Who is really building East Africa’s digital knowledge economy
Note: This thought piece marks out an emerging research agenda I am developing on transnational and development led digital entrepreneurship in East Africa. It does not report empirical findings and the research is currently in progress.
In the last decade, East Africa has started to appear in global conversations about digital innovation. Nairobi as Silicon Savannah, Kigali as a smart city, Dar es Salaam and Kampala as emerging hubs. Books and reports on digital entrepreneurship in Africa now describe a continent that is beginning to escape Silicon Valley's long shadow (de Beer et al., 2017; Friederici, Wahome and Graham, 2020; Mutegi, Van Belle and Sevilla, 2023).
The standard story is reassuring. Support start ups, open hubs and accelerators, roll out broadband, bring in investors, and a dynamic knowledge economy will follow.
A question I keep coming back to, however, is simpler and more uncomfortable.
Who is actually building the knowledge economy that digital transformation in East Africa depends on, and who really benefits from it
This question connects my earlier work on Lombardy with my current focus on East Africa. It pushes me to look beyond ecosystem checklists and toward the lives and power of specific groups of people who shape what digital transformation looks like in practice.
People as hidden infrastructure
In my research on Lombardy I worked with the idea of global learning pathways. These are the study and work experiences that take founders abroad and then bring them back or keep them connected to a place like Milan.
Global learning pathways matter because they plug a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem into wider flows of knowledge, not only through patents or trade, but through people who move between places and carry ideas, methods and networks with them. This echoes broader work on how international experience and foreign knowledge feed into domestic innovation and entrepreneurship (Bathelt, Malmberg and Maskell, 2004; Li et al., 2012; Chen, Tan and Jean, 2016).
Once I started to see founders in Lombardy through this lens, I could not unsee the same pattern in East Africa.
Across Nairobi, Kigali, Dar es Salaam and Kampala, many visible digital ventures are led by people whose lives span several contexts. Some grew up in East Africa and later studied or worked in Europe, North America or Asia before returning. Others arrived from abroad and have since embedded themselves locally while keeping strong ties to their previous ecosystems.
This is the world of transnational entrepreneurs. Work by Drori, Honig and Wright and others defines them as people who are embedded in more than one geographical and social field and who draw on cross border networks, knowledge and legitimacy for their ventures (Drori, Honig and Wright, 2009; Drori, Honig and Wright, 2021; Bolzani, Marabello and Honig, 2020).
These founders are not just individual talents. They are part of the region's knowledge infrastructure. They interpret what foreign investors, donors or platforms expect. They translate technologies designed elsewhere into products that can work in East African markets. They open doors that may remain closed to founders whose biographies are entirely domestic.
Transnational prosocial power
With that role comes a particular type of power. Recent work on transnational social entrepreneurship talks about prosocial power, the ability of multi context entrepreneurs to mobilise resources and define what doing good looks like across places (Koehne, Woodward and Honig, 2022).
Transnational founders can become bridge builders, interpreters and problem solvers. They are often seen as the ones who know how to speak to both sides, the global and the local.
In East Africa's digital ecosystems this power can be a force for good. Distance can help founders question imported models that do not fit local realities. They can direct resources toward neglected problems and share ownership and decision-making with local teams.
But prosocial power also has a second edge. Koehne, Woodward, and Honig show how large social distance, one-way learning, and external impact on audiences can allow subtle forms of domination to sit inside seemingly benevolent ventures. In that case, transnational actors may unintentionally reproduce old hierarchies and dependencies in new digital clothes (Koehne, Woodward and Honig, 2022).
So the question for me is not whether transnational founders are heroes or villains. It is how their social distance, their willingness to learn as well as teach, and their openness to sharing power shape the kind of digital transformation they enable.
Donor scaffolding and the paradox of inclusion
Alongside this transnational architecture, another layer has grown quickly in East Africa. Over the past decade, international and bilateral organisations have turned toward entrepreneurship as a preferred development tool. They have financed innovation hubs, accelerators, challenge funds and impact programmes.
This has created what some authors describe as scaffolding around local ecosystems, compensating for gaps in finance, infrastructure and policy (Devine and Kiggundu, 2016; Manning and Vavilov, 2023; Kolade et al., 2021). In practice, this scaffolding opens doors for many founders. It offers training, seed grants, visibility and a sense that domestic innovation matters.
At the same time, research on Kenya's Silicon Savannah and digital entrepreneurship in Africa surfaces tensions. When founders organise their work around calls for proposals and programme cycles, it becomes possible to move from cohort to cohort without ever building a solid customer base. New terms like compepreneur capture this figure of the continually incubated entrepreneur who pitches constantly but rarely scales (Bramann, 2017; Friederici, Wahome and Graham, 2020; Mutegi, Van Belle and Sevilla, 2023).
