Doing business in Africa is tough, especially for budding entrepreneurs and worse for those from other markets. There have been outcries of lack of curated information, inadequate data and limited entrepreneur resources for the modern day business owner apart from college textbooks or word-of-mouth from industry gurus, it’s even harder for entrepreneurs in Africa’s nascent technology scene.
However, with today’s launch of Waterhole a content page revolutionary in Africa’s tech scene, Savannah Fund aims to fill that knowledge gap and put founders on steroids.
According to the team at Savannah Fund, “Waterhole is an educational source to help Africa-focused entrepreneurs and those interested in the space gain the practical knowledge and resources they need to transform an idea into a business. Here we support budding entrepreneurs hoping to innovate and scale can learn topics from Product, Engineering, Marketing to expanding across multiple countries in Africa.”
Waterhole was not just launched as another resource site for founders but the team says through experience working with both entrepreneurs and investors, it found a great need in the African tech startup ecosystem for a page to aggregate the best resources and content on entrepreneurship for budding entrepreneurs authored from practitioners.
Not many entrepreneurs understand venture capital and entrepreneurship in Africa, and this is a hindrance to businesses.
Waterhole will therefore inform and educate readers and will have resources in the form of articles written by Savannah Fund partners, entrepreneurs and other influential people in the space, news on Savannah Fund, videos, slides, events and downloadable PDFs.
“In an emerging market, there are fewer relevant resources available to entrepreneurs than in developed markets and we want to bridge the gap to create equal opportunity as well as pass on important lessons learnt,” says the Savannah Fund team. “This content site is especially important in countries where local media is unreliable, lack of free flow of practical startup tips and is not built on a solid foundation to foster trust and be a useful source for an entrepreneurial audience.”
To most of you, Waterhole will not be new as it is anchored with content that originated from Erik Hersman’s Whiteafrican.com and Mbwana’s former column from Afrinnovator, a resource-full tech website that has since shut down.
Waterhole will also have resources from events Savannah Fund holds such as Afrikoin in payment and currency space, and from the upcoming VC course the fund is set to launch with the University of Cape Town Business School and Knife Capital and posts from its portfolio companies.
The fund also announced its third accelerator class today with incredible startups from Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.