NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Ten fund managers active in Africa’s tech space have been selected from across the continent for the LAUNCH Capital Provider Fellowship Program, facilitated by the Collaborative for Frontier Finance (CFF), with the main objective of further advancing the capacity of these local capital providers (LCPs) to raise institutional capital. LCPs are first time fund managers based in market which can be a person or entity helping finance and allocate capital to businesses.

The LCPs are locally based fund managers or emerging capital allocators who are investing between $50k-$500k in tech or tech enabled, small and growing businesses. The majority of funds are targeting a >$20 million fund size providing early stage or growth capital in a mix of pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds. The funds are geographically spread across West, East and North Africa.

According to recent CFF survey of 90 LCP’s in Sub Saharan Africa, 96% have incremental funding needs and 85% expressed a need for technical assistance. There is an estimated $230 million funding gap in the LAUNCH cohort alone. FMO partnered with CFF to help address this challenge through the entrepreneurial ecosystem building efforts of the FMO Ventures Program Technical Assistance Facility, co-funded by the Dutch Government and European Union.