Ecosystems

Africa and Germany meet around innovation

In Berlin, the week opened with a story about a meal and widened into a question about what happens when people with ideas are given the chance, tools and relationships to build something that lasts.

On Wednesday evening, Wawira Njiru stood at the centre of the German Africa Prize ceremony. The Kenyan nutritionist and founder of Food4Education was being recognised for work that began with 25 schoolchildren and grew into a large scale school meals operation. Yet the meaning of the award reached beyond one founder. The meal on a child’s desk is also work for a cook, a farmer, a driver, a school and a family. It is nutrition, learning and local economic activity meeting in one daily routine. 

That human scale stayed with the group the next morning. On Thursday, at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom’s headquarters in Potsdam, African and German partners gathered for an Innovation Exchange. They came from organisations that support founders, green businesses, universities and start up ecosystems. Around the table were people who have built companies, financed ventures, supported entrepreneurs and helped new ideas move from one stage to the next.

The question was not simply how to celebrate innovation. It was how to make support more connected and how to build partnerships that recognise the expertise already present in African markets.

The exchange formed part of a wider Africa - Germany study tour linked to the Falling Walls Science Summit. The sequence mattered! A public honour for an African social entrepreneur, a working session about the conditions that let ideas grow, then a global stage where young innovators would test their ideas before an international audience. The aim was to turn introductions into practical next steps for founders.

For Mushrafat Abdul-Rahman, who manages the Centre for Entrepreneurship at African Leadership University (ALU), the starting point is the founder’s experience. She knows both sides of the support relationship. She spent years building ventures before taking on the work of helping other entrepreneurs. At ALU, she said, the approach is deliberately practical. “We don’t really want to teach you how to run a business. We want you to go through the process.”

That process means learning by building, taking ideas into the field and seeing what works. Abdul-Rahman said around 45 % of ALU students graduate as founders. “As much as we support entrepreneurs, we can’t do it alone,” she said. “We need tools, we need partnerships, we need an ecosystem to help build these entrepreneurs that are solving problems.”

That plea for an ecosystem was echoed in the room. Megan van Vlaanderen, chief financial officer at GreenCape, described how the South African organisation supports the green economy, from energy and water to circular economy and sustainable agriculture. Its partnership with FNF includes the Green Pitch, which helps early stage green small businesses and the Green Outcomes Fund, which connects growing enterprises with funders and ties investment to agreed outcomes.

The journey between an idea and a growing business is rarely a straight line. Participants discussed connecting the stages. These are, helping founders explore an idea, prototype and test it, then reach markets and capital with support from the right partners at the right moment.

This is where collaboration between African and German partners could be practical. Lara Weigel from UnternehmerTUM described an earlier programme that brought aspiring entrepreneurs from Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya to Munich, where they met start ups looking to understand African markets. The exchange worked both ways — the entrepreneurs gained experience in the German ecosystem, while the companies gained insight from people who understood the markets they hoped to enter.

That idea of two way learning challenged an old development script. In his contribution to the discussion, FNF’s Kwezi Sogoni argued that the relationship between Europe and Africa should not be reduced to a donor and recipient. Innovation and entrepreneurship, he said, create room for collaboration “as equals”. The phrase is simple but putting it into practice requires listening to local knowledge, acknowledging that African markets differ from one another and designing partnerships around problems people are already trying to solve.

The story of Food4Education offered a vivid example of what such a shift can mean. During the exchange, participants recalled how a school feeding initiative grew beyond the kitchen. The story of a woman who began delivering meals by motorbike and is said to have built a fleet of 60 trucks was one of the north star stories. The detail made the broader impact tangible. A meal programme at scale depends on people, livelihoods and logistics, as well as food. It shows why social impact and enterprise do not have to sit on opposite sides of a conversation.

The people around the table were also candid about what remains difficult. Start up support can become too focused on technology, even when the most useful response to a problem may be simple or locally adapted. Businesses can face financing structures, policy barriers and markets that do not fit a single continental template. The guests spoke about the need to connect founders to investors and mentors, give trainers the tools to support entrepreneurs and bring policymakers into conversations about practical obstacles.

They also spoke about storytelling. A business or social innovation may be working, but its lessons can remain invisible beyond its immediate community. There is a need to show African innovators as makers and problem solvers, not only as recipients of assistance. In that sense, sharing stories is part of the infrastructure. It helps potential partners see what is possible and where they might contribute.

The exchange did not produce a finished blueprint. It created room to identify shared interests, name what the potential innovation partnership still needed to learn and imagine concrete collaboration.

On Friday, the discussion about early stage ideas moved onto the Falling Walls Lab Global Finale stage. FNF’s African delegation included Anesu Mukuwane, the Zimbabwe Lab winner, and Dr Sandile Gumbi, representing Cape Town. The finalists from Africa made a great impression on the world stage with their hyperlocal innovations that gave the judges a hard time with their when it came to shortlisting the top 3 winners in the competition with 100 Lab finalists from around the world. 

A pitch lasts only three minutes. Behind it are years of noticing a problem, shaping a response and deciding to risk being heard. For Mukuwane and Gumbi, Berlin offered a global forum and a chance to meet others building solutions. The Lab echoed Thursday’s exchange on a promising idea can find the people, networks and resources to move forward?

From the schoolchildren who first received Njiru’s meals to the founders pitching in Berlin, the human thread through the week was not innovation as spectacle. It was people making a response to a need and the less visible work of helping that response grow. A child eats and can focus in class. A student learns by trying. A founder finds a partner who understands the market. A business gains the support to test, adapt and employ.

Those outcomes do not come from a single ceremony or exchange. They take time, trust and institutions willing to work across borders without assuming that knowledge travels in only one direction. The prize ceremony offered recognition. Thursday’s meeting built connections, the Lab gave emerging innovators a stage. Together, they suggested that the Africa and Germany cooperation can be strongest when it begins with people already doing the work and asks what can be built with them next.