SME Growth through Business Accelerators

African SMEs are major drivers of the continents economy accounting for 70% GDP and employing over 80% of the continent youthful population. Ironically African SMEs are the most underserved in terms of little or no government protection, supporting policies or even an enabling environment as compared to Multinationals and much larger organizations.

Some other challenges faced by African SMEs are; lack of financing, lack of information, lack of business management skills, and access to market among others.

There is an emerging trend in form of accelerator programs whose overall goal is to increase start up SMEs probability of raising capital needed for their growth. Some examples of organizations ruuning accelerator programs in Africa include GrowthAfrica, Spring Accelerator, and Ongoza among others.

Accelerator programs employ varying business models for their own sustainability such as getting grants and disbursing to start ups, deducting ‘’fee’’ from amount they are able to secure on behalf of start up, acquiring a degree of equity from start up organizations that are in their program among other strategies.

Similarly accelerator programs play a crucial role in offering business support to growing SMEs. Business support in this context comes in various shapes and forms.

Accelerators overall aim is to enable start ups raise growth capital; on the other hand most African start ups don’t actively seek capital but seek to grow organically through product improvement, accessing new markets   .

It’s this expectation gap that accelerators need to be careful when tackling given that not all start up SMEs need venture capital immediately. It’s therefore critical that accelerators offer services to SMEs that enable them to move forward. Such services may include assistance in talent acquisition, corporate governance development, market research, new product development, research and development among others.

Once an SME is capital ready, it’s the role of the accelerator to match the start up with the right investor. Accelerators have the potential to fast track professional SME growth in Africa and to level the global business playing field