The European Commission’s record for ENRICH in Africa, a project to link African incubators and accelerators into one network, carries two dates: a start on 1 January 2021 and an end on 30 June 2024, at a total cost of €3,586,505. Ecosystem-building fails when it runs on that calendar alone, because the relationships, records and habits a founder community depends on take longer to form than a grant lasts, and few projects name anyone to hold them after the final payment. Continuity design closes the gap: decide early who inherits each thing the project builds, and let those heirs run it alone while the money is still flowing.
Key Takeaways
- Ecosystem support arrives as dated projects: between 2020 and 2023, five major funders put more than $300 million into African tech-innovation support through 68 rounds, most of it via intermediaries.
- Hubs close on the same calendar. A 2019 AfriLabs and Briter Bridges study counted over 110 African hubs that had shut in the previous few years, citing bankruptcy, pivots and the expiry of their mandate.
- Results at closing predict little about what lasts. Tufts researchers who returned to three Kenyan food-security projects two to three years after exit found many gains had slipped, some to baseline or below.
- What lasted in Kenya had resources, local capacity, motivation and linkages behind it, and a gradual exit. Savings groups that started without outside capital kept growing.
- Entrepreneurial Communities and Ecosystems tells builders to stay for the long haul and assumes permanent local institutions. In East Africa a funder’s project cycle sets the clock, so the long haul has to be written into the handover.
- The Handover Will names, for each asset a project builds, its heir, its yearly running cost and the month the heir first runs it unaided.
Two dates on a project record
The ENRICH record is ordinary. A consortium, a budget, deliverables and a closing date, and now the status “Project closed”. The consortium planned further ahead than most: it set up the Enrich in Africa Center to carry the network on, and in 2024 that center published a study, financed under the same grant, of who pays for African innovation support.
The study describes the calendar most ecosystem builders work to. The five funders it could trace in detail (BMZ, the Gates Foundation, the European Commission, the African Development Bank and AFD) distributed more than $300 million between 2020 and 2023 through 68 funding rounds, with a median round of $1.5 million, to 56 recipients. Local support organizations were rarely the direct recipients. Money passed through intermediaries, many of which kept 10 to 15 percent as overhead, and reporting demands kept growing. The report also found funders “consolidating their funding for longer periods”, which is welcome. Longer periods still end.
The organizations on the receiving end live on that rhythm. When AfriLabs and Briter Bridges surveyed almost a hundred hubs in 2019, they identified 643 hubs across Africa and over 110 that had shut operations in the preceding few years “due to bankruptcy, pivoting, or the expiration of their mandate.” Sixty percent of respondents received external funding, and most had received less than $100,000 in total. An expired mandate is a project ending on schedule. The closed hub is the loss a survey can see; the founder community it convened, with its contacts, its meeting night and its trust, is harder to count.
A 1914 extension service and a five-year grant
Morgan Clevenger and Michael Fortunato’s edited volume, Entrepreneurial Communities and Ecosystems (Routledge, 2022), is written from American practice, and its sense of time is generous. The editors open by telling readers that “entrepreneurship developers are in this for the long haul”. Their second chapter adds that ecosystems start small and gather momentum slowly: “Rome was not built in a day, and neither is a community or ecosystem.” The chapter on education traces institutional support to the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which placed agricultural extension services in every land-grant university. Where the book worries about short horizons, it blames policy that swings with each electoral cycle.
The long haul in that picture is carried by institutions built to stay: the extension office, the county chamber, the Small Business Development Centers the editors thank by county in their dedication. A builder in Pennsylvania who gives twenty years to her town has an office and a likely successor around her.
The advice lands differently in Kampala or Nairobi. The feeders the book counts on, funders and support programs, mostly arrive here as projects, and the clock that governs them is set in a head office abroad. Aid also moves in sharper swings than the economies it supports: Homi Kharas at Brookings estimated in 2008 that official aid was five times as volatile as GDP for the average recipient country. The person most committed to the long haul is often a local convener whose salary sits on a project budget line with a closing date.
So the book’s patience transfers and its institutional assumption does not. In most East African hubs the patience is housed in a grant agreement. Building a permanent house for it is part of ecosystem work here, and a project can fairly be judged by what it leaves standing.
What Kenyan villages kept after the projects left
Few funders go back to look. Jindra Čekan, drawing on twelve years of Valuing Voices research, estimates that ex-post evaluation, a return visit after a project closes, has been done for far less than 1 percent of global development projects.
