‘Saving’ Africa

by Nthanda Manduwi > Recent > Writing > Blog > Commentary > Economics > ‘Saving’ Africa

On Entrepreneurship

On a train ride from Brussels to Paris, around 11am CEST, I penned a few words:

I did not think very much of it after I posted it. I wanted to see Paris with my partner, and we did. I then had to catch a flight to Milan after the fact, as I was heading to the Rockefeller Foundation Big Bets Residency in Italy. On arrival in Milan, we had group dinner plans. Somewhere between getting into my hotel room and rushing out again, a friend sent the tweet back to me and said, “Banger!”

I opened Twitter. It had maybe a thousand likes.

Okay. I guess people like this opinion.

Then I went to dinner.

When I came back, 10 thousand + people were engaging with it.

Some agreed immediately. Others thought I was dismissing entrepreneurship. A few took particular offense at the vibecoding slander, which is fair enough. People have dreams.

I’m a bit of a vibecoder myself. I take serious pride in how fast I can build and ship websites and apps [4-10 hours now, thanks to AI].

When it is all said and done, I get to say ‘beautiful app!’ But I still have questions:

Where are the factories?
Where is the reliable power?
Where are the logistics networks?
Who makes the sensors?
Who makes the chips?
Where is the industrial tooling?
Who owns the productive capacity?

Some people read my 280 characters as an argument for bigger government. Others responded from an explicitly anti-state position. There were versions of the familiar argument that African governments are precisely the problem and that entrepreneurs should be left alone to build around them.

All fair.

You can only say so much in 280 characters.

The thought itself took me more than a decade to arrive at.

I guess if this is the first time you are reading anything penned by me, I will start with saying this:

I am an entrepreneur.

I have been an entrepreneur for 14 years now.

I do not mean that in the increasingly loose sense in which having ideas, making content or registering a company makes you one. I have spent most of my adult life building businesses, running programmes, employing people, finding money, losing money, selling things, writing proposals, managing clients, trying things that worked and many things that did not.

There was a time when I was possibly the most optimistic entrepreneur you could meet.

I thought entrepreneurship was the answer.

I am no longer sure it is enough.

That distinction, between saying entrepreneurship does not matter and saying entrepreneurship is not enough, is where I want to start.

Episode 12: Lessons Conversation

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Africa today produces less than 2 percent of global manufacturing output and just 1.4 percent of global manufacturing exports.

Manufacturing value added on the continent reached about $351 billion in 2025

This all sounds substantial, until you remember the size of the continent, its population and its ambitions. Manufacturing contributes about 10.8 percent of African GDP compared with 16.5 percent globally.

Those numbers bother me.

Not because every African country needs to become China. Not because manufacturing is the only path to development. And certainly not because technology is unimportant.

They bother me because we are talking excitedly about artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems and the fourth industrial revolution while a continent of more than a billion people still captures a tiny fraction of the productive capacity behind the physical world.

We can build apps on top of other people’s infrastructure.

We can vibecode products on other people’s compute.

We can create beautiful interfaces to systems whose chips, machines, sensors, cloud infrastructure and industrial tooling were designed and manufactured somewhere else.

That can create wealth. It can create extraordinary companies.

But if we are talking about transforming economies, something is missing.

I did not always think this way.

I Was the Entrepreneur Who Wanted Nothing to Do With Government

When I finished undergraduate school in 2016, where I pursued a dual-major in Economics and Demography, I told my parents I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I did not want a job.

To be fair, I had not yet had many jobs from which to draw this grand conclusion.

My first internship did not feel particularly meaningful to me. I moved into an internship with UN Women, where I began learning about international development. From there I spent time inside government, at Malawi’s Ministry of Gender.

I remember being deeply underwhelmed.

There was all this language about development, empowerment, programmes and change, and then so much institutional energy seemed to revolve around finding ‘funding‘. There was always a development partner. A proposal. A programme. A donor priority. Someone else with money.

