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Businesses need stability to thrive. Unfortunately for anyone in Sudan, stability has been hard to come by for the past year and a half as the country quakes amidst a raging civil war. More than 20,000 people have been killed, and about 7.7 million people have been displaced just within the country; millions have had to flee across international borders as refugees.
But pockets of safety can still be found. And in the relatively safer provinces of Port Sudan and Kassala in the eastern part of the country, one startup incubator has resumed operations after a six-month forced hiatus, when war broke out in the country last April.
“On the Saturday when the war broke out, we had staff members in the office, and after three days, the RSF militia knocked on the door and said, ‘You guys got to leave, and if you don’t leave, there will be some bullets in the air,’” Yousif Yahya, the founder of Savannah Innovation Labs, told TechCrunch.
Shortly after the warning, the conflict intensified, and as the gunfire grew louder and more frequent, basic utilities such as water and electricity were cut off. For Yahya, his family, and many others, fleeing to neighboring Egypt, a 12-hour journey over some 550 miles, became imperative for survival.
Building in times of war
Asylum is never great, but for Yahya, the respite and safety enabled him to carry on with his plans to set up and run a startup incubator in Sudan. Operating out of Cairo — Egypt’s capital and one of the largest startup hubs in Africa — Savannah was able to establish operations in the eastern region of Sudan, which was relatively safer.
The first edition of Savannah’s “We-Rise” bootcamp, financed by the European Union and the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, aimed to foster entrepreneurship. The program took in entrepreneurs who were building a company or even just ideating, and gave them a launchpad — over 300 businesses participated for a year. The 100 finalists of the bootcamp’s pitch competition are set to receive grant funding ranging from €2,500 ($2,783) to €7,500 ($8,313).
Before the war, the program had intended to give the finalists equity funding, but Yahya explained that grant funding made it easier for them to keep the program running.
“The main idea was that we should continue to do the work,” he said. “One, because there are still young people in the country who are eager to go ahead and build businesses and learn and so forth. They do not have the means to leave the country. Secondly, if and when the war stops, we don’t want to go back to square zero [and start] explaining to people what term sheets are or what equity is and what company formation should look like.”
“The war is chaotic. The war is ugly. But at the same time, we now have a clean slate,” he added.
In pursuit of talent
Savannah has now reached out beyond Sudan’s borders to establish networks in neighboring Uganda, Kenya, and Egypt, aiming to bring together dispersed members of the Sudanese startup community. The aim is to resume building what Yahya set out to do in 2018: establish the talent pool that would power the country’s tech transformation.
Savannah was conceptualized when Yahya was studying international relations at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. And after he set it up in Sudan, the incubator started helping university students get experience working with tech companies so they could get a taste of how startups function.
Yahya maintains that talent precedes the investments needed for national transformation.
“The whole idea is that you develop the talent pool that is needed … to go ahead and start their own companies. I never tell people that this is an overnight success story or anything like that. But the seeds that are being sown right now will take some time to be seen,” he said.
Today, Savannah has enabled thousands of people to enter Sudan’s startup ecosystem. It has also fostered a number of startups, including Sudan’s first YC-backed startup, Bloom (now Elevate).
Not saying no to risk
Yahya, who is also a partner at venture firm Africa Renaissance Partners, says he is keen to bridge capital gaps in untapped markets like Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, and especially those considered risky due to conflict, like Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
DRC, a country ravaged by armed conflict, continues to be among the top emerging startup markets.
“If you need the markets of scale, you need to look at places like the Sudan, the Central African Republic, the DRC. Even though these places are war-torn, the work being done on the ground right now is going to rewrite the framework of what new economies are going to look like,” he said.
“We are not waiting for anything to stop in order to continue building the stuff that we want to. Nobody’s going to come and do this work for us. … A lot of people are speaking about the war, famine, and all these ugly things that are happening, which they rightfully need to be speaking about. But on the other side, we need to start having the conversation of what that next day is going to look like. What values do we want? What kind of society do we need to lead? What kind of businesses are going to be running the country?”
Sudan’s startup ecosystem is still in its infancy, but there are several players, such as 249Startups and Impact Hub, working to foster it. The community got somewhat of a boost after some sanctions were eased back in 2017, and Yahya remains optimistic.
“I want to bet that after the war, Sudan is going to be a very ripe VC market, because a lot of the big family businesses have either been destroyed or bled a lot of cash,” he said. “A lot of these businesses, and many of the patriarchs that built them, no longer have the stamina to go back. The new generation is going to want to come in, and they’re going to set up funds and advisory firms in the sectors that their family businesses have historically been.”
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