Haïle Amegashie – edited by PACT
In recent years, African venture capital has become fixated on fintech. The sector dominates pitch days, press releases, and portfolio pages. It promises scale, familiarity, and the illusion of impact. To many investors, fintech feels like the clearest path to inclusion and returns.
But beneath the headlines and hockey-stick projections, a deeper misalignment is unfolding. Fintech, as it is currently practiced across the continent, often digitizes dysfunction instead of solving it. It builds sleek interfaces on crumbling foundations. It chases numbers instead of needs.
This is not a call to abandon fintech. It is a call to refocus the conversation. To reimagine African venture through the lens of infrastructure, context, and lived realities.
The Comfort of Fintech
Fintech feels safe. It fits the venture capital template. It scales fast, requires relatively little capex, and produces metrics that look good in an LP report: monthly active users, transactions per second, gross volume.
It is also familiar. African VCs, many of whom are trained in Western markets or mentored by global funds, often lean into fintech because it resembles what succeeded in the United States, India, or Southeast Asia. The logic is tempting: if it worked there, why not here?
But this comfort is costly. While fintech might mirror global trends in form, the underlying infrastructure in most African countries remains fundamentally different. The roads, power supply, regulatory enforcement, and identity systems simply do not match.
When venture capital skips the hard questions and leans into the familiar, it risks creating beautifully designed apps that solve very little.
The Illusion of Inclusion
Many fintech startups claim to be building for the financially excluded. But exclusion in Africa is not merely a lack of access. It is a function of deeper system failures: trust, mobility, documentation, distribution.
Digital lending is a clear example. When a startup lends to informal traders with no collateral, no credit history, and no legal protection, it is not underwriting risk. It is gambling. Defaults are not anomalies. They are the product.
The same applies to mobile wallets that sit unused after the initial incentives dry up, or agent networks that collapse once bonuses disappear. These are not signs of product-market fit. They are signals of a superficial relationship between capital and context.
Fintech has become a layer of convenience for the elite and a simulation of inclusion for the rest.
The Tomato Analogy
Consider a simple, real-world example. A farmer in Jos harvests tomatoes. She wants to sell them in Lagos. But because of poor roads, delays at checkpoints, and the absence of cold chain infrastructure, half the tomatoes rot before reaching the market.
What problem should be solved first?
In the current VC landscape, the typical answer is to give her a wallet. Or a loan. Or a payment link. But none of these tools address the real constraint: the tomato never made it to Lagos.
You cannot pay for produce that does not arrive. You cannot insure revenue that evaporates in transit. You cannot digitize absence.
The tomato analogy captures the core problem of African fintech. We are building financial tools to optimize broken systems, rather than repairing the systems themselves.
What Gets Overlooked
While capital flows into fintech, critical sectors remain underfunded: cold chain logistics, healthcare infrastructure, urban mobility, energy access, local manufacturing. These are the arteries of any functioning economy.
They are not as easy to pitch. They are slower to build. They do not promise 10x growth in 12 months. But they matter.
And they create the conditions for fintech to actually work.
Without electricity, there is no digital economy. Without roads, there is no e-commerce. Without identity systems, there is no credit underwriting. Without reliable water and power, there is no scalable agriculture. Infrastructure is not optional. It is foundational.
Examples of Real Builders
Some founders are choosing the harder path. They are building what I call infrastructure tech. These are companies that enable economies rather than just digitize them.
Wayer is using Lagos’ neglected waterways to ease congestion and create reliable transport alternatives.
Omini Channel is rethinking cold chain logistics with modular, tech-enabled warehousing across West Africa.
WakaWork is building a platform for Africa’s creative workers, starting with tailors. It combines software, embedded finance, fabric sourcing via photo, physical kiosks, and a decentralized measurement system.
These ventures do not chase vanity metrics. They build trust. They build infrastructure. They build systems people can depend on.
The Venture Hat, Worn Poorly
As I wrote in Blueprints & Bloodlines, much of African VC still operates with a Western mindset. It arrives with pre-baked answers. It speaks in TAMs and CACs before asking how people actually live. It funds pitch fluency, not market fluency.
Venture capital is meant to be risk capital. But in Africa, we have used it as comfort capital. We fund what is legible to us, not what is necessary for the market.
This is not just a strategic error. It is a moral one. Because it allocates resources away from the people and systems that need them most.
Toward Alignment, Not Addiction
Fintech still has a role to play. But its role must be supportive, not central. It should serve the real economy, not distract from it.
Africa does not need another wallet. It needs roads, rails, cooling, connectivity. It needs to solve the tomato problem before monetizing it.
What we need now is capital that listens before it lectures. That studies systems before funding software. That understands inclusion as more than access to an app.
If we do that, if we fund the unsexy, unscalable, and foundational, we will build ventures that last. We will stop chasing ghosts and start building ground truths.