NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Across Africa, social innovators are tackling some of the continent’s most pressing challenges, from food insecurity and youth unemployment to climate resilience and access to education. These ventures are often deeply rooted in their communities, combining lived experience with entrepreneurial ambition, and they hold immense promise for inclusive growth. Yet for all this ingenuity and commitment, far too many social enterprises struggle to move beyond their early traction or scale beyond their initial promise.

As part of our programmes at LEAP Africa, we support early- and mid-stage social entrepreneurs by strengthening their leadership, organisational capacity and ability to scale. We routinely meet founders who’ve secured pilot customers, hired small teams and demonstrated early impact, yet remain stuck, unable to scale. This bottleneck is prevalent across the continent, from South Africa’s funding shortages and talent retention issues to Nigeria’s regulatory voids and infrastructure gaps.

This challenge persists despite rapid sectoral growth. Africa’s social entrepreneurship ecosystem now comprises an estimated 2.18 million enterprises generating significant economic activity. At the same time, persistently high youth unemployment — averaging 8.9% across the region as of 2023 and sometimes exceeding 40% in high-burden countries such as South Africa — has heightened expectations that social entrepreneurship will deliver both jobs and social impact.

To help African social enterprises deliver on these high expectations, accelerators, incubators and fellowships have proliferated across the continent over the past decade, fuelling optimism that entrepreneurship can emerge as a key driver of development. Yet a pressing question lingers: Are these existing support models actually aligned with what African social innovators need today?

Assessing Current Social Entrepreneur Support Models in Africa

To address this question, LEAP Africa, with support from partners at the William Davidson Institute (WDI, NextBillion’s parent organisation), conducted a needs assessment between March 26 and April 14, 2025 to better understand where current support models succeed, and where they fall short. We gathered insights from social entrepreneurs — including alumni of enterprise support programmes — as well as from funders, accelerators and other ecosystem actors. 

The survey received 89 responses from actors operating across 18 African countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and South Africa. A small number also operated in countries outside Africa, including the United States, United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates.

Of the respondents, 83% were active social innovators or entrepreneurs, including 25% who were alumni of LEAP Africa’s Social Innovators Programme, Youth Enterprise Fund and Sahara Impact Fund — programmes that have collectively supported over 290 fellows across Africa. The rest of the respondents played other roles in the ecosystem: 6% were from accelerators or incubators, 3% were from funders or investors, and 8% were other ecosystem actors, including educators, consultants and researchers.

Our goal in this assessment was to uncover ecosystem-wide patterns: where support succeeds, where it falters, and what shifts are needed to achieve more lasting impact. What stood out most in this survey data was not just the persistence of familiar challenges, but how consistently different actors described the same disconnects, often from opposing sides.

Funding remains the central constraint, but not in isolation

Across stakeholder groups, access to funding emerged as the most persistent and urgent barrier. Among active social innovators in our survey, nearly nine in 10 identified funding as their primary challenge, and more than 90% cited it as the most critical form of additional support they needed. Alumni of enterprise support programmes echoed this, with almost half naming funding access as the single most impactful component of their fellowship experience.

This aligns with broader ecosystem research. The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), for example, has consistently highlighted early-stage capital as a bottleneck for impact-driven ventures in Africa, particularly those operating in underserved or non-traditional markets, while acknowledging that this is often tied to gaps in business readiness. Our findings reinforce this, suggesting that funding constraints are symptoms of deeper structural gaps rather than standalone problems.

Funders and investors who participated in the study were clear: While an entrepreneur’s impact ambition matters, these intentions are not enough to motivate a funding decision unless the enterprise also demonstrates organisational readiness. They emphasised financial documentation, regulatory compliance and evidence of traction as non-negotiables. 

The result is a familiar mismatch. Social entrepreneurs often prioritise narrative, mission and early visibility, while investors focus on systems, structures, numbers and risk signals. Without targeted support to bridge this divide, even high-potential ventures may remain locked out of capital.

Investor readiness must go deeper than pitching

Pitch training is now a standard feature of enterprise support programmes, and with good reason. In our study, both entrepreneurs and accelerators rated pitching skills highly, especially at the enterprise’s early stages. But funders were more ambivalent, rating pitch training as useful but insufficient on its own.

What they valued more was due diligence readiness: the often invisible work of building financial discipline, governance structures and operational clarity. This mirrors findings from the International Trade Centre, which show that small businesses with robust financial management and the capacity to present a compelling business plan are better positioned to secure investment and adapt to market trends.

Too often, enterprise support programmes simulate investor interactions rather than providing entrepreneurs with genuine engagement opportunities. In practice, this leaves founders underprepared for the months of scrutiny that follow a genuine investment conversation. Our findings suggest a shift is needed, from preparing founders to perform well on demo days, to preparing them to withstand rigorous due diligence — while also ensuring that capital is ready to engage with early-stage social ventures in ways that match their realities.

As one investor in our survey noted, “I believe aspects of investor readiness programs, especially on due diligence, should be handled by investors directly.” Embedding investors into capacity-building sessions on due diligence, financial modelling and compliance could help demystify expectations on both sides and reduce friction in the funding process.

