As Africa’s leaders, investors and institutions gather in New York, conversations around capital, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, trade and infrastructure are raising a more fundamental question: how does Africa convert its extraordinary potential into productive capability and lasting prosperity? At the centre of that conversion is entrepreneurship. But the challenge is no longer simply to produce more entrepreneurs. Africa must form better entrepreneurs; enterprise builders capable of organising its resources, capital, technology and opportunities into productive enterprises, competitive industries and enduring institutions.
Every September, the world comes to New York. Presidents, ministers, diplomats, development institutions, investors, corporate leaders, philanthropists, academics and civil-society organisations arrive. Speeches are delivered, bilateral meetings are held, investment opportunities are discussed and the great questions confronting humanity are debated.
The 81st United Nations General Assembly is no different. Yet beneath the formal diplomacy taking place in New York this week, another conversation about Africa has been unfolding. It is a conversation about capital, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, trade, industrialisation, investment and entrepreneurship.
At first glance, these appear to be different conversations but if we look more closely, however, and they begin to converge around one fundamental question.
UNDP has framed the African agenda around UNGA81 unusually directly. Who shapes the new rules? Who owns the infrastructure behind the artificial-intelligence revolution? Who captures the value from Africa’s resources, data and talent? Who gets trusted by capital, and on what terms?
At Unstoppable Africa 2026, held in New York on 20 and 21 September under the theme Powering Business, Scaling Economies, Shaping the Future, the Global Africa Business Initiative pushed the argument further. Its programme did not simply ask how Africa participates in the changing global economy. It asked who owns the value created from African resources, who controls capital flows, who builds the companies, and whether African businesses can move from participation towards ownership and scale.
When we look closely, we realise, these are not separate questions, but they are different expressions of the same question: How does Africa convert what it has into what it needs to become?
That may be one of the defining entrepreneurship questions of our generation, and it points towards an argument I believe African entrepreneurship discourse now needs to confront more seriously.
We do not simply need more entrepreneurs. We need better entrepreneurs.
Not because African entrepreneurs are somehow inherently deficient, but because the economic task before them is becoming more sophisticated. Africa needs entrepreneurs capable not merely of starting businesses, but of building productive enterprises; entrepreneurs capable of organising capital, technology, people and markets; entrepreneurs capable of entering value chains, competing across borders, building organisations that can scale and eventually creating institutions that can endure beyond their founders.
The challenge is therefore not merely entrepreneurial emergence. It is entrepreneurial formation.
AFRICA DOES NOT HAVE A SHORTAGE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTIVITY
The distinction matters because Africa is already extraordinarily entrepreneurial.
Small and medium-sized businesses dominate the continent’s private sector. The African Development Bank reported this year that SMEs account for roughly 90 percent of private firms in Africa’s developing economies, while the private sector generates more than 90 percent of jobs.
If entrepreneurship simply meant having many people engaged in business, Africa’s entrepreneurship problem should already be largely solved. It clearly is not.
New World Bank Enterprise Survey evidence published in April makes the problem particularly stark. Across 48 Sub-Saharan African economies, a firm that has been operating for almost three decades employs only a little more than twice the number of workers it employed when it began. Meanwhile, the region needs to create roughly 15 million new jobs every year simply to absorb its expanding working-age population.
Africa is producing businesses, but the harder challenge has been producing enough businesses that grow. Businesses that become productive and employ substantially more people as they mature. Businesses that export, acquire sophisticated management capabilities, move beyond dependence on the founder, become corporations and ultimately become institutions.
The entrepreneurship debate therefore cannot end with business formation. It must confront enterprise formation. This is why I increasingly believe that saying “Africa needs more entrepreneurs” is insufficient.
Quantity matters, particularly where productive entrepreneurship remains constrained, but quantity alone does not solve the development problem.
Africa needs better entrepreneurs.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “BETTER ENTREPRENEURS”?
We should be precise about what “better” means because ‘better’ does not mean wealthier entrepreneurs. It does not mean entrepreneurs with prestigious university degrees. It does not mean technology founders rather than traders, farmers, manufacturers or service businesses. And it certainly does not mean we are blaming entrepreneurs for structural conditions they did not create.
Better, describes capability. A better entrepreneur is progressively more capable of identifying real problems, allocating resources intelligently, understanding customers, building teams, maintaining financial discipline, creating systems, governing an organisation, adopting technology productively, entering new markets and building something that becomes increasingly independent of the founder’s personal effort.