I was young, impatient and probably more judgmental than I should have been.

But I remember thinking:

is this it?

Is development mostly waiting for somebody else to fund what we think our priorities should be?

I left and joined the Malawi Revenue Authority. Three of us from the 2016 class economics joined the institution that year.

That changed the way I understood government.

Taxation sounds profoundly boring until you realize what it actually represents.

People wake up, work, create things, sell things, employ people, earn salaries, make profits and consume. The state takes a portion of that economic activity and pools it.

Then somebody has to decide what happens next.

Roads.

Schools.

Hospitals.

Courts.

Police.

Electricity infrastructure.

Public servants.

Debt.

Social programmes.

Research.

Regulation.

There is something quite extraordinary about taxation when you strip away the administrative language.

You are taking some of what I produced and telling me that we can create more collectively with it than I can create alone.

That is a massive act of trust.

It is also an enormous concentration of decision-making power.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, domestic revenue already covers close to four-fifths of total government spending on average. Borrowing covers much of the remainder. Grants and concessional budget support account for only around 2 percent on average.

That fact alone changes the way I think about the African development story.

Our governments are not, as the popular imagination sometimes suggests, primarily running on aid.

African economies and African citizens already finance African states.

Which means there is another question we should be asking much more aggressively:

What are we building with the money?

A Decade of Entrepreneurship Has Taught Us

Something happened across Africa over roughly the past decade.

Entrepreneurship became a development strategy.

If you are my age, you know exactly the language.

Innovation hubs. Accelerators. Incubators. Pitch competitions. Startup ecosystems. Hackathons. Youth entrepreneurship. Digital transformation. Fintech. Agritech. Edtech. Healthtech. Leapfrogging.

I for 5 years have ran an innovation hub: the Kwathu Kollective. We have raised slightly over $400,000, and trained and empowered thousands of young people from more than 20 African countries through Digital Skills for Africa.

For many of us, the language of entrepreneurship was liberating.

You did not have to wait for government to fix something. You could build.

Electricity unreliable? Build around it.

Banking inaccessible? Build around it.

Farmers disconnected from markets? Build a platform.

Government services inefficient? Digitize something.

Education inaccessible? Put it online.

Payments difficult? Fintech.

And to be clear, some of this has been extraordinary. African entrepreneurs have changed how millions of people send money, access credit, buy goods and interact with services.

But there was also something else happening.

We were learning how to operate around broken systems.

That is a skill.

A strange one, perhaps. But a skill nonetheless.

If you spend ten years trying to run businesses where infrastructure is unreliable, capital is expensive, currencies are unstable, logistics are difficult and institutions do not always behave predictably, you begin to develop a certain kind of imagination.

You stop assuming that the existing system is the only possible system.

Entrepreneurs do this all the time because we have to.

The question I have been sitting with lately is what happens after that.

What have we learned?

What happens when a generation of Africans has spent ten or fifteen years learning how to redesign things because the things around us did not work?

Do we just keep building around the state forever?

Or at some point do we turn around and ask what the state itself should become?

Between Brussels and Paris

On the train from Brussels to Paris, I was with my partner.

New partner, actually.

He had just asked me to be his love standing under the Eiffel Tower, which is objectively ridiculous and very cute, but that is a story for a different day, or year.

On the train I was trying to explain to him what I am building now.

My businesses did not begin anywhere near robotics.

I started in digital media. I loved storytelling. That became a company. That work expanded into an innovation hub. We trained young people. We worked with students. We built digital platforms. We worked with clients in different industries. That part of the business still exists today.

Over time, my questions became less about websites and more about systems.

Now I spend a frankly unreasonable amount of my life thinking about cyber-physical infrastructure, robotics, autonomous systems, simulations, transport and what the next generation of African infrastructure could look like.

So I am sitting on this train trying to explain all of this.

I am talking about China.

I am talking about America.

I am talking about manufacturing.