One of the exceptions happened in Kenya. Tufts University researchers, working with USAID’s FANTA project, followed three food-security projects run by ADRA, CARE and Food for the Hungry whose funding ended in 2008 and 2009, and surveyed the same areas again in 2011. Their central finding is uncomfortable for anyone who writes closing reports: impact measured at exit did not reliably predict benefit two to three years later. More gains declined than held, several to baseline or below.
Two details map closely onto ecosystem work. Community health workers mostly kept serving, but gave less time, partly because the planned link to the Ministry of Health was still tenuous when the projects ended and those fledgling connections dissolved at exit. CARE’s community savings groups went the other way and thrived. They had started without external capital, lent from members’ own savings under strict bylaws, and paid a local trainer a fee to form new groups after a year-long graduated course. The researchers traced what lasted to four conditions (resources, technical and managerial capacity, motivation, and linkages) and to a gradual exit, with participants operating on their own before closure. They also asked funders to consider lengthening the typical five-year project cycle.
A founder community has the same anatomy. Its resources are a room, a data bundle and the convener’s hours. Its capacity is whoever can run the monthly meeting and the pitch night. Its motivation is the founders’ own reasons to come when nobody is paying for lunch. Its linkages are the bank officer, the registry desk and the investor who returns the program manager’s calls. When all four sit with staff whose contracts end with the grant, the last day is quiet and final: the WhatsApp group loses its admin, the founder records leave on the implementer’s laptop, and the bank officer’s number leaves in the program manager’s phone.
Nielsen’s warning about the project industry
S. L. Nielsen and three co-authors, quoted in the book’s chapter on policy, ask whether political intervention becomes more of a support to the consultants and trainers “that feed on designing entrepreneurial projects than a support to entrepreneurs”. The intermediary overheads in the ENRICH study give the question weight, and an organization kept alive by renewals learns to serve the renewal. On this reading the end date is the one discipline a funder holds, some of those 110 hub closures were healthy, and a plea for continuity sounds like a plea for the next grant.
Continuity design accepts the incentive problem and keeps the end date exactly where the contract puts it. What should outlive a project is narrower than the organization that ran it: the founders’ ties to each other, their records, the habit of meeting and the links to banks and government. A hub can close while its community carries on, provided the community’s assets were placed with the community from the start.
CARE left and the Kenyan savings groups kept lending, because everything they needed already sat with the members. The design question for an ecosystem project is how much of what it builds can be arranged that way from the first month.
Three years in Ephesus
The Kenyan study listed motivation among its four conditions, and of the four it is the one a funder can least buy. The water committees that kept working did so, the researchers found, out of a sense of obligation to their communities and the stewardship of scarce water. Luke records a handover built on that same footing. After three years in Ephesus, Paul called the city’s elders to Miletus and gave the work away in one speech (Acts 20:17 to 38). He named them overseers, warned them about what would follow, and said, “Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace.” He reminded them that his own hands had supplied his needs, so the church’s life had never rested on his upkeep. Continuity planning in the secular sense can list resources, capacity and linkages, and it can name motivation as a factor. It cannot issue it. Paul placed the elders’ motivation in a trust that sat on no one’s budget, and that is what let them weep at the shore, knowing they would never see his face again, and walk home as overseers.
The Handover Will
Before the inception report goes to the funder, list every asset the project will create and write beside each one who holds it after the last disbursement. That list is the Handover Will, written the way a will is: by the party that will be gone, for the people still in the room. For a project already running, write it before the final year’s workplan.
| What the project builds | Heir after the last payment | Yearly cost to the heir | Month the heir first runs it alone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder records and contacts, held with consent | A founders’ association, plus each founder’s own copy | Storage and one volunteer’s time | Six months before close |
| The monthly gathering | Alumni businesses hosting in rotation | Room and tea, or a local sponsor | The final two quarters |
| The mentor roster | The mentors, with one of them coordinating | A shared calendar | The final quarter |
| Peer savings or deal circles | Members, under their own bylaws | Members’ contributions | From the first cycle |
| Links to banks, registries and ministries | Named founders, introduced in person | Their time | Before the program manager’s contract ends |
| The name, website, domain and social accounts | Whoever hosts the gathering | Renewal fees | At registration |
The heir has to exist apart from the implementer, which rules out “the hub” when the hub is the grant. The cost has to be small enough for the heir to carry, which is why the savings circle is the easiest row to fill. The month has to fall before the end, so heirs run the work while staff are still there to catch a fall.
