At the heart of these lessons is the idea of Peer to Peer (P2P) learning. The idea that you don’t need some outside expert to come and tell you how to start a business in Africa because Africans have already done it. You just need the tools to learn from those founders.
You know that This Is Africa (TIA) and the best source of knowledge on how to start an African business is looking locally. So how do other African founders see this process?
##“In Africa, Everything Changes”
“Then we also realized that it doesn’t really work in Africa. In Africa, everything changes. Africa, we realized that they are skewed to more offline. They need to see tangible things before someone takes his money.” - Eyram Tawia, Co-founder of Leti Arts, MEST Incubator
Eyram learned the hard way that many of the assumptions companies in Europe or the US can rely on simply don’t work for African companies. He worked to start a gaming company but realized that he had to build an entire industry from scratch. Payment solutions that worked easily in other countries were blocked in Ghana.
The solution was to look to other African companies to learn how they were tackling similar problems. The knowledge wasn’t far away, it was right at home.
##Understanding African Risks
“As a startup if we don’t take care of those risks, they could kill us. One mistake could kill us. We talk to BRCK to exchnge knowledge”
-Samson Mutisya, founder of Tracopay
We’ve written plenty about the dangers of unknown unknowns. Well, Samson Mutisya knew that this was a particular danger for African startups. He faced an even greater number of unknown unknowns when starting his payment company Tracopay.
That’s why he sought out his fellow Nairobi based startup BRCK. He knew he could learn from their mistakes, understand what traps they had fallen into. This was invaluable knowledge for him and helped avoid similar problems for Tracopay.
##Building Communities
“We talk to entrepreneurs, the influential ones who I feel can help me. I understand that I can also help someone else, but this Whatsapp group is basically for people who can help each other. Once in a while we set up meetings to see how we can also be of help to younger entrepreneurs, and they ask us questions that we would have already discussed in this Whatsapp group. We discuss things almost every day, sometimes we hear about happenings in Silicon Valley and we ask ourselves how we can replicate them here, then we identify challenges that will make it difficult for us to implicate them.”
-Edward Amartey-Tagoe, Founder of Nandimobile, MEST Incubator
Everyone working at the MEST incubator in Accra believes in the power of networks to encourage this kind of P2P learning. The key is getting out there to create them if they don’t already exist. So if your city doesn’t have a network of entrepreneurs sharing their insights, create one.
Ultimately, if African startups are going to succeed, they need to support each other. That goes for raising money as well as sharing knowledge.