Innovating in Africa: Why Kenya is more than a silicon savannah

Kenya’s innovation story is moving far beyond the M-Pesa prologue. With US$638 million raised in 2024, AIoT breakthroughs in agriculture, climate-tech experiments in mobility, and a booming creative economy, the country is redefining how Africa builds its future.

Africa is no longer waiting to be discovered. It is building. It is innovating. It is rewriting the global script on how technology, culture, and resilience converge to shape societies.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Kenya, a country that has moved from being branded the Silicon Savannah to becoming something far more layered and ambitious. For too long, the narrative reduced Kenya’s innovation story to a single case study: M-Pesa. That was transformative, yes, but it was only the prologue. Today, Kenya is writing a different chapter—one that blends finance, technology, culture, and sustainability into a new vision of African progress.

The numbers tell part of the story. In 2024, Kenyan startups raised about US$638 million, nearly 29 percent of all startup funding on the continent. By mid-2025, African startups had already crossed the one-billion-dollar mark, with Kenya firmly among the “big four” alongside Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt. Investment is also shifting: cleantech captured nearly half of Kenya’s equity funding in 2024, while agritech and AI-driven solutions began drawing serious attention.

The creative economy, long undervalued, is booming as music, film, and fashion find continental and global markets, with platforms like Mdundo reaching more than twenty million users across Africa.

Yet the true story of Kenyan innovation is not just capital raised, but ecosystems built. Innovation does not thrive in isolation—it thrives in soil that has been cultivated with care. That is why organizations like Anza Village matter. At Anza, we do the often unglamorous work of training founders through the Grow Academy, supporting women entrepreneurs through accelerators, and convening the AfriNovation Festival, where innovators, corporates, policymakers, and creatives meet. These are not showcases for their own sake; they are deliberate efforts to connect the dots between ideas, policy, and capital.

This ecosystem-first approach matters because Kenya’s challenges are not abstract. They are lived realities: post-harvest food losses that consume nearly 30 percent of output, climate shocks that threaten smallholder farmers, unemployment in a country where the median age is just nineteen. Innovation here is not a luxury or a trend. It is survival, it is dignity, and it is the only way to transform crises into opportunities.

Already, the outlines of the future are clear. Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are being applied in agriculture to measure soil health, predict rainfall, and reduce losses. Climate-tech startups are deploying electric buses in Nairobi and battery-swap motorbikes across Kisumu.

The government has launched an AI Strategy 2025–2030, signaling that artificial intelligence is not a luxury but a necessity for national competitiveness. Mobile subscriptions now exceed seventy-six million, with penetration at 145 percent, showing that connectivity is no longer concentrated in elites but part of daily life for millions.

Even Kenya’s IoT market, projected at US$670 million in 2024, underscores how embedded digital solutions are becoming in agriculture, healthcare, and commerce.

But the provocation remains: will this momentum scale, or will it stall? Will Kenyan startups continue to be celebrated for pilots and prototypes, or will they grow into industries that change GDP? Will regulators catch