Work on barefoot institutional entrepreneurship in contexts of deep poverty suggests that formal inclusion and new programmes are not enough on their own. Granados, Rosli and Gotsi describe a paradox of inclusion, where regulatory recognition of marginalised groups can actually trigger open and hidden forms of resistance from powerful actors, leaving those groups still excluded in practice and sometimes more vulnerable than before (Granados, Rosli and Gotsi, 2022).
Seen through this lens, some forms of development led entrepreneurship support in East Africa may widen access on paper while keeping agenda setting power with a relatively narrow circle of donors, intermediaries and transnational actors.
Two architectures of digital transformation
Putting these strands together, I see East Africa's digital transformation as resting on at least two intertwined architectures.
One is transnational. It is carried by founders and intermediaries whose lives and networks cross borders and who function as people-based infrastructure for knowledge and influence (Drori, Honig and Wright, 2009; Bathelt, Malmberg and Maskell, 2004).
The other is development-led. It is carried by organisations and programmes that use entrepreneurship as a vehicle for wider social and economic goals and that build scaffolding around local markets and institutions (Devine and Kiggundu, 2016; Manning and Vavilov, 2023).
Both architectures matter. Both bring resources that did not exist before. But they do not create the same kind of knowledge economy and they do not distribute power and opportunity in the same way.
What strikes me is how often public conversation treats them as one merged story about African start-ups, innovation, and digital leapfrogging (Friederici, Wahome, and Graham, 2020; Naudé, 2017). In that process, we risk losing sight of questions that feel increasingly urgent, for example:
How does social distance between founders and communities shape which problems count as worth solving
What happens to ventures that are disciplined more by programme logics than by demanding customers
Whose capabilities and institutions are being built and strengthened and whose are being bypassed or quietly undermined (Spigel, Kitagawa and Mason, 2020)
These are the questions that sit just under the surface when I listen to founders, hub managers, policymakers and investors in East Africa.
An agenda I am starting to follow
I am now developing a research agenda that takes these tensions seriously and connects them back to my earlier work on global learning pathways.
At its core lies a simple idea. Not all entrepreneurial activity contributes in the same way to a knowledge economy that is innovative, resilient and broadly beneficial. Some ventures and support structures may mainly recycle resources within tight circles. Others may create deeper forms of learning, capability building and institutional change (Asongu and Tchamyou, 2016; Peris-Ortiz, Ferreira and Merigó Lindahl, 2019).
In particular, I am interested in how
transnational digital entrepreneurs, with their multi-context embeddedness and prosocial power, shape patterns of knowledge transfer, innovation and influence in East African ecosystems (Drori, Honig and Wright, 2009; Koehne, Woodward and Honig, 2022)
Development-led entrepreneurship support, with its scaffolding, metrics and time frames, affects the sustainability and inclusiveness of digital ventures in the region (Devine and Kiggundu, 2016; Manning and Vavilov, 2023; Kolade et al., 2021)
Over the coming years I plan to explore these themes empirically across several East African ecosystems, combining data on founder trajectories with the lived experiences of different ecosystem actors. The detailed designs, data and methods will sit in my academic work. Here my aim is to name and frame the conceptual territory.
People as knowledge infrastructure.
Transnational prosocial power and social distance.
Donor scaffolding and paradoxes of inclusion.
Two architectures of digital entrepreneurship that coexist and sometimes collide in East Africa's digital transformation.
These are the threads I am beginning to follow.
Why this matters for East Africa's digital future
East Africa is often positioned as a testing ground for digital futures, from fintech and logistics to health, agriculture and artificial intelligence (Ndemo and Weiss, 2016; Eke, Wakunuma and Akintoye, 2023). Decisions made now about how to support entrepreneurship, structure partnerships and value different kinds of knowledge will shape who benefits from these futures and who is left carrying risk without real power.
Evidence from across the continent already shows that digital transformation can expand opportunities but also widen divides when benefits concentrate among those with higher education, income or connectivity (Asongu and Tchamyou, 2016; Bahia et al., 2021; Lee, 2024; Coeckelbergh, 2022).
By making visible the different roles played by transnational entrepreneurs and development-led support, I hope to contribute to a more honest and useful conversation about digital transformation in East Africa. One that recognises ambition and creativity, but also attends carefully to power, distance and the slow work of building a knowledge economy that serves many rather than a few.
This thought piece is a first step in that direction and a way of anchoring this line of thinking in public. The detailed research, evidence and answers will come later. For now, the most important move may simply be to name the architectures that are already shaping East Africa's digital future and to ask more deliberately what kind of knowledge economy they are building.
————————————-
Suggested citation
Andohr, J. (2025). Who is really building East Africa's digital knowledge economy. Thought piece on an emerging research agenda in transnational and development led digital entrepreneurship in East Africa.