I am talking about the books Apple in China and Capitalism and Its Critics and what happens when a country becomes exceptionally good at making things while another remains exceptionally good at creating enormous markets for the things being made.

And then I start explaining cyber-physical systems.

The easiest example was the train we were sitting on.

A cyber-physical system brings computation into intimate interaction with the physical world. Sensors observe physical conditions. Communications systems move information. Software processes it. Models or simulations can help predict what happens next. Control systems act on those decisions, and the physical system generates new information again. NIST describes cyber-physical systems in essentially these terms: computation, communication, sensing and actuation integrated with physical systems.

So imagine the train itself becoming increasingly autonomous.

It knows where it is.

It senses conditions around it.

It monitors the track.

It predicts faults.

It interacts with other vehicles and infrastructure.

Its operating data can feed models that improve the system over time.

Now your railway is not simply physical infrastructure. It is part of an intelligent feedback loop.

That train conversation led me back to a question that has been sitting underneath much of my work.

Africa’s infrastructure deficit is almost always framed as a weakness.

And obviously, it is.

Poor infrastructure raises costs. It disconnects markets. It limits productivity. It makes everything more expensive.

But what if, in some narrow circumstances, not having built everything yet also creates design freedom?

Do We Have to Build Yesterday’s Africa First?

Roads are a useful example because roads are one of the most basic technologies of a market economy.

Things have to move.

People have to move.

A farmer’s produce has to get to somebody who will buy it.

Inputs have to reach factories.

Workers have to reach jobs.

Products have to reach ports.

Roads are expensive, and Africa needs a lot more of them.

Now, I have a thesis I am exploring in my company around compacted or gravel autonomy corridors.

I want to be very precise here because Twitter rewards certainty and engineering punishes it.

I do not know yet that this works at scale.

It is a hypothesis.

But I think it is worth testing.

The basic question is whether some categories of future autonomous mobility could operate on infrastructure designed differently from the roads we currently assume we must build.

African road costs vary dramatically. Historical World Bank and African Development Bank project data show paved road construction and upgrading ranging from below $100,000 to more than $1 million per kilometre depending on specifications, terrain and project type. One review found median construction or upgrading costs for two-lane paved roads below 50 kilometres at about $538,000 per kilometre, with an upper quartile just above $1 million. Re-gravelling costs in the same data were dramatically lower.

That does not mean I get to say asphalt costs $1 million and gravel costs $100,000 and therefore I have just saved Africa $900,000 a kilometre.

I wish economics worked like that.

Drainage matters. Bridges matter. Terrain matters. Climate matters. Traffic matters. Maintenance matters. Materials matter. The lifespan of the asset matters.

And autonomous vehicles themselves do not magically eliminate road requirements. The OECD’s International Transport Forum has made the opposite point in some respects: automated mobility will still depend on physical road conditions, digital infrastructure, institutional rules and environments capable of supporting the technology. For the foreseeable future, automated and human-driven vehicles will also share existing networks.

Fine.

Test it.

That is precisely my point.

Why should the assumption be that every kilometre Africa has not yet built must look like the infrastructure somebody else designed for the technological constraints of the twentieth century?

Some African secondary and tertiary roads already carry very low traffic volumes. World Bank analysis notes that many have fewer than 400 vehicles a day and that, in those cases, very expensive paving may not always make economic sense.

Maybe the answer to my autonomy question is no.

Maybe autonomous freight corridors require better surfaces, not cheaper ones.

Maybe the economics work only for farms, mines, logistics parks or industrial zones.

Maybe they work brilliantly.

The role of serious public institutions should be to have the technical capacity to find out.

That is the habit entrepreneurship gave me.

You do not inherit a constraint and immediately assume it is permanent.

You ask why.

You prototype.

You test.

You look at the unit economics.

You kill bad ideas.

You scale good ones.

And roads are only my example because that is the system I happen to spend time thinking about.

Somebody else knows energy.

