How the Boost Africa project works

 Edward Claessen, Head of EIB Global's Regional Representation East Africa during a recent interview in his office in Nairobi.[Courtesy].

The programme supports Africa’s young entrepreneurs by encouraging them to create innovative and compelling modern businesses.

It increases the capacity for these businesses to compete regionally and globally, attract both domestic and foreign investment and diversify investor profile and contribute significantly to job creation and economic growth.

The programme consists of three components: investment programme, technical assistance pool and entrepreneurship lab.

1. Investment Programme

The investment programme spans the whole venture segment, including seed funds, incubators, accelerators, follow-on funds, business angel funds, equity-crowd platforms, and venture capital funds to support the creation of innovative and highly scalable start-ups and SMEs.

It focuses on those ecosystem builders that are able to generate first-rate opportunities in terms of quality, creativity, impact and innovation, from fund managers to accelerators, incubators and business angels.

The investment component is structured as a co-investment partnership between EIB and AfDB, which each commit up to €50 million (Sh7.5 billion).

 Third-party investors from the public and the private sector are invited to co-invest with the ultimate aim of mobilising a combined amount of €200 million (Sh30 billion) and leveraging €1 billion (Sh150 billion) in additional investments through financial intermediaries.

Deploying a blended finance approach, the programme expects to build a portfolio of 25 to 30 funds over a seven to eight-year period.

2. Technical assistance pool

The TA Pool aims to provide capacity building and disseminate best practices for the investment readiness of intermediaries, especially first-time local fund managers, business and technical training of investee companies or entrepreneurs and the creation of investors’ networks, notably for business angels.

3- Innovation and information lab

The lab acts as a catalyst for innovation, knowledge and partnerships by incubating and piloting promising new ideas. It also assesses and disseminates best practices and provides support to ecosystem interventions at the country level.

Through this integrated approach, Boost Africa both provides financial capital and develops human capital, helping fund managers and entrepreneurs to effectively deal with the many obstacles that arise when building new funds and new enterprises.