@naval got me thinking yesterday when he spoke on JRE about income inequality vs outcome inequality.

If we focus more on outcomes, rather than people’s incomes, we will fund the right things to ensure the right outcomes.

This does to the heart of the African poverty narrative.

Are we looking too much at people’s incomes in Africa instead of looking at outcomes and their potential?

@TheVunderkind wrote something people may have missed yesterday about how a laptop alone can change a brother into a world-class developer. Just a laptop. Not money.

The cliche of teaching to fish and not giving fish is true if you also give people the right fishing equipment. A fishing net and a boat will go a long way more than a line and a hook. When giving a fishing net and a boat, there is further training required as it is now a team.

Most of Africa’s entrepreneurship narrative is built around funding instead of building capacity to innovate. We wrongly assume that once money is there, innovation will miraculously happen.

We are inadvertently incentivizing the wrong things and the wrong approach.

When I had a chat with the disgraced founder of the Rwandan based startup helping people to get jobs, I asked him what he was seeking funding for precisely? I gave him the example of Toptal’s founder who realized that his own community could power him instead of looking outside.

I saw that he had attempted to build a community of devs and I said that the community was more valuable than the product he was trying to get funding for. We tend to miss this key part of innovation. We talk about ecosystems as funding and incorporated entities but it is people.

Africa is not poor. Africa is just not self-aware.

A true community-based ecosystem compounds outcomes.

I don't agree with @imasuen_design that the human API should be removed from the equation as it cannot be removed. The human is the resource. We just need decentralization instead of aggregation.

The danger of focussing on funding and ego is why we start getting bad actors. There are many more to be revealed who have nothing real to show for the money they have raised. We have allowed the media to lead us into their circus of believing that ”Attention = Outcome”.

Profit = Outcome.

Profit is a multiplier that funds other things. We are playing the pump and dump game of accelerator hyped secondaries in Africa while pretending to build ecosystems.

While doing @NkaliFund, I have started asking founders what they really need? Some of the results are surprising.

Investor funds are not for survival but growth. When you have so many people playing hunger games, outcome inequality is guaranteed.

*goes (not does in first tweet. I am tired of autocorrect).