A report commissioned by the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi), Wesgro and the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation – with the support of the Western Cape government – has confirmed that the greater Cape Town area, including Stellenbosch, is Africa’s tech capital.
The report, compiled by Endeavor Insight and titled ‘Evaluation & Network Analysis of the Cape Town-Stellenbosch Tech Sector’ ,was released last week.
“Given South Africa’s current unemployment challenge, the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation believes the study is important . . . to understand the tech entrepreneurial ecosystem in Cape Town, which has a great potential to accelerate meaningful job creation,” Allan Gray Orbis Foundation head of finance and operations Karen Gabriels said.
The report aimed to discover the current state of the Cape tech entrepreneur community and identify where the opportunities for growth lie.
It was based on interviews with 150 local technology entrepreneurs and research into more than 450 local tech founders and their companies in the Cape Town and Stellenbosch areas.
It reveals that the Cape entrepreneurial tech sector is significantly more productive than those in other African cities, employing more than double the people Lagos and Nairobi combined employ, with between 450 and 550 entrepreneurial companies employing 40 000 to 50 000 people.
In comparison, the Lagos and Nairobi tech sectors employ 9 000 and 7 000 people respectively, while a promising 3% of local companies have reached scale, compared with Nairobi’s 1% and 2% in Lagos.