REGIONAL INSIGHTS
COTE D’IVOIRE TECH RISING / Read original article here /
When I first coined the KINGS (Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa) concept in September 2013, Cote d’Ivoire also known as Ivory Coast was a small “i” in the KiNGS. The country was just emerging from a tumultuous civil unrest that followed a disputed election in 2010 that ousted then incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo and set the country back. In 2016, when I wrote about “The KINGS of Africa’s Digital Economy” Ivory Coast had fully recovered, and its tech sector was on an acceleration path similar to Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
The francophone and the Portugesespeaking countries in Sub-Saharan Africa tend to get less attention compared to the English-speaking countries and thus Ivory Coast is rarely in focus. West Africa was predominantly colonized by the French such that only five out of the 15 countries in the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) were British colonies and thus English-speaking (Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and The Gambia) while Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau were the only Portugese colonies with Creole being the official language. The remaining countries in West Africa were French colonies and comprise Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. With the exception of Guinea, all francophone countries in West Africa use the same currency – Communauté Financière Africaine (“CFA”) that is issued by the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO; Banque Centrale des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest). The francophone countries in West Africa are members of the West African Economic and
Monetary Union (UEMOA; Union Économique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine) – a French union within ECOWAS. The CFA is pegged to the EURO and the members of the UEMOA have to keep 50% of their foreign assets in the French Treasury and have a French representative in its currency Board as a colonial-era arrangement to help stabilize the currency in the region. Ivory Coast is Africa’s 11th largest economy with a GDP of US$61B and population of 26M people with 13M active internet users. Having Ivory Coast as part of the KINGS is not only symbolic but important. In 2019, Ivory Coast ranked 110 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report from 122 the year before. According to Digest Africa, the 10 most funded startups in Ivory Coast have raised a combined $19M across 23 deals. Of these 23 deals more than half relate to early-stage investment: 12 are seed rounds, three are pre-seed rounds and grants each, two series A, and one venture deal, angel investment and series B. The largest amount
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n 2017, encouraged by this impressive turnaround my team took our annual Angel Fair Africa (AFA) to the Ivorian capital of Abidjan. Archangel, Esther Dyson, the event’s keynote speaker reacted remarked “I was pleasantly surprised with the level of tech innovation and digital entrepreneurship”. This final essay to see off 2021, will focus on Cote d’Ivoire’s digital economy and the startups that have raised capital and are leading the charge in the country. In the concluding paragraphs, I will also highlight some of the non-KINGS countries whose digital economies have picked up pace in 2021 with the attraction of investments similar to the KINGS.
1ST QUARTER 2022 | SYNAPSE
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