ strategic use of ‘narrative infrastructures’ (Deuten and Rip, 2000) and engages with the use of narrative in the production of and practices in arenas of development. Third, it discusses the perverse incentives and moral hazards that can emerge from doctrinaire discourses, as observed in case studies exemplifying a range of organisations that have social good imperatives and/or emphasise profit-making. Doing so callsinto question this presumed dichotomy. A fourth contribution isto the performativity programme. The thesis analyses how particular enactments act as proxies for capability in an arena characterised by sharp asymmetries. These asymmetries are reflected in the fact that the ability to bestow legitimacy and value is vested in distant geographies responsible for the promulgation of a particular digital entrepreneurship discourse and practice. A fifth contribution is to the coloniality school and the introduction of the methodological approach, ‘Africa as Method’, which provides that this kind of research cannot be accomplished without the integration of geographic and historical positionality. In the case of Kenya, this means paying attention to power topologies, political economy, governance philosophies, the fact of geographical hegemony and practices and relations characterised by the persistence of colonial modality. The thesis concludes with a contemplation of the future – a discussion that emerges from questioning whether a decolonised technoeconomic arena can flourish in a global digital economy that is underpinned by modernist philosophy

Spatially shaped imaginaries of the digital economy

This paper examines spatial imaginaries and their ability to circumscribe and legitimate economic practices mediated by digital technologies, specifically, the practices of digital entrepreneurship. The question is whether alternative imaginaries and typologies of digital entrepreneurship can be included in how we view digital entrepreneurship in order to stimulate new practices and imagined futures. Our case studies of digital entrepreneurs in a number of African cities illustrate that popular and academic spatial imaginaries and discourses, for example those that cast the digital economy as borderless and accessible, do not correspond with the experience of many African entrepreneurs. Furthermore, enacting the metaphoric identities that coincide with these imaginaries and their discourses is a skillset that determines which (and how) actors can participate. They reflect the inherent coloniality of the digital, capitalist discourse. The tendency in the digital economy is to regard the entrepreneur persona, as realistic and global, rather than performative and particular to the Euro-American context in which these personas have originated. Our interviews of 186 digital entrepreneurs demonstrate that digital imaginaries and metaphors cannot be neutral and apolitical. In order to be inclusive, they should evoke a sense of multiplicity, heterogeneity and contingency

A Collaborative Research Manifesto! An Early Career Response to Uncertainties

Social researchers have been adapting methods and practices in response to COVID-19. In the wake of these adaptations, but still in the midst of intersecting crises that the pandemic has exacerbated or shifted (e.g. health-social-political-economic), researchers face a future suffused with methodological uncertainties. This paper presents a Collaborative Research Manifesto that responds to this by promoting markers for mean-ingful collaborations in future research. The manifesto was co-written primarily through a series of workshops and events that were designed to identify challenges within, and potential for, collaborative research. Through this exploratory collaborative qualitative process, we highlight what the future of such research could look like and describe methodo-logical commitments that collaborative researchers should embody. The discussion draws on wider methodological literature to articulate the key role that ‘collaborative research’ can offer in uncertain times whilst being sensitive of the limitations of our assertive and radical programme

Transdisciplinarity in transformative ocean governance research—reflections of early career researchers

This paper interrogates the concept of transdisciplinarity, both theoretically and practically, from a perspective of early career researchers (ECRs) in transformative ocean governance research. Aiming to advance research methodologies for future complex sustainability challenges, the paper seeks to illuminate some common uncertainties and challenges surrounding transdisciplinarity from a marine science perspective. Following a literature review on transdisciplinary research, workshops, and a series of surveys, we determine that transdisciplinarity appears to be a concept in search of definition, and that there is a need to explore transdisciplinarity specifically from an ocean research perspective. The paper discusses a number of challenges experienced by ECRs in conducting transdisciplinary research and provides recommendations for both ECRs wishing to undertake more equitable transdisciplinary research and for the UN Decade for Ocean Science to support ECRs in this endeavour (Figure 1). Based on our findings, we interrogate the role of non-academic collaborators in transdisciplinary research and argue that future transdisciplinarity will need to address power imbalances in existing research methods to achieve knowledge co-production, as opposed to knowledge integration

How are Research for Development Programmes Implementing and Evaluating Equitable Partnerships to Address Power Asymmetries?

The complexity of issues addressed by research for development (R4D) requires collaborations between partners from a range of disciplines and cultural contexts. Power asymmetries within such partnerships may obstruct the fair distribution of resources, responsibilities and benefits across all partners. This paper presents a cross-case analysis of five R4D partnership evaluations, their methods and how they unearthed and addressed power asymmetries. It contributes to the field of R4D partnership evaluations by detailing approaches and methods employed to evaluate these partnerships. Theory-based evaluations deepened understandings of how equitable partnerships contribute to R4D generating impact and centring the relational side of R4D. Participatory approaches that involved all partners in developing and evaluating partnership principles ensured contextually appropriate definitions and a focus on what partners value. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41287-023-00578-w. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s) 2023.

How are Research for Development Programmes Implementing and Evaluating Equitable Partnerships to Address Power Asymmetries?

The complexity of issues addressed by research for development (R4D) requires collaborations between partners from a range of disciplines and cultural contexts. Power asymmetries within such partnerships may obstruct the fair distribution of resources, responsibilities and benefits across all partners. This paper presents a cross-case analysis of five R4D partnership evaluations, their methods and how they unearthed and addressed power asymmetries. It contributes to the field of R4D partnership evaluations by detailing approaches and methods employed to evaluate these partnerships. Theory-based evaluations deepened understandings of how equitable partnerships contribute to R4D generating impact and centring the relational side of R4D. Participatory approaches that involved all partners in developing and evaluating partnership principles ensured contextually appropriate definitions and a focus on what partners value

Figuration of an African digital entrepreneur

Maurice Mbikayi's sculpture, Techno Dandy, solicits a reflection on African digital entrepreneurs. In light of my research interests, Techno Dandy evokes for me the interaction of local and global digital capitalisms and the fabrications that emerge. Fabrication here refers to 'making', 'making up' and 'making do'. At the global scale both digitization and capitalism are envisioned as part and parcel of a seamless system of technology production that is desirable and replicable in every locale. Zoom into the microscale and you find attempts to syncretize the globalising model into local modes of existence

Malaysia Collaborates with the New York Academy of Sciences to Develop an Innovation-Based Economy

If Malaysia is to become a high-income country by 2020, it will have to transform into a knowledge-based, innovation economy. This goal will be achieved by developing an atmosphere conducive to experimentation and entrepreneurship at home; while reaching out to partners across the globe. One of Malaysia’s newest partnerships is with the New York Academy of Sciences. The Academy has expertise in innovation and higher education and a long history of promoting science, education, and science-based solutions through a global network of scientists, industry-leaders, and policy-makers. Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Dato’ Sri Mohd Najib Tun Abdul Razak, leveraged the Academy’s network to convene a science, technology, and innovation advisory council. This council would provide practical guidance to establish Malaysia as an innovation-based economy. Three initial focus areas, namely palm-oil biomass utilisation, establishment of smart communities, and capacity building in science and engineering, were established to meet short-term and long-term targets