Fast Tracking Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa

The digital economy offers opportunities at scale to generate jobs, contribute to economic growth and productivity gains. Digital entrepreneurship will accelerate the digital transformation of Africa, which will be a key driver for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. It can also help address the growing digital gender gap and digital entrepreneurship is particularly favourable to youths. At the same time, there are still many challenges preventing the tech sector to contribute to its full potential to growth and development, in particular in the areas of regulation, business support, technical and business skills as well as international linkages.

The “Fast Tracking Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa” project (#FastTrackTech in Africa) aims to support digital entrepreneurs and tech startups in sub-Saharan Africa with online and onsite training, advisory and coaching focused on building digital and business skills as well as domestic, regional & international business generation and investment promotion. The project also engages with business support organizations and governments to foster local tech ecosystems.

The two-year project started in October 2019 supporting 7 countries: Benin, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. In 2022, the project continued in Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia under ITC’s SwitchON initiative, with the other four countries seeing continued support under the Netherlands Trust Fund V FastTrackTech multi-country project.

The International Trade Centre’s Netherlands Trust Fund V (NTF V) is a four-year partnership (July 2021 – June 2025) signed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands and the International Trade Centre to support micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the digital technologies and agribusiness sectors.

The programme includes both sectors in Ethiopia, Ghana and Senegal; and the digital technologies sector in a multi-country project in Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Uganda. NTF V follows on the successful NTF IV and NTF III programmes and will track its results through real-time customer relationship management and active risk management data systems.

In the digital technology sector, we are focusing on business-friendly tech ecosystems and tech hubs, offering tech start-ups (with a focus on agri-tech) and MSMEs resilient business models, linking them to national and international business and investment opportunities, and digitalizing traditional MSMEs.

We support IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies with export strategies, B2B matchmaking events and regional and international IT event exposure. We also aim to contribute to ICT and entrepreneurship-related policies to improve the tech ecosystem.