Capital is often the top challenge many African founders cite in conversations. At any stage of the building process, capital is needed to hire employees, drive customer acquisition, and acquire licences, amongst others. But as the several shutdowns have shown, capital is not the magic pill it is often painted as.
“Founders need capital, but they also need product refinement, market access, institutional credibility, and distribution pathways,” Ojoma Ochai, Managing Director of CcHUB, says.
Over the last few years, the innovation hub has refined its processes and mission, choosing to focus on building systems that help innovation thrive hinged on eight pillars, including academic/ research-based innovation, community & ecosystems, civic & digital resilience, and workforce development.
By empowering individuals and startups, the firm says it is able to compound its influence beyond just a few thousand people. In 2025, that looked like supporting over 3,000 ventures in 49 African countries and 1.89 million people through its programmes and the ventures it backed, according to its 2025 Impact Report.
According to Ochai, the firm has narrowed its focus to just education, health and creative industries, a decision she says reflects where the firm believes technology can drive the most impact and change for the most people.
“An ecosystem enabler like CcHUB absorbs early-stage risk in sectors that private capital hasn’t yet learned to value. That means doing the foundational work that builds the ecosystem itself: producing research, generating evidence, running design sprints, and creating the institutional relationships that make adoption more likely.”
In 2025, it published seven research reports across AI, digital regulation, and blockchain fundamentals and contributed to a digital health roadmap in Nigeria’s Kwara State. Its impact is not limited to the country where it traces its roots; in Kenya, it worked to design a financing pathway for hospitals facing the possibility of closure due to cash flow issues.
Yet, Ochai does not discount the role capital plays, with CcHUB continuing to provide financing to the startups that pass through its doors. However, she insists that infrastructure makes capital more durable. In 2025, CcHUB invested $4.18 million directly in startups in equity-free grants, bringing total investment since inception to $17.1 million. Additionally, its portfolio companies have raised an additional $5 for every $1 it invested.
“That ratio exists because we spent years building the credibility, the pipelines, and the institutional relationships that make our portfolio legible and attractive to external capital.”
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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Having worked with both governments and startups to drive innovation, Ochai points to several barriers that often hinder successful partnerships between the public and private sectors.
One major challenge is the lengthy procurement cycles typical of government institutions. These processes can take months or even years, making it difficult for most startups — which often operate with limited runway — to pursue such opportunities without putting strain on their businesses.
On the government side, a lack of political continuity further complicates the process. A government official who champions a partnership may be reassigned or leave office before a deal is finalised, potentially derailing progress. In many cases, negotiations must then restart, delaying or even ending the partnership altogether.
“Partnerships that survive tend to share a few things: a specific, bounded problem government already recognises; deliberate investment in government capacity alongside the technology; and a patient intermediary willing to absorb coordination costs that neither government nor startups can carry alone,” she notes, calling for increased funding for these intermediaries.
African universities produce significant research and talent, yet much of it rarely translates into impact at an industrial scale. CcHUB hopes to help bridge that gap by acting as a catalyst that connects academic innovations with industry needs.
However, it notes that this can only happen if three key stakeholders — universities, governments, and the private sector — play active roles. Universities must treat commercialisation as part of their core mandate, governments need to create incentives that reward research-driven innovation, and the private sector should participate more actively in curriculum design, research collaborations, and product development.
Ultimately, CcHUB sees its role as laying the groundwork that allows innovation to flourish rather than building companies directly.
Programmes like the Spark Accelerator illustrate this approach. Kenyan social commerce platform Chpter secured partnerships with Safaricom, ABSA Bank, and Co-operative Bank thanks to its efforts, while Nawiri restructured its pricing and grew revenue more than 10x to $140,000.
For CcHUB, these outcomes are the clearest signals that the ecosystem infrastructure it is building is working.
“Five to ten years out, the clearest measure of success is in our three focus sectors, education, health, and creative industries, becoming measurably better funded, more capable of absorbing new technology, and producing stronger outcomes for people,” Ochai says.