Somebody knows agriculture.

Somebody knows housing.

Somebody knows ports.

Somebody knows payments.

Somebody knows healthcare.

Somebody has spent ten years fighting one very specific failure in one very specific African market and knows more about how it behaves than I ever will.

What would happen if all that knowledge started flowing back into how public systems are designed?

“You Are Building a Government”

I meet with one of my sponsors – the Board Chair of my company, almost every week.

The first time Leo went through my Q2 Systems work properly, I created an email account for him so he could access my SharePoint.

Then he apparently read everything, to my surprise [most of the people I get to hire never do].

When we spoke, he said something that has stayed with me.

“You are building a government. You’re not building a business.”

My first response was basically: excuse me?

But he was right.

I thought I was building a technology company.

Then you follow the logic of what I wanted to build.

Transport infrastructure.

Industrial standards.

Procurement.

Skills.

Research.

Regulation.

Capital.

Autonomous systems.

Energy.

Technology policy.

Land.

Education.

Public investment.

Coordination across sectors.

At some point you have to admit that you are not describing a startup anymore.

A venture capitalist cannot redesign a national transport system.

A founder cannot change national engineering standards by herself.

A philanthropic foundation can fund a pilot, but it cannot permanently substitute for the state.

A startup can demonstrate something.

It cannot automatically create the legal, physical and institutional environment required for an entirely new system to exist.

Then Leo asked me a question I did not particularly enjoy.

What if African entrepreneurs actually went stateside?

What if people who know how to build things stopped assuming that our natural position is outside government telling government what it should do?

I have been grappling with that question ever since.

The Economies We Admire Were Never Built by Entrepreneurs [Alone]

One problem with the way we tell business history is that we love a hero.

Henry Ford invented the future.

Steve Jobs built Apple.

The entrepreneur sees something nobody else can see, takes an enormous risk and transforms the economy.

There is truth in that.

There is also a lot missing.

Henry Ford and the America Around Him

Henry Ford is useful because even the stories we think we know are more complicated than we remember them.

Ford introduced the moving assembly line in 1913 and transformed manufacturing productivity. The work was also miserable enough that labour turnover became astonishingly high. The Henry Ford museum records turnover of about 380 percent by late 1913. Ford had to hire 53,000 people in a year to keep roughly 14,000 positions filled. In 1914, the company more than doubled daily pay from $2.34 to $5.

You may know the nicer version of this story.

Ford paid workers enough so they could buy the cars they made.

They eventually could, and that helped Ford.

But the immediate business problem was retention.

That is useful because it complicates the mythology without destroying the lesson.

Mass production had created an extraordinary productive machine. The machine still needed labour. And at a larger level, mass production needs markets capable of absorbing what factories produce.

Ford did not industrialize America alone.

The automobile became powerful inside a broader system of roads, fuel, finance, suburbanization, public investment and enormous national demand.

Then the state built infrastructure at a scale no individual company was going to build. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act expanded the planned Interstate System to 41,000 miles and committed the federal government to paying 90 percent of project costs.

Private cars.

Private manufacturers.

Public roads.

That relationship matters.

The American state also became a massive purchaser of industrial output, particularly through war and defense.

I am not making the argument that the American government invented capitalism or created Ford.

I am saying the entrepreneur we remember existed inside an institutional and industrial architecture we often forget.

Apple in China

Apple is one of the greatest entrepreneurial stories of the modern era.

It is also one of the best stories about the limits of telling entrepreneurial history through entrepreneurs.

Follow the iPhone into the factory and eventually you get to China.

China’s rise as a manufacturing power involved special economic zones, ports, power, roads, supplier clusters, enormous pools of labour and engineering talent, foreign investment, technology acquisition and a state willing to coordinate industrial development over decades.

Shenzhen did not become Shenzhen because somebody held a startup weekend.

The Chinese state used special economic zones as laboratories for policy experimentation and as mechanisms to attract foreign capital and industrial capability.