Investor-readiness support, which focuses on preparing entrepreneurs for due diligence, financial modelling and governance expectations, remains crucial. Complementing this with capital-readiness support — helping investors understand early-stage social ventures, their operational realities, and flexible funding approaches — can further reduce friction in the funding journey.

The ‘messy middle’ is where ventures stall and support thins out

Another consistent insight across stakeholder groups was the vulnerability of ventures in what funders described as the “messy middle”: the space between early validation — including business model, product-market fit and initial traction — and sustainable scale. While seed funding and mentorship are often available when ventures enter programmes, fewer enterprise support programmes provide sustained guidance, resources and other support as ventures grapple with operational complexity, team growth and market expansion.

This gap matters. Across Africa, 54% of startups fail overall, according to a 2020 report based on data from 2010 to 2018. The report analyzed 500 ventures from 32 countries, and found that these failures are often linked to funding shortages, weak infrastructure and limited management expertise — challenges that intensify in the scaling phase. In other words, capital without capacity can be destabilising. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 The State of Social Enterprise report underscores this reality, highlighting a critical need for strategic support to help budding African social enterprises build resilience and successfully cross the “valley of death.”

Accelerators and incubators in our study reinforced this point, highlighting the need for periodic impact assessments, continued advisory support and stronger post-programme engagement. Short-term interventions may spark momentum, but long-term accompaniment is what helps ventures convert opportunity into enduring resilience.

‘Relational capital’ still underpins everything

Despite differences in perspective among the diverse stakeholders in our survey, there was striking agreement on one point: Relationships matter. Mentorship, peer learning and networks were consistently rated as high-impact components of entrepreneur support programmes by entrepreneurs, programme alumni, funders, accelerators and incubators alike.

For founders operating in fragmented and resource-constrained environments, access to people often determines access to opportunity. Trusted mentors help entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty, networks open doors to markets and partners, and peer communities provide learning that no curriculum can replicate.

This emphasis on relational capital also shaped preferences around programme delivery. Across stakeholder groups, in-person or hybrid formats were strongly favoured over fully virtual models. While digital delivery can increase reach, respondents stressed that physical convening builds trust and depth in ways that online sessions often cannot.

Information asymmetry is an early — and underestimated — barrier

Beyond capital and capacity, another issue surfaced most clearly among ecosystem actors working close to the ground: lack of access to information. Several respondents pointed to basic gaps in awareness around business registration, documentation requirements and funding opportunities.

This insight reframes how we think about “readiness.” Many entrepreneurs are not excluded from funding because they are incapable, but because they are disconnected from information pipelines. Addressing this requires more than advanced training: It calls for clearer orientation, simplified resources and proactive outreach, especially for founders outside established urban hubs.

Can entrepreneurs pay, and should they?

The survey also revealed that the question of programme affordability remains sensitive. Entrepreneurs expressed caution about paying for fellowships (i.e., structured, time-bound programmes that provide mentorship, training and networking), while alumni of LEAP Africa’s enterprise support programmes and participants from accelerators and incubators were more open to the idea, as long as the value proposition and differentiation were clear. Suggested price points were modest, typically under $200, and respondents consistently emphasised the importance of scholarships, tiered pricing and subsidised options.

The issue is not whether support should be free or fee-based by default, but whether programmes deliver outcomes that founders value — such as credible pathways to funding, high-quality mentorship and applied learning — without excluding those they are intended to support.

Are we ready to deliver what social innovators need?

Taken together, these findings suggest that Africa’s social enterprise support ecosystem is not failing — but they also highlight clear opportunities to deepen the relevance, extend the reach and enhance the impact of these programmes. Many programmes excel at offering inspiration and early-stage exposure, but their support could often be strengthened by providing the depth, continuity and integration founders need to grow sustainably.

Readiness, then, is not just about expanding the number of accelerators or increasing funding pools. It is about redesigning this support around real entrepreneurial journeys by:

• Making funding access a core function, not an aspirational outcome, by brokering relationships and supporting compliance and documentation.
• Deepening investor readiness, with hands-on training that reflects actual due diligence processes.
• Supporting the messy middle, through sustained advisory engagement beyond short fellowship cycles.
• Placing relational capital at the centre, recognising that mentorship and networks are not add-ons but foundational infrastructure.
• Reducing information asymmetry, especially for founders operating outside dominant ecosystems.
• Balancing rigour with accessibility, ensuring that cost structures do not reinforce exclusion.

Social innovators across Africa are already doing the hard work of building solutions in complex environments. But if Africa’s social innovators are expected to solve complex development challenges, ecosystem actors must rethink, redesign and reengineer the support they provide, working with these innovators themselves to develop systems that match their needs — even if it means changing familiar programme models.

Amabelle Nwakanma is Director of Programmes and Partnerships; Akolade Oladipupo is Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) Coordinator; Abdullahi Ibrahim is Acting Manager, Programmes & MERL; and Chukwuemeka Okeke is Senior Programmes Coordinator at LEAP Africa.

Photo credit: PeopleImages