The distinction is between entrepreneurship understood primarily as an activity and entrepreneurship understood as a productive capability and that distinction becomes extraordinarily important when we examine the conversations taking place around UNGA81.
AFRICA HAS SPENT DECADES TALKING ABOUT WHAT IT HAS
Africa’s development narrative has long been dominated by nouns. Discussions are usually centred around resources, population, land, minerals, markets, talent or capital.
We are constantly reminded of the continent’s enormous potential and much of that potential is real, but possession does not matter if we are not able to turn that potential into capability.
As a continent we possess minerals without possessing a minerals-processing industry, and we produce agricultural commodities without building sophisticated food companies. We have millions of business owners who are not capable of producing enough scalable enterprises. We attract foreign investment without developing domestic suppliers and are now adopting artificial intelligence without building African AI companies. We even now have a continental free-trade agreement without having enough enterprises capable of competing continentally.
The statistics make this difficult to ignore. In 2025, 76.7 percent of Africa’s merchandise exports were primary goods, according to UN Trade and Development. That statistic tells us that Africa possesses resources, but possession does not on its own bring productive transformation.
The same pattern appears in trade. Intra-African trade represents only about 16 percent of the continent’s total exports, according to UNCTAD. Yet trade within Africa tends to contain greater value addition than much of Africa’s external trade. Again, the opportunity exists but likewise the conversion remains incomplete.
DEVELOPMENT HAPPENS IN THE VERBS
We have spent too much time discussing Africa through nouns when the real work of development happens in the verbs. Instead of talking merely about capital, minerals, markets or infrastructure, we need to start organising capital, processing minerals, commercialising knowledge, manufacturing products. Development happens when we finance enterprises, manage organisations, enter markets, scale businesses and institutionalise enterprises.
CONSIDER WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH CAPITAL
Just before UNGA’s high-level week, the World Bank released a striking set of figures.
Private capital mobilised by the World Bank Group across developing economies increased from $35 billion in FY2022 to $112 billion in FY2026. When combined with the World Bank Group’s own financing, total financing and mobilisation in developing economies exceeded $200 billion in FY2026.
Africa participated meaningfully in that increase. Private capital mobilised across the continent rose from approximately $9 billion in FY2022 to $22 billion in FY2026, an increase of nearly 150 percent. This is progress.
Africa needs more capital. African entrepreneurs need capital. Infrastructure requires capital. Industrialisation requires capital.
But the same figures contain a warning. Private capital mobilisation in low-income countries globally remained at only around $3 billion, compared with $37 billion in lower-middle-income countries and $50 billion in upper-middle-income countries.
So the financing problem remains real. But suppose we become successful at mobilising capital. Suppose Africa’s $22 billion becomes $40 billion, then $60 billion, then $100 billion.
A second question immediately arises. What will the capital become?
Will it become factories? Productive enterprises? Infrastructure? Export capacity? African intellectual property? Regional companies? Better management? Competitive suppliers? Enduring institutions?
Capital entering Africa is not guaranteed to bring economic transformation. Sometimes it comes and immediately leaves without leaving much behind. Someone must harness that capital convert capital into productive capability that multiplies value.
EVEN CAPITAL NEEDS AN ENTERPRISE
One of the most revealing developments during UNGA week has been the attention being paid to precisely this conversion.
UNDP and UNCDF’s Investment Accelerator has focused on turning investment pipelines into investable, job-creating ventures. Those words deserve attention.
An opportunity does not automatically an enterprise. An enterprise does not automatically become investable. And even an investable enterprise does not automatically productive. Even when fully it does not automatically become an institution. Something must happen between each stage.
Another development this week reinforces the point. FSD Africa launched its Manager Finance Facility on 17 September to strengthen emerging African alternative capital providers and help them provide more appropriate financing to small and growing businesses.
This is very important because capital requires machinery. Someone must understand the business. Someone must assess risk. Someone must structure the instrument. Someone must perform due diligence. Someone must understand whether debt, equity, revenue-based finance or another structure suits the enterprise. Someone must monitor performance and understand the market well enough to distinguish an unconventional opportunity from an irresponsible investment.
Capital travels through an architecture and weakness at any point can break the conversion.
This explains an apparent African paradox. Investors have historically complained that they cannot find enough investable enterprises while entrepreneurs simultaneously complain that they cannot find enough capital.
Both can be telling the truth because the problem may lie partly in the conversion machinery between them.
AFRICA’S MINERALS TELL THE SAME STORY
Nowhere is the difference between possession and capability clearer than in natural resources.