Apple then became deeply entangled with that ecosystem.

A 2025 report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission found that, as of 2023, 157 of Apple’s manufacturing or component suppliers were Chinese or located in China, and roughly 95 percent of iPhones, AirPods, Macs and iPads were made there. The report also discusses a reported 2016 memorandum under which Apple committed enormous investment into China’s technology ecosystem, including engineering training and relationships with Chinese universities and firms. The widely quoted $275 billion figure comes from reporting about that agreement, not from a publicly released audited contract, so I treat it accordingly.

The number is less interesting to me than the capability.

Factories produce products.

Factories also produce knowledge.

Engineers learn.

Suppliers improve.

Tooling gets better.

Workers develop skills.

Clusters become denser.

The country becomes able to do things it could not do before.

That is the part of industrialization I think Africa has to become obsessed with.

Who captures the learning?

Who captures the manufacturing capability?

Who can make the next thing without the foreign firm?

China understood that participation in global value chains could be more than employment.

It could be education.

Singapore, South Korea and the Uncomfortable State

Singapore’s Economic Development Board was created in 1961 specifically to drive industrialization.

The country built Jurong Industrial Estate, courted foreign manufacturers, moved from labour-intensive production into electronics and precision engineering, then into increasingly sophisticated industries. Manufacturing still accounts for more than 17 percent of Singapore’s economy.

South Korea’s story is different but also inconvenient for anybody trying to tell a clean story about markets doing everything themselves.

The state promoted exports, used low-interest credit and tax incentives, protected or targeted industries and pushed aggressively into heavy and chemical industries during the 1970s. Some of those interventions worked. Some created distortions and had to be corrected.

Good.

We should talk about the mistakes too.

I am not interested in replacing an entrepreneurship fairytale with a government fairytale.

States fail spectacularly.

Governments waste money.

Politicians protect bad firms.

Industrial policies become patronage machines.

State-owned enterprises can become permanent drains on public budgets.

The World Bank’s 2026 Africa Economic Update makes exactly this point. Africa’s growth problem is structural, but past industrial-policy efforts often failed because implementation capacity was weak and fiscal and institutional constraints were real. The report argues that successful industrial policy requires infrastructure, skills, finance, regional markets and, crucially, the state capacity to implement what governments announce.

That is far more interesting than arguing about whether the state or the market is good.

The market needs institutions.

Industrial policy needs competent institutions.

Entrepreneurs need infrastructure.

Governments need firms that can actually produce.

States and businesses build economies together.

Follow the Money

I have spent much of my career moving between systems that are usually discussed as though they are separate.

I studied economics and demography as an undergraduate.

Later I completed a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship at the Malawi University of Science and Technology.

Then an MBA at Michigan State University.

Along the way I built businesses and projects in Malawi, South Africa and the United States.

I do not list this because it makes me an expert in industrial policy.

It does not.

I am not a road engineer either, as I have already made painfully clear.

What those experiences gave me are different windows into the same machine.

At business school, and later during my time at Microsoft, one question became increasingly difficult for me to escape.

Who pays?

Not who is the user.

Not who benefits.

Who pays?

What does it cost to acquire them?

What does it cost to serve them?

How long do they stay?

Where does the money enter?

Where does it leak?

What has to be true for the economics to work?

I remember conversations with Sarah Bond during my time around Xbox that reinforced that discipline for me. Get granular about the business.

Xbox itself is an interesting example because enormous cultural relevance does not exempt a business from economic pressure.

Microsoft generated $331.8 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2026. Gaming revenue weakened during parts of the year, with Xbox hardware revenue falling sharply in multiple quarters. Microsoft’s own 2026 Xbox strategy reset put console back “at the foundation” while still describing an ecosystem that spans console, PC, mobile and streaming, and shifted the stated north star toward daily active players.

I am deliberately not making claims about Xbox profitability because Microsoft does not disclose a clean standalone Xbox profit number.