—————————————
References
Asongu, S.A. and Tchamyou, V.S. (2016) ‘The impact of entrepreneurship on knowledge economy in Africa’, Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, 8(1), pp. 101–131. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/JEEE-08-2015-0045.
Bahia, K., Castells, P., Masaki, T., Cruz, G., Rodriguez Castelan, C. and Sanfelice, V. (2021) ‘Mobile Broadband Internet, Poverty and Labor Outcomes in Tanzania’, Policy Research Working Paper Series 9749, The World Bank.
Bathelt, H., Malmberg, A. and Maskell, P. (2004) ‘Clusters and knowledge: local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation’, Progress in Human Geography, 28(1), pp. 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph469oa
Bolzani, D., Marabello, S. and Honig, B. (2020) ‘Exploring the multi-level processes of legitimacy in transnational social enterprises’, Journal of Business Venturing, 35(3).
Bramann, J.U. (2017) ‘Building ICT Entrepreneurship Ecosystems in Resource-Scarce Contexts: Learnings from Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah”’, in Ndemo, B. and Weiss, T. (eds) Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 227–264. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57878-5_8.
Chen, X., Tan, D. and Jean, R. (2016) Foreign knowledge acquisition through inter-firm collaboration and recruitment: Implications for domestic growth of emerging market firms.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2022) The Political Philosophy of AI. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN-13: 978-1509548545. Available at: https://www.springerprofessional.de/coeckelbergh-mark-2022-the-political-philosophy-of-ai-polity-pre/23669498 (Accessed: 20 November 2024).
de Beer, J. et al. (2017) ‘A Framework for Assessing Technology Hubs in Africa’. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2929256 (Accessed: 20 November 2024).
Devine, R.A. and Kiggundu, M.N. (2016) ‘Entrepreneurship in Africa: Identifying the Frontier of Impactful Research’, Africa Journal of Management. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23322373.2016.1206802 (Accessed: 20 November 2024).
Drori, I., Honig, B. and Wright, M. (2009) ‘Transnational Entrepreneurship: An Emergent Field of Study’, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 33(5), pp. 1001–1022.
Drori, I., Honig, B. and Wright, M. (2021) ‘Chapter 71: Transnational entrepreneurship’. Available at: https://www.elgaronline.com/display/edcoll/9781839104138/9781839104138.00078.xml (Accessed: 20 November 2024).
Eke, D.O., Wakunuma, K. and Akintoye, S. (2023) ‘Introducing Responsible AI in Africa’, in Eke, D.O., Wakunuma, K. and Akintoye, S. (eds) Responsible AI in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–11. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08215-3_1.
Friederici, N., Wahome, M. and Graham, M. (2020) Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa – How a Continent Is Escaping Silicon Valley’s Long Shadow. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12453.001.0001 (Accessed: 19 November 2024).
Granados, N., Rosli, A. and Gotsi, M. (2022) ‘Staying poor: Unpacking the process of barefoot institutional entrepreneurship failure’.
Kolade, O. et al. (2021) ‘The business models of tech hubs in Africa: implications for viability and sustainability’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 33(10), pp. 1213–1225. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09537325.2021.1947492.
Koehne, F., Woodward, R. and Honig, B. (2022) ‘The potentials and perils of prosocial power: Transnational social entrepreneurship dynamics in vulnerable places’, Journal of Business Venturing, 37(4).
Lee, N. (2024) Innovation for the Masses. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Available at: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/innovation-for-the-masses/hardcover (Accessed: 20 November 2024).
Li, H. et al. (2012) ‘Returnees Versus Locals: Who Perform Better in China’s Technology Entrepreneurship?’, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 6(3), pp. 257–272. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1139.
Manning, S. and Vavilov, S. (2023) ‘Global development agenda meets local opportunities: The rise of development-focused entrepreneurship support’, Research Policy, 52(7), p. 104795. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104795.
Mutegi, L., Van Belle, J.-P. and Sevilla, J. (2023) ‘Assessing Kenya’s Technology Innovation Ecosystem Towards Digital Entrepreneurship Success’, in 2023 IST-Africa Conference (IST-Africa), pp. 1–14. Available at: https://doi.org/10.23919/IST-Africa60249.2023.10187878.
Naudé, W. (2017) ‘Entrepreneurship, Education and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Africa’, SSRN Electronic Journal. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2998964.
Ndemo, B. and Weiss, T. (2016) Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Peris-Ortiz, M., Ferreira, J.J. and Merigó Lindahl, J.M. (eds) (2019) Knowledge, Innovation and Sustainable Development in Organizations: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective. Cham: Springer International Publishing (Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74881-8.
Spigel, B., Kitagawa, F. and Mason, C. (2020) ‘A manifesto for researching entrepreneurial ecosystems’, Local Economy, 35(5), pp. 482–495. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0269094220959052.