The opening conversation at Unstoppable Africa was provocatively titled From Raw Deals to Real Value. The programme noted that Africa supplies about 69 percent of the world’s cobalt and 76 percent of its manganese, yet captures less than 1 percent of global clean-energy manufacturing value and refines less than 5 percent of most critical minerals it produces.
Whatever methodological qualifications may surround individual estimates, the structural point is difficult to dispute when placed alongside the broader trade data showing that primary goods still represented 76.7 percent of African merchandise exports in 2025.
Africa possesses something the world desperately needs while capturing surprisingly little of the value created from it because a mineral deposit is not an industry.
To create an industry someone must process the material. Someone must develop the technology, manufacture the components, assemble the product, own the intellectual property and build the brand. At every stage, value is created.
This is why Africa, for much of its history has been indispensable to global industry without owning much of that industry.
The deeper question is therefore not simply whether African minerals enter global value chains, but we must ask if African entrepreneurs and African enterprises enter those value chains with them?
That is the reason where to us as a continent, the proposition that “we need better entrepreneurs” becomes economically serious because a sophisticated industrial opportunity requires sophisticated enterprise builders.
PARTICIPATION IS NOT OWNERSHIP, AND OWNERSHIP IS NOT CAPABILITY
Africa has understandably spent decades demanding greater participation in global trade, technology, finance and governance. Participation matters, but we must understand that participation cannot be the destination. The progression should increasingly move from participation to capability, scale and ownership.
An African company can participate in a global supply chain while possessing little bargaining power. A country can host an assembly plant while importing most of its sophisticated inputs. A local contractor can win procurement while acquiring little transferable knowledge. A technology company can distribute another company’s platform without owning the underlying technology.
Countries can even insist on local ownership percentages while still failing to develop the organisational capabilities required to compete internationally.
Ownership matters significantly, but capability determines what ownership can ultimately accomplish.
The real ambition should therefore be to produce African entrepreneurs capable of turning participation into capability, capability into competitive enterprise, enterprise into ownership and ownership into enduring economic power.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL TEST US AGAIN
UNDP’s framing for UNGA81 asks another important question: Who owns the infrastructure behind the AI revolution? That question should fundamentally alter Africa’s AI conversation.
Much of our discussion currently concerns adoption. How can African entrepreneurs use AI? How can students use it? How can governments deploy it? How can companies automate? These are necessary questions, but economically, they are only the beginning. The deeper question is: Which parts of the AI economy will African enterprises build?
The Unstoppable Africa programme explicitly framed its AI conversation around moving African developers and entrepreneurs from users towards builders and owners of models, platforms, products and infrastructure.
That changes the developmental ladder and helps Africa to move from consumption to ownership because if we are not careful, Africa could become one of the world’s most enthusiastic AI markets while remaining structurally dependent upon external compute, models, cloud infrastructure, intellectual property and platforms. That would represent technological adoption and would not necessarily represent technological capability.
Again, the missing element is not simply another entrepreneur. It is a better-formed entrepreneur capable of moving beyond using technology towards building enterprises around it.
UGANDA SHOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ENTREPRENEURS MOVE FIRST
One of the week’s most useful examples of this model comes from Uganda.
A World Bank study published on 21 September found that Uganda’s battery-swapping network expanded from approximately 150 stations in mid-2024 to more than 350 by late 2025. Motorcycles account for more than 60 percent of Uganda’s registered vehicle fleet, including more than 400,000 in Greater Kampala alone.
Entrepreneurs and enterprises are already building the market. But precisely because the market is growing, the constraint is changing.
The World Bank estimates that smart charging in Greater Kampala could reduce the modelled annual cost of additional energy losses from approximately $21 million to $10 million. Its roadmap identifies regulatory clarity, affordable finance, standards, grid investment, charging coordination and urban planning among the requirements for scale.
This I believe is a powerful entrepreneurship lesson because it shows that the bottleneck moves. At first the question is entrepreneurial: Can somebody make this work? Then it becomes organisational: Can somebody make it repeatable? Then financial: Can it attract enough appropriate capital to scale? Then infrastructural: Can the surrounding physical systems support it? Then institutional: Can regulation, standards and public systems evolve around the emerging market? Eventually bringing everything together by asking whether enough capable enterprises can interact for an industry to emerge?
This progression is why entrepreneurship policy cannot simply mean encouraging more people to start businesses. The objective must be to form entrepreneurs capable of travelling further along the journey.
THE EVIDENCE FOR “BETTER ENTREPRENEURS”
The African Development Bank says SMEs represent roughly 90 percent of private firms across Africa’s developing economies. Yet it also acknowledges that too few grow into large enterprises.
