Field notes & instruments.
Primary fieldwork first. AI as the compression layer. Everything public-safe, everything sourced.
Three years inside African tech, distilled.
Two mandates for one of the continent's largest founder-support funds. Key findings: 70% of funding comes from foreign sources; founders burn out operating as one-person ecosystems; imported VC models fail in local context.
The Collateral Ceiling
Why capital design, not capital supply, sets the ceiling. The first public intelligence brief from the archive.
Read the brief → InteractiveSystem Portrait
The ecosystem as a constraint network. Explore the diagnostic yourself.
Open the instrument → Field guideAfrican tech ecosystem
Nine patterns worth remembering, from capital mismatch to trust as an invisible tax.
Open the field guide →Stakeholder interviews: business owners, founders, VCs, ESOs, policymakers, donors, and funds of funds.
Countries of primary fieldwork across the continent.
Entrepreneur-support organizations scanned for The Academy.
Research-backed founder personas built from the interviews.
Public-safe note: these pages use aggregate stats, paraphrases, and broad themes, no raw internal quotes, sensitive claims, or unverified named quotes.
Slower thinking.
The Context Tax
How AI can hallucinate infrastructure in African markets without inventing a single fact.
Read the essay → MethodologyThe method, in full
Listen → Extract → Structure → Test → Build, and the chapters underneath it.
Read the method → Case studyArchive-to-Asset
The research system that powers everything on this page.
Read the case study →