That is exactly the point of learning to respect the numbers you actually have.

But the lesson stayed with me.

Follow the money.

Then I started applying that question to development.

And things got awkward.

Following the Money Into Development

Before the United Nations, I ran a World Bank-supported programme in Malawi.

We had roughly a quarter-million dollars.

At the time, this felt like an enormous amount of money.

It was.

It also was not.

Development money is not entrepreneurial capital.

You do not receive $250,000 and wake up the next morning asking, “What is the highest-return thing I could possibly do with this money?”

The money comes with a purpose.

A budget.

Procurement rules.

Reporting requirements.

Outputs.

Compliance.

Approvals.

Timelines.

Monitoring.

All of this exists for reasons.

Public and donor money should not simply be handed to enthusiastic twenty-somethings with good PowerPoints and vibes.

Accountability matters.

But I also saw something that has stayed with me.

A system can be full of good people, pursuing legitimate objectives, and still be inefficient.

Nobody needs to steal the money.

Nobody needs to be corrupt.

The incentives themselves can produce outcomes that are much less efficient than what the same amount of capital might produce in another institutional setting.

If you gave the entrepreneur I am today a quarter-million dollars and told me my continued existence depended on turning it into a sustainable operation, I would approach the capital very differently.

That does not automatically mean I would produce more social value.

Business capital and development finance have different objectives.

But the comparison is useful because it forces us to ask what our development systems are optimizing for.

Then zoom out.

Official development assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa was about $66.5 billion in 2024.

That is a lot of money.

It is also not the whole financial story.

As I mentioned earlier, domestic revenue finances close to four-fifths of Sub-Saharan African government spending.

Debt matters.

Debt service matters.

Foreign investment matters.

Remittances matter.

Commodity exports matter.

Capital leaving the continent matters too.

UNCTAD estimated in 2020 that illicit capital flight from Africa averaged about $88.6 billion annually, based on data from 2013 to 2015. I am intentionally giving you the dates because this statistic is often repeated online as though somebody measured $88.6 billion leaving Africa last Tuesday. They did not. It is an historical estimate, produced using imperfect data, and the institution itself acknowledges the difficulty of measuring illicit flows.

Still.

Once you learn to follow the money, “Africa needs funding” starts feeling like the beginning of a sentence rather than a conclusion.

Funding from where?

On what terms?

For what?

Who spends it?

Who gets the contracts?

What productive capability remains afterward?

Who owns the thing that was built?

What happens when the project ends?

Who captures the value?

Those are business questions.

They are also development questions.

What Does the Full Ledger Say?

This is where the conversation gets politically uncomfortable very quickly.

Because once Africans begin talking about resources leaving Africa, colonialism enters the room.

Usually loudly.

I understand why.

Colonial economies were built around extraction.

But I think we weaken ourselves when we turn that history into one gigantic number somebody found in an infographic.

I do not know the exact dollar value of everything extracted from Africa through colonialism.

I am suspicious of anybody who claims they do.

The mechanisms are documented well enough without inventing certainty.

Colonial administrations taxed African populations.

They structured production around commodities.

Concession systems extracted resources.

Labour was coerced in various territories.

Land was alienated.

Profits frequently left the colonies.

Transport infrastructure was often built to move minerals and export crops toward ports.

A World Bank history of African transport describes much colonial transport investment as infrastructure built primarily for the exploitation and export of natural resources.

And here is one fact I find particularly interesting.

By the twentieth century, locally raised revenue had become the most important source of financing for British colonial governance in Africa. Historian Leigh Gardner’s work on colonial taxation shows how deeply fiscal self-sufficiency shaped those administrations.

Sit with that for a second.

Africans were financing colonial states designed substantially around imperial objectives.

Then independence comes.

The flags change.

The institutions evolve.

New governments inherit borders, bureaucracies, transport networks, commodity structures and fiscal systems with histories.