The World Bank’s 2026 Enterprise Survey analysis shows that across 48 Sub-Saharan African economies, firms approaching 30 years of age employ barely twice as many workers as when they started.
Africa therefore does not simply face an enterprise-entry problem, it faces an enterprise-development problem.
The argument here is not that every microenterprise should become a multinational corporation and it is not to diminish the dignity or economic importance of small businesses.
The ideas is that as a continent attempting to create approximately 15 million jobs every year, we cannot depend only on continuously creating tiny firms. We also need substantially more existing firms to become more productive, employ more people, enter larger markets and build increasingly sophisticated organisations.
That requires capital, but it also requires formation. We need to develop financial literacy, strategic thinking, management capability, customer understanding, governance, operations, technology, leadership, talent development, market intelligence, risk management and institution building.
The entrepreneur who can start a business is not automatically equipped to build a corporation and the entrepreneur who can personally sell a product is not automatically equipped to build a sales organisation. Similarly, the founder who can manage five employees is not automatically equipped to lead five hundred and the company capable of serving one city is not automatically capable of operating across five countries.
Each transition requires the entrepreneur to become something different. That is formation.
THE AfCFTA MAKES BETTER ENTREPRENEURS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT
The African Continental Free Trade Area demonstrates the same principle at continental scale.
AfCFTA is creating the institutional architecture for a much larger African market. Yet UNCTAD reported in late 2025 that intra-African trade still accounted for only about 16 percent of Africa’s total exports.
The opportunity is enormous precisely because regional trade tends to carry more value addition. UNCTAD has repeatedly found African regional trade to be more diversified and more manufacturing-intensive than much of the continent’s external trade.
But a trade agreement cannot manufacture a product. A tariff schedule cannot acquire a customer. A customs protocol cannot build a brand. A government cannot sign an enterprise into competitiveness.
Governments can create conditions, institutions can reduce friction, infrastructure can connect markets, but enterprises must ultimately conduct the commerce and better entrepreneurs must build those enterprises.
This is why AfCFTA is not only a trade project. It is an entrepreneurship challenge.
Africa may be constructing a continental market faster than it is constructing continental-grade enterprises.
BETTER ENTREPRENEURS DO NOT REMOVE THE NEED FOR BETTER INSTITUTIONS
There is, however, a danger in the proposition. “We need better entrepreneurs” must never become shorthand for telling African businesspeople that every structural problem is their personal failure. It is not.
Entrepreneurs cannot individually solve sovereign risk. They cannot personally build national electricity grids. They cannot harmonise customs systems. They cannot eliminate currency volatility. They cannot create deep capital markets by themselves. They cannot compensate indefinitely for broken infrastructure.
So better entrepreneurship must sit alongside better institutions because entrepreneurial capability needs to be supported by institutional capability. Neither substitutes for the other.
Weak entrepreneurs operating within strong institutions will still struggle to create extraordinary enterprises while extraordinary entrepreneurs operating permanently within broken systems waste enormous energy overcoming avoidable friction.
Africa needs both better entrepreneurs and better institutions.
THE ENTERPRISE IS A CONVERSION MACHINE
This brings us to what may be the deepest entrepreneurship insight emerging from this week’s UNGA conversations. What does an entrepreneur actually do?
The entrepreneur rarely creates every ingredient. People already possess skills. Capital already exists somewhere. Customers already have problems. Technology already exists. Suppliers possess inputs. Markets contain demand.
The entrepreneur’s distinctive work is to organise. The entrepreneur brings previously disconnected resources together into a configuration capable of creating value.
Entrepreneurship is therefore not merely business ownership, it is organised possibility. The enterprise makes that organisation repeatable and the institution makes it durable.
This is why better entrepreneurs matters so much because the quality of the entrepreneur affects the quality of the conversion.
FROM BETTER ENTREPRENEURS TO BETTER ENTERPRISES
Our entrepreneurship discourse therefore needs to become more ambitious. We should continue celebrating people who start. Starting matters, but we must become equally interested in whether they learn to build.
The central question should progressively move from the number of entrepreneurs being created to deeply looking at the quality of entrepreneurs that we are forming?
Can they allocate capital? Can they understand unit economics? Can they develop people? Can they build management teams? Can they create systems? Can they adopt technology intelligently? Can they compete across borders? Can they operate within sophisticated value chains? Can they govern organisations? Can they transition from founder to institution builder?
