The recent visit by the French president for the Africa Forward Summit sparked the usual flurry of diplomatic commentary.
It took me back to the 12th-century French word, franchir, meaning “to free”.
What if the key to taking Africa forward lies not in foreign treaties, but in freeing its own entrepreneurs from the one person holding them back, themselves?
In Kenya, as across much of Africa, we have a paradox.
The nation’s SMEs are the backbone of the economy. It contributes 34 per cent to GDP and 15 million jobs, yet this engine of growth still struggles to move forward. Over 80 percent of small businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa fail within their first five years, hitting an invisible ceiling that prevents them from scaling.
The cause is not a lack of ambition but invisible operational chaos.
The vision to execution gap and failure to translate a founder’s idea into scalable, repeatable outcomes. This gap, born from a weak foundation in governance and risk management, is the silent killer of scale.
From an investor’s perspective, the narrative continues with the founder’s dilemma. The choice between absolute control and funded growth. Too many founders choose control, creating a key-man risk.
As decision-making becomes centralised
in one person, it limits potential investment opportunities, particularly when boards which are often ceremonial lack the teeth to provide meaningful oversight and governance.
Well-meaning institutions have tried to intervene. The Nairobi Securities Exchange’s Ibuka Program, designed to prepare SMEs for public listing, has seen limited success. With an official recently admitting it “did not see the success it was meant to have.”
Why? Because a top-down program cannot fix a bottom-up problem. You cannot simply polish a company for public markets if its core is still stuck in operational chaos.
The solution, then, must come from within. It requires a mindset shift from “hustle” to “structure.” And the most powerful, yet underutilized, strategy for achieving this is the discipline of “franchisability.”
This isn’t necessarily about selling franchises. It is the process of developing a business model so well-documented, systemised, and repeatable that it could be successfully replicated by a third party. The discipline of building a “franchise-ready” business is transformative. It forces a founder to confront the root causes of their operational chaos.