Every other week I find myself having a conversation about the best way to support entrepreneurs in Africa.
Funders inevitably ask about investor readiness. And very often the conversation lands in the same place: "We’re thinking of setting up an accelerator programme."
Accelerator programmes and startup bootcamps remain one of the most common tools used to support entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile I know dozens of entrepreneurs here in Rwanda who have been through the same kind of 6-week accelerator programmes 5 or 6 times. Surely there are only so many times you can be “accelerated”? So what’s going on?
In many ecosystems today, accelerators feel less like a deliberate design choice and more like a default setting. Across East Africa there are more than 100 accelerator and incubation programmes supporting startups.
Accelerators emerged for good reasons. They work well when:
And cohort-based programmes are great and proven to help founders move faster and learn from each other. But ecosystems evolve, and the tools that worked in one phase don’t necessarily solve the constraints of the next.
I would argue the popularity of accelerators today isn’t necessarily because they are the best solution but because they are the most recognisable ones. They’re easy to explain, they have clear timelines and clear metrics. A six-month accelerator with 20 startups, weekly workshops, and a demo day at the end is a format everyone understands. It fits neatly into grant cycles and generates visible activity. It produces numbers that look reassuring in reports: founders trained, mentorship hours delivered, pitch decks produced.
In more mature ecosystems, we often start to see the same symptoms. Founders move from accelerator to accelerator, hearing the same bootcamp content again and again.
Demo days happen but the room is full of mentors and programme staff rather than real buyers, investors, or decision-makers. Strong ventures graduate into ecosystems that simply cannot absorb or scale them. Programmes become optimised for delivery metrics rather than ecosystem outcomes.
Accelerator programmes tend to assume the same diagnosis: The core problem is founder capability. Meanwhile many ventures are jumping through these hoops to get their hands on a small $20,000 grant.
In reality, the constraints to venture success are much more complicated and ventures are struggling with everything from market access, regulatory readiness, procurement pathways, and ecosystem coordination.
If the real constraint is demand-side access, another accelerator won’t solve it. If the real constraint is policy or regulatory barriers, another grant won’t either.
Instead of starting with a format - an accelerator - we should start with understanding the ecosystem.
What is actually missing right now? Is the constraint skills, or capital or demand or something systemic? Is the ecosystem mature enough to support uptake and scale? And what happens to ventures after our intervention ends?
At Brink we’ve been thinking a lot about how funding itself needs to evolve. You can read this great blog from my colleague Lea about the psychology of next-century grantmaking. That shift also changes how programmes are designed: support should be proportionate to the size of the grant and the capacity of the recipient, avoiding one-size-fits-all administrative burdens while still maintaining fiduciary rigour.
When you start from that mindset, another question quickly emerges: are accelerators actually the right tool for the job?
Accelerators are administratively convenient. They give funders a clear structure to manage programmes and demonstrate progress. The reality is that ventures rarely face the same problems at the same time. Often times a standardised curriculum delivered to a cohort of startups won’t fully meet their diversity of needs and instead we need to provide tailored coaching and targeted support.
We’re developing a Fund Builder Tool to help funders and ecosystem builders think more deliberately about how they support innovation.
This is our attempt to codify how we design adaptive, ecosystem aware support models. It encourages us to ask:
So… are accelerator programmes dead? Probably not. But they shouldn’t be the automatic answer to every ecosystem challenge.
Let us know if this resonates and send us an email here if you want to get access to an early release of the Fund Builder Tool.