Because ultimately that is the journey entrepreneurial formation must prepare people to undertake.
AFRICA NEEDS CONVERSION INFRASTRUCTURE
The UNGA conversations also suggest that better entrepreneurs require something around them. We might call it conversion infrastructure. This is not another physical institution or programme, but a way of understanding the systems that transform potential into productive capability.
We need financial institutions that convert savings into investment, and education that converts knowledge into human capability. We need entrepreneurs who convert opportunity into enterprise and enterprises that convert resources into products and services. We need capital markets that convert savings into long-term financing. We need standards institutions that can help convert local production into exportable production. We need transport infrastructure that converts production into market access and digital public infrastructure that can reduce transaction costs and make entirely new services possible. We need governance systems that converts founder-dependent businesses into organisations capable of enduring.
This is the conversion architecture upon which our future as a continent can ultimately be built on.
STOP MEASURING ONLY WHAT GOES IN
This argument should also change how we think about African development. When a billion-dollar investment is announced, we tend to concentrate on how much money is coming, but I believe we should also ask, what will African enterprises become capable of doing because the investment happened? When a mine opens, what capability remains? When an industrial park is built, what enterprises emerge around it? When an international technology company enters, what local technology capability develops?
This is the thinking that will move us from measuring input accumulation towards measuring capability accumulation because capability is ultimately the more durable asset.
A mineral deposit can be exhausted. A grant can be spent. A loan can mature. A foreign investor can leave. A technology can become obsolete. But engineers can remain. Managers can remain. Supplier networks can remain. Organisational knowledge can remain. Industrial standards can remain. Enterprises can remain. Institutions can remain.
THE REAL QUESTION EMERGING FROM NEW YORK
The significance of UNGA81 for African entrepreneurship may therefore not lie in any single speech, investment announcement or summit declaration.
It lies in the convergence of questions.
Who builds? Who owns? Who finances? Who captures value? Who controls infrastructure? Who enters the value chain? Who scales? Who becomes capable? And what remains afterwards?
These are entrepreneurship questions because entrepreneurs and enterprises sit at the point where resources become productive activity.
Therefore, we need better entrepreneurs. We need entrepreneurs capable of converting capital into productive assets. Entrepreneurs capable of converting African resources into African value chains. Entrepreneurs capable of converting technology adoption into technological capability. Entrepreneurs capable of converting AfCFTA’s market access into actual continental commerce. Entrepreneurs capable of converting small businesses into scalable enterprises. Entrepreneurs capable of converting founder energy into organisational systems. Entrepreneurs capable of converting enterprises into institutions.
FROM POTENTIAL TO PRODUCTIVE POWER
For generations, Africa has been described as a continent of potential. Perhaps we should become increasingly uncomfortable with the compliment because potential is possibility that has not yet been converted.
The objective cannot be to remain perpetually promising. It must be to become capable and that requires us to ask different questions. And the first question I believe we must ask is: What quality of entrepreneurs are we forming?
I believe that is the question I hear beneath many of the African conversations taking place around the United Nations General Assembly this week.
Africa certainly needs capital. It needs technology. It needs infrastructure. It needs investment. It needs functioning markets. It needs stronger institutions. But between all those inputs and the development outcomes we seek stands a human being capable of organising possibility into productive enterprise. That person is the entrepreneur, and I believe the quality of that entrepreneur matters.
So, the defining African entrepreneurship proposition for the next era should be: WE NEED BETTER ENTREPRENEURS. Because Africa’s future will not be determined merely by how many people start businesses.
It will increasingly be determined by how many of those people become capable of building enterprises; how many enterprises become capable of building value chains; how many value chains develop into industries; and how many of those enterprises eventually become institutions capable of enduring beyond their founders.
The great African entrepreneurship challenge is therefore not simply emergence. It is formation. And perhaps that is the deeper message coming from New York this week.
Africa has spent decades telling the world what it has. The next chapter must demonstrate what better-formed African entrepreneurs can build with it.
Dr Luckmore Kudakwashe, is the Founder of The Next Africa Initiative, a pan-African platform committed to developing better entrepreneurs, stronger enterprises and enduring institutions across the continent. Known as The African Entrepreneurship Evangelist, he writes and speaks on entrepreneurship, enterprise building, business leadership and Africa’s economic transformation.
He is the author of THE NEXT AFRICA: A Road Map and Blueprint for a New Generation of African Entrepreneurs, which advances a vision for an Africa transformed through a new generation of purpose-driven entrepreneurs capable of building consequential enterprises and enduring institutions.
