The state of Angel investing in Africa in 2015.

Last year, I wrote about the state of the Angel investing in Africa in 2014 , I thought it would be good to look at the same issue and look back on the state of Angel investing in Africa in 2015.

Alot has changed from an ecosystem point of view but there is still alot that need to change .

Our year in review :

At the beginning of 2015 I shared our plans with DisruptAfrica and subsequently kicked off the “MeetInvestor series” for the publication and I am very happy to see the wonderful job that Tom and Gabriel have done with that platform .

We started a series of investment dinners called #FrontierInvestorsDinner in London and it was an excellent opportunity to curate great conversations and meet some people that are shaping our world today . Please see some of the photos from the July’s dinner with the Rwanda High Commissioner to the UKhere and we are looking forward to expanding this series to 5 cities around the world in 2016 .

AngelfairAfrica that took place in Accra, Ghana was the highlight of our events calendar because we were able to directly participate as investment partners and add value . Please find the full report and pictures here

NewGenFund was also established with the aim of investing in up to 10 over the next 18 months . The objective here is to give retail investors an opportunity to witness professional angel investing in practice. Our goal is to activate 1000 angels by 2020 .

In other news :

Africa Business Angel Network came alive in 2015 and run a number of workshops across the continent ,find out more about them here

Crowdfunding adoption is still low .

Infodev reports on lessons learned through East African startups, and it makes a very interesting reading , find the full report here

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Why poverty levels in Africa remain high despite growth

A number of readers asked why it felt like in many countries, the number of people getting poor was increasing. Was the average African truly benefiting from the rapid growth in Africa? This week I explore some of the reasons why the number of poor people in Africa is increasing when Africa’s economies are growing so rapidly?

This year marks the 20th year since Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) embarked on a path of faster economic growth. Over this period, growth has averaged at 5,2% per annum, whereas the number of people on the continent reportedly living under US$1,25 a day has continued to creep up from 358 million in 1996 to 415 million in 2011; the year 2011 being the most recent year for which official estimates are available.

Can these divergent trends be explained?

The most obvious reason would be that all the benefits of growth were captured by the rich, resulting in ever-increasing inequality in each country — the rich are simply getting richer.

The data, however, doesn’t show much evidence of that. Distribution trends within African countries vary dramatically. The distribution is widening in as many countries as it is narrowing and in most countries it is not changing much at all.

It is possible that the very rich people, the top 1%, are benefiting from the share of the spoils of growth, by more than their fair share, but this is missing from the data as this rarified class tends not to participate in household surveys from which statistics and distributions are derived.

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