UN to Debut $1B for African Tech Startups

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) will launch an initiative to mobilize and invest in new startups in Africa, a report from Business Day said.

Part of the initiative, called Timbuktoo, will put $1 billion of public and private capital toward the goal in the next 10 years.

A statement from UNDP Africa said this project will look at engaging many partners from the private and public sectors to put eight hubs in the leading African startup ecosystems, Accra, Ghana; Nairobi, Kenya; Cape Town, South Africa; Lagos, Nigeria; Dakar, Senegal; Kigali, Rwanda; Casablanca, Morocco; and Cairo, Egypt, along with others.

The hubs will all focus on a different priority sector, including FinTech, AgriTech, HealthTech, GreenTech, creatives, TradeTech and logistics, smart cities and mobility, and tourism.

The initiative officially launched on Wednesday (Aug. 17) and is set to begin operations in 2023.

The Timbuktoo initiative was started in 2021 and the report said the initiative has also established University Innovation Pods to help encourage students to “engage in innovation and design thinking.” Those will become operational by the end of this year.

PYMNTS has written before about startups in Africa, including recently about a number of different operations that are getting off the ground there and moving beyond the borders of their home country.

Read more: South Africa, the Startup Hub With a Record for Launching Global Businesses

Among those is TallOrder, which develops cloud-based point-of-sale solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and which said it was looking at expanding to Europe and the U.S.

There’s also online learning platform Valenture, which expanded to London and Boston after opening in Cape Town initially.

And DataProphet, an AI developer working with the manufacturing industry to apply machine learning techniques, now serves customers in Japan, China, Europe, and North and South America.

Maurizio Caio, a managing partner with TLcom Capital, a venture capital firm, said South Africa was “kind of a parallel universe […] somehow the [country’s] entrepreneurs do not have a big interest in expanding in sub-Saharan Africa.

“They tend to go to Europe and to the U.S., so it’s kind of a different animal,” Caio said.