The question isn't whether young Africans are capable of building. The question is whether we are building systems capable of giving them room to build.
Thank you for having me. I want to start somewhere unusual for a room like this — not with a statistic, but with a question I've been asked in some form for almost fifteen years: what makes young people in this region so entrepreneurial?
I've come to dislike the question, because it assumes the answer is a trait. Ambition, hustle, resilience — whatever word is fashionable that year. I don't think that's it. I think we've built a generation extremely good at compensating for the absence of systems, and we've mistaken the compensation for the culture.
The question isn't whether young Africans are capable of building. The question is whether we are building systems capable of giving them room to build.
When The Next 10,000 started, it wasn't a mentorship programme first. It was an attempt to answer a narrower question: what specifically stops a capable twenty-four-year-old with a working idea from turning it into a functioning business within eighteen months? The answer, most of the time, wasn't a lack of ambition. It was a lack of a bank account that would extend credit, a lack of an address that landlords would accept, a lack of someone willing to vouch for them in a system built to be skeptical of exactly the kind of first-time founder they were.
None of that shows up in a speech about hustle. All of it shows up in a spreadsheet about default rates.
So the work, if it's honest, isn't about celebrating young builders. It's about removing the thousand small frictions that make building unnecessarily hard, and being precise enough to name them instead of talking around them with encouragement.
I'll close with this. We are not short of ambition in this room, or in this country, or on this continent. We are short of systems willing to bet on that ambition before it has already proven itself elsewhere. That is the work. Thank you.