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Sustainable tech hubs: rare as breakdancing unicorns?

We all know – or at least think we know – that tech hubs in Africa are a good thing. Small, dynamic, shared workspaces where technologists, business people, venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs and designers can meet up and develop new business ideas or apps to save the world.

But even though there are a lot of tech hubs across the continent – somewhere between 100 and 200 at the last count – there’s a huge variety of specialities and skills across them all. Some are thriving, industrious and profitable: others are struggling to find an audience or to meet the bills.

Tayo Akinyemi knows the problems well. As the head of Afrilabs, an umbrella organisation that represents many tech hubs around the continent, she’s intensely familiar with the difficulty of developing a working model for a new tech hub. In a post over at Medium called All Hands on Deck: Why Hub Sustainability is a Complex Challenge that Requires a Systemic Solution, she’s gone into huge detail about the challenges hubs face and why some fail where others succeed.

Ultimately, it comes down to long-term funding and where that comes from. If a hub can pay its bills through its membership, that’s great. But what happens when the local market can’t sustain a tech workspace on its own?

What’s the solution to this thorny problem? The short answer is “innovate or die.” The long answer is a bit more complicated, and remains undiscovered.

Akinyemi says that even among her own members, “Core cost coverage and flexible long-term funding seem as rare as spotted, breakdancing unicorns, while sustainability is a long-term proposition that requires experimentation and a license to fail”. She admits that it may well take a lot longer than founders realise until a tech hub no longer requires funding.

The sustainability horizon is probably farther away than we’d like to admit… it could be 6–10 years… So, who wants to fund a hub for the next ten years? Anyone? Bueller?

Fortunately, there are steps Akinyemi says that she is committing Afrilabs to. Four of them, in fact, including helping to improve communications among members and helping to identify new revenue streams to support the more community based actions.

To find out what they are go read the original post here.

[Main Image – CC/ Gglavin]

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