Innovation Hubs in Africa: What Do They Really Do for Digital Entrepreneurs?

Driven by a wave of excitement, dozens of innovation hubs emerged across Africa in the 2010s. Yet critical voices soon began to surface, pointing out that start-up creation and development were mostly elusive. Aspirational voices across the donor landscape became pitted against a more hard-headed narrative, seeing hubs as nothing but ineffective incubators. This chapter sidesteps the question of whether hubs work and instead tries to clarify what work hubs do for African digital entrepreneurs. The chapter is thus an attempt at empirically grounding and testing both hopes for and criticisms of African innovation hubs. Specifically, the study examines in more depth how hubs’ supposed connection function plays out within the complex and challenging realities of African cities as contexts of digital entrepreneurship.