Kampala’s Hive Colab shows the two layers on one page of its website: an accelerator built with the Argidius Foundation, a Youth Startup Academy financed by Korea’s SMEs and Startups Agency with a goal of 1,000 young entrepreneurs by 2024, and the Swarm Summit, which the hub organizes itself and now announces in its sixth edition. The funded programs carry their funders’ names and horizons. The summit carries the hub’s.
The will also changes what a builder asks of a funder. Put the heirs’ first year inside the project budget, the way CARE’s trainers were set up to earn fees before CARE left. Report on the four Kenyan conditions alongside the usual output counts. Fund one return visit two years after closing. Every AVODA cohort has had a last session; few have had a will.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do innovation hubs in Africa close?
A 2019 AfriLabs and Briter Bridges study of almost a hundred hubs counted over 110 that had shut in the preceding few years, citing bankruptcy, pivots and the expiry of their mandate. Sixty percent of surveyed hubs relied on external funding, so a grant’s end date often becomes the hub’s.
What is an exit strategy in a donor-funded enterprise program?
An exit strategy is the operational plan for withdrawing without losing what the program achieved. The Tufts study of Kenyan projects found that results lasted where resources, local capacity, motivation and linkages continued after exit, and where participants ran activities on their own before the project closed.
How long does it take to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem?
Longer than most grants. Clevenger and Fortunato describe ecosystem building as long-haul work that starts small and gathers momentum slowly. The Kenyan projects the Tufts team studied ran on what it called the typical five-year cycle, so builders should plan for several projects to pass through one community and design each handover accordingly.
What should a hub keep when a donor project ends?
Keep what the community needs in order to keep meeting: founder records held with consent, the regular gathering, the mentor roster, any peer savings or deal circles, and the personal links to banks and government offices. Each needs a named heir outside the implementing organization and a trial period before closing.
How can funders support continuity after a grant ends?
Funders can budget the heirs’ first year inside the grant, add indicators for resources, capacity, motivation and linkages to the results framework, and pay for one return visit about two years after closing. Ex-post evaluation covers far less than 1 percent of development projects, so a single return visit already puts a program ahead of most.
Next Step
If your project already has a closing date, its heirs need their trial months on the calendar now. Program leads and funders can take one live project through a strategy call with Joshua, row by row, and every asset on the list leaves the call with a named heir and a month to run it alone.
Related Reading
- The ESO Funding Crisis in Africa: After the Aid Collapse
- Co-opetition for Ecosystem Builders: Accelerators, Funds, and BDS Providers
- Leadership Is Handed Down, Then Paid Forward
- Founder Dependency Is a Discipleship Failure: Succession as Stewardship
Sources and Evidence
- European Commission, CORDIS project record 101004709, “ENRICH in Africa”: start 1 January 2021, end 30 June 2024, total cost €3,586,505, status closed; aim of an African network of incubators and accelerators.
- Enrich in Africa Center, “Exploring the Funding Landscape of Africa’s Tech Innovation Support Ecosystem” (2024): over $300 million in 68 rounds, median $1.5 million, 56 recipients, 2020 to 2023; intermediaries and 10 to 15 percent overheads; rising reporting burden; longer funding periods.
- AfriLabs and Briter Bridges, “Building a Conducive Setting for Innovators to Thrive” (October 2019): 643 hubs; over 110 closures from bankruptcy, pivots or expired mandates; external funding and funding size of surveyed hubs.
- Coates, Kegode, Galante and Blau, “Sustaining Development: Kenya Country Study, Executive Summary”, FHI 360/FANTA, 2016 (USAID archive text): follow-up two to three years after exit; four sustainability factors; gradual exit; health worker linkages; COSAMO savings groups; recommendations to funders.
- Čekan, “Fostering Values-Driven Sustainability Through an Ex-Post Capacities Lens”, Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, December 2023: ex-post sustainability evaluation done for far less than 1 percent of development projects.
- Kharas, “Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility”, Brookings Wolfensohn Center Working Paper 3, July 2008: aid five times as volatile as GDP for the average recipient.
- Hive Colab, programs and news page: Argidius accelerator, KOSME-financed Youth Startup Academy, sixth Swarm Summit.
- Clevenger and Fortunato (eds.), Entrepreneurial Communities and Ecosystems: Theories in Culture, Empowerment, and Leadership, Routledge, 2022: chapter 1 (long haul), chapter 2 (Rome; electoral cycles), chapter 5 (Smith-Lever Act, 1914), chapter 7 (Nielsen et al. on the project industry).
- Acts 20:17 to 38 (NIV), Bible Gateway: Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders at Miletus.