That history matters.

It also cannot become our eternal alibi.

Many African states have now had more than half a century of independent decision-making.

Some have used that agency better than others.

So I am less interested in a morality play about whether Europe took more than it later gave in aid, although that is a legitimate historical conversation.

I want the ledger.

What left?

What came in?

What assets were created?

What productive capacity accumulated?

What skills stayed?

What intellectual property stayed?

What firms became globally competitive?

What resources are still leaving as raw materials that could have been processed here?

How much debt service leaves?

How much profit leaves?

How much tax is retained?

How much of our own public revenue turns into productive assets?

That is the accounting I want us to become serious about.

Not because countries are businesses.

They are not.

But because economies are material things.

You cannot rhetoric your way into productive capacity.

Why Are We Still Asking for Permission?

I spent two years working at the United Nations in New York.

I believe in multilateralism.

I understand why the UN exists.

I also think Africans sometimes spend an extraordinary amount of intellectual energy asking international institutions to recognize our importance.

Every year our leaders arrive in New York.

They speak.

They demand reform.

They remind the world that Africa must not be ignored.

And on representation, they are correct.

African states represent about 28 percent of UN membership, yet Africa has no permanent seat on the Security Council. The Common African Position calls for at least two permanent African seats and additional non-permanent representation.

That is indefensible.

Keep fighting it.

But I also have another question.

What are we building while we wait?

What proportion of African political imagination goes toward getting more space inside institutions designed elsewhere, and what proportion goes toward strengthening institutions whose power we control?

The African Union.

The African Development Bank.

AfCFTA.

Regional power pools.

African universities.

Regional transport systems.

Development banks.

Research institutions.

Standards bodies.

Cross-border procurement.

Industrial corridors.

Today, intra-African trade is still only about 14.4 percent of Africa’s total trade.

That should bother us at least as much as our seating arrangement in New York.

I am not arguing that Africa should withdraw from the UN, IMF, World Bank or anything else.

That would be unserious.

The international system matters.

Capital markets matter.

Multilateral finance matters.

Trade partners matter.

But bargaining feels different when you have options.

Countries with strong institutions negotiate.

Countries without them plead.

I want us to build enough that our engagement with the rest of the world becomes less about asking to be included and more about deciding what terms make sense for us.

Governments Cannot Be Startups

There is an obvious danger in everything I have written so far.

Somebody will read this and say government should be run like a business.

No.

A government is not a company.

A company can decide that a customer is too expensive to serve.

Government cannot.

A company can leave a market.

Government cannot abandon a province because the unit economics are unattractive.

A company can kill a product.

A state still has obligations to citizens who are poor, remote, disabled, old, sick or otherwise commercially inconvenient.

Public institutions must think about rights, legitimacy, distribution, continuity, resilience and public goods in ways that businesses often do not.

So when I say I want government to learn from entrepreneurs, I do not mean I want presidents cosplaying as CEOs.

I mean I want public institutions capable of experimentation.

I want governments that can run pilots and admit when the pilot failed.

I want procurement systems that can distinguish a serious technological proposition from a PowerPoint full of words like AI and blockchain.

I want ministries capable of understanding the technologies they are regulating.

I want institutions that can hire excellent people and keep them.

I want public systems with memory.

I want data.

I want measurement.

I want governments capable of changing course when the evidence says something is not working.

And I want leaders competent enough to understand that none of this can depend on them personally.

That is one place I would amend my own tweet.

I wrote that we need extremely competent leaders at the helm.

We do.

But Africa cannot be one brilliant president away from development every election cycle.

If the system collapses when the competent person leaves, then we did not build a capable state.

We built a personality cult with spreadsheets.

The World Bank’s latest industrial-policy work makes this distinction painfully clear. Industrial strategy succeeds only when the policy fits the state’s actual ability to implement it.

That is not sexy.

Capacity rarely is.

But states are built out of boring things.

Procurement manuals.

Civil-service incentives.

Tax systems.

Engineering standards.

Databases.

Competent middle managers.

Maintenance budgets.

Institutional memory.

Then one day everybody calls the result Singapore.

What If We Went Stateside?

This brings me back to entrepreneurs.

Africa has spent years asking its brightest, most impatient young people to build.

And they did.

There are people on this continent who understand payments because they have spent a decade trying to move money through our financial systems.

There are people who understand healthcare supply chains because they have tried to fix them.

There are people who know exactly why agricultural markets fail at the last mile.

People who understand carbon markets.

Logistics.

Telecommunications.

Housing.

Manufacturing.

Energy.

AI.

Mobility.

Education.

Media.

People who have knowledge policymakers sometimes encounter only after somebody turns it into a forty-page stakeholder report.

What happens to that knowledge?

I do not think everybody should go into government.

Please do not.

We still need companies.

We need capital.

We need founders.

We need researchers.

We need universities.

We need strong private institutions capable of pushing governments and sometimes saying no to them.

But perhaps we have created too clean a separation between “the builders” and “government.”

There are more ways to go stateside than running for president.

Civil service.

Regulation.

Local government.

Development finance.

Public enterprises.

Technology offices.

Research institutions.

Procurement.

Advisory roles.

Ministries.

Politics.

Somebody has to bring the knowledge in.

And perhaps those of us who have spent years complaining about governments should occasionally ask a more uncomfortable question.

If we genuinely love this continent, where does what we know create the most value?

Sometimes the answer will be in the company you own.

Sometimes it may not be.

That last possibility is the one I have been struggling with.

It Absolutely Hurts Me to Say This

Entrepreneurship changed my life.

It gave me agency very early.

It allowed me to take an idea seriously before I had any particular reason to believe I could execute it.

It taught me how to sell.

How to survive.

How to make payroll.

How to start again.

How to look at something everybody accepts and ask why it has to be that way.

I remain deeply optimistic about entrepreneurs.
I remain one.

Which is why it hurts me to say that entrepreneurship will not save Africa.

Not because entrepreneurship failed.

Perhaps because it succeeded at something we have not fully appreciated.

It trained a generation of us to question systems.

It forced us to become resourceful.

It taught us to work around constraints.

It made some of us obsessive about execution.

And now I am beginning to wonder whether the larger project is what we do with that training.

My own answer is unresolved.

I have not decided that public office belongs in my future.

There is a very comfortable version of my life in which I continue building companies, writing about institutions, advising people and complaining very eloquently whenever governments do things I think are stupid.

I enjoy that version.

The problem is that I increasingly find it intellectually dishonest to keep saying competent Africans should enter public institutions while quietly exempting myself from the category.

Maybe I remain outside.

Maybe I do not.

I genuinely do not know yet.

But I know this.

Africa today accounts for less than 2 percent of global manufacturing output. More than 620 million people are expected to enter the continent’s labour force by 2050. Public investment remains under pressure, debt service is consuming a larger share of government revenue, and the institutions required to execute industrial policy remain uneven.

We do not have infinite time to romanticize either entrepreneurship or government.

We need firms that can produce.

We need states that can build.

We need markets large enough to sustain what we make.

We need institutions capable of learning.

We need people who understand technology sitting close enough to public power to influence what gets built next.

And perhaps we need to stop treating Africa’s future as something entrepreneurs must create despite the state.

For years, we taught a generation to dream like entrepreneurs.

Maybe the next challenge is whether we can bring that same audacity to the institutions we share.

Read my Published Works:

If you’d like to go deeper into my journey — from Malawi, through the United Nations and Microsoft to now building my own companies in Detroit, you can find it in my books.

Read the Lessons Book Series:

Read my Previously Published Works:

TEENS [2018]

TWENTIES [2025]

FEMININE SILENCE [2025]

CONNECT WITH NTHANDA ONLINE:

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Nthanda Manduwi

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