The Death of Big Ideas❗❗
...taking you through how micro-innovation is reshaping African innovation
Hello, Dear Innovator 👋
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By 4pm, every week, you’ll receive a notification our Wednesday Midweek Check-Ins and Saturday newsletters. Both are designed to keep you updated on what’s happening across African🌍 innovation!
As a community of innovators, Consonance Club cares about the future being built by the boldest and brightest minds on the continent. Through our community support, useful tools, honest stories and real opportunities, we stay committed to helping and spotlighting the wins and journey of African innovators who solve real problems with what they have.
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In case nobody has told you yet, African tech/innovation ecosystem has been on a rollercoaster for the past half-decade. A wave of big tech companies (e‑commerce giants, consumer fintechs, etc.) drove the first boom, but by 2022 those spaces were “crowded red oceans”
The results…?
Margins grew thinner, competition exploded, investors were leaving and founders grew tired. As TechCabal Insights puts it, “the frontier of value creation shifted elsewhere”
In other words, out went the hype about building Africa’s next WhatsApp or Uber, and in came a focus on fixing the fundamentals; the nuts and bolts of business operations that are tailored specifically for the climate and African problems.
As it turns out, today, investors now prize solutions that solves indispensable problems 😍 over flashy broad consumer apps 👎
This shift toward the “invisible” engine room of the economy is already visible in commerce and logistics. Take retail supply chains for example, instead of adding yet another marketplace, founders are now digitizing inventory and credit for small merchants. Reports also show that Africa’s next billion-dollar opportunities may not be in more payment apps but in the back-office systems that make trade work.
In practice, that means companies like Nigeria’s OmniRetail and Bumpa are building wholesale and retail networks. Similarly in Morocco, Chari’s founder bundles stock ordering with embedded payments and micro‑insurance so shopkeepers don’t have to juggle separate apps.
The team at Terminal Africa is also another perfect example. Brothers Nnamdi and Udi Okoh started by helping e‑commerce stores with payments, but quickly discovered logistics was the real headache. They simply listened to customers, who begged for better shipping solutions.
Terminal has since grown into a “digital freight forwarder” stitching together services from last‑mile couriers to air cargo. Today Terminal has thousands of SME customers in Nigeria, who ship their wares worldwide using its platform.
Another case in point is Haul247, a Nigerian tech company that was launched in 2020. Haul247 was born from founder Sehinde Afolayan’s own ordeal with rotten inventory and empty trucks. His team raised only modest funding (about $3 million early on) but survived while big, VC‑backed carriers flamed out. Haul247’s growth has been steady; building a single, integrated operating system so Nigerian businesses always know where their goods are.
In ⚡energy too, the trend is micro-scale solutions. Sub‑Saharan Africa’s rural shops and workshops pay huge sums for diesel generators, so energy tech companies started delivering solar microgrids right to the rooftop.
For example, ICE Commercial Power outfits streets of tailors and grocers with shared solar systems and smart meters, charging customers pay-as-you-go. ICE’s co-founder Emmanuel Ekwueme says they impose no upfront cost on businesses, landlords lease the panels, and shops just swipe an app to tap power 😎 So far ICE has helped hundreds of small businesses in Nigeria, cutting their power bills by 35% on average, and plans to reach 100,000 stores in the next three years.
On another front, Lagos’s Salpha Energy assembles solar panels locally for home and grid use. The female-led company recently raised $1.3M to expand, but even today its off‑grid kits already serve 2 million Africans.
These are targeted fixes for defined communities (rural clinics, marketplaces, mini‑grids), not vague “energy revolution” slogans. \
Recent fundraising data also reflect this shift. Briter Bridges reports that this year clean-tech investments nearly equaled fintech (about $950M vs $1B so far) as investors chase projects with concrete payback instead of abstract solutions (sort of).
Importantly, these innovations are happening with government policies backing ‘em up. Nigeria’s new Digital Economy policy and the AfCFTA are good frameworks, but real change is always driven by inspired and determined founders 💪 Even at Moonshot this year, Nigeria’s Trade Minister framed his speech as opening doors, not micro-managing ideas, stating that while Nigeria’s government [aims] to help African businesses thrive within Africa by harmonising regulations, ultimately it’s private innovation [that] can build the tools; policies just open the doors.
Dear Innovator, this quiet trend toward micro-innovation matters now more than ever. Why? Because Africa’s tech ecosystem is maturing!
Fundraising reports already show a surge of larger, debt‑financed deals and a slowdown in reckless hypergrowth. It’s a recognition that, as Tomiwa Aladekomo of Big Cabal Media put it, “founders [are] thinking beyond local markets, investors [are] taking Africa seriously, and policymakers [are] aligning with the realities of digital business.”
For African innovators, founders and operators, the lesson in all this is to stay grounded. Solve one problem at a time, listen to your users, and build with real unit economics. In the end, the “death of big ideas” is really about survival and pragmatism and this shift means Africa’s tech future will be written in dependable steps, not lofty vision statements.
How are you positioning yourself in Africa’s new innovation wave?
Alsoooooooo, since you didn’t get this newsletter on saturday…
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