AfriLabs has come a long way. We have grown from five member hubs, annual gatherings in Berlin and one staff member, to four hundred hubs as at December 2022, five successful annual gatherings held in Africa and close to 40 team members. We have also grown from mostly organic connections to intentional, structured upskilling programs, well thought out partnerships and key products. I have been there for most of it, as a leader in one of the founding hubs, as an AfriLabs board member, and most recently as senior staff member at the secretariat. And now it is time for me to move on from the AfriLabs staff team and return to being a member of the Afrilabs global community.

After 11 years of involvement with AfriLabs, I now confidently take a step back and leave room for others to grow it, and be grown by it just like I was. In 2016 during an AfriLabs Nairobi City meetup, Anna, the Executive Director and I talked about the need for Africa’s more mature hubs to plug into the network. I worked with iHub at the time, having joined them in 2012 as Director of Operations. Truth be told, despite being one of the founding hubs, iHub had for the most part become a silent member of the network for some years. AfriLabs’ offering at the time felt more geared towards the newer hubs. I agreed that iHub needed to plug in more, and if I was going to plug in, I was going plug in! So I successfully ran for an AfriLabs board seat in 2017 and served two terms. After this I served as the AfriLabs Interim Executive Director between April and August 2020 and then finally as Director of Strategy. I leave this role in December, 2022, grateful for the experience and with two lessons: the essence of community, and the value of selflessness.

As a hub leader, I understood the importance of having iHub visible within the network. It wasn’t so much about what AfriLabs could do for the iHub, but what the iHub or other hubs for that matter, could do for AfriLabs and therefore for the African innovation ecosystem; and there are several things that hubs can do. The essence of community is that we contribute to the whole and benefit from the whole as well. The more we give, the richer the community is and as a result, the more value we get from the community. The richness of the AfriLabs community continues to grow as we share skills, networks, knowledge, data and time with each other. The role of AfriLabs is to channel all these resources for maximum impact. I’m excited to see how the AfriLabs Capacity Building Program, AfriLabs Academy and AfriLabs Connect continue to grow in the coming years. All three are fuelled by AfriLabs community members sharing openly.

Sitting across the table from fellow board members from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal and Egypt from 2016 to 2020 was incredible. It was a lesson in selflessness. Running a hub in Africa is hard. Despite the value they bring, it sometimes feels like an endless sprint to stay afloat. To step away from our grind long enough to put the welfare of the network at the forefront was only possible because we remained mission driven – A thriving innovation economy in Africa, driven by the power of our community.

A Pan African view of the innovation ecosystem underscored for me the important and urgent need to consolidate the work that AfriLabs was doing, to make it more focused and relevant, and to leave no hub behind. We had to begin to imagine a borderless, inclusive African hub infrastructure that led a global innovation agenda: one whose focus was on using our tools to build our solutions to improve our lives and contribute to our economies. Together we are stronger than the sum of our individual hubs, therefore a strong AfriLabs core means strong African hubs. The mandate of the board therefore remains critical to the African innovation ecosystem – unify and strategise selflessly.

I felt well prepared to transition to the AfriLabs secretariat in 2020 because I had the benefit of having run a hub and having sat on the board. This meant that I understood not just the needs but also the vision of the network and could use these insights to build out the AfriLabs strategy. The strategy, which we titled Setting Africa up For Success, is very introspective focusing on building foundations for the African Innovation ecosystem backed by knowledge we have garnered over the years.

As I leave, it’s an exciting time for AfriLabs as they explore the definition and role of African Innovation Hubs, impact measurement for networks and hubs, and what connection, collaboration and inclusion of innovators truly means.

There is an African revolution afoot. It is a revolution for the control of our economy, and our entrepreneurs and innovators along with the hubs that arm them are in the frontlines. The AfCFTA, the data policy framework, the digital transformation strategy for Africa, our national innovation policies are all plans of attack to ensure victory, but they are for naught if we don’t build the innovators to act on them. Now more than ever, AfriLabs will rally its community to build an economic army across borders designed to build strong African businesses which fight tirelessly with integrity and excellence for the dignity and prosperity of all Africans. Please work with them and watch after them as they do!

As for me, I have completed my tour of duty as a staff member but there’s much to be done. As I move on to my next deployment, I am content that I have set the foundation and done my bit to train the army of African hubs and support the Africans who run them.

Once an AfriLabber, always an AfriLabber! See you at the frontlines!

(Image: Afrilabs Annual Gathering 2019 at the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)