On Friday at the New Africa-France Summit, President Emmanuel Macron announced a renewed financial commitment of €130m for the next three years and defined Digital Africa’s new ambitions to support entrepreneurship and technological innovation on the continent.
Present in Montpellier, the Digital Africa team unveiled new programmes, according to a Press release signed by Ndeye Mane Sall for Digital Africa on Friday.
In terms of financing, the team announced the Fuzé project, which focuses on Francophone Africa and aims to support at least 200 tech start-ups as of early 2022 by launching a new small ticket fund (in stages, from €10,000 to €200,000) taking the form of repayable loans.
In terms of skills, Digital Africa joins forces with Make IT and the German government to set up Talent4StartUps, a fellowship programme designed to meet the needs of talents that have been trained in tech and digital, and whose beneficiaries will be put in touch with start-ups actively recruiting.
More broadly, Digital Africa will continue to develop non-financial activities (knowledge production, training, networking, research, and support for the evolution of regulatory frameworks) while having the opportunity to raise funds from other public or private donors.
This will be enabled by its new status as a subsidiary of Proparco, which is the Agence Française de Développement (AFD)’s structure dedicated to the private sector.
This ambitious change will give Digital Africa the opportunity to deploy direct seed financing capabilities for high potential start-ups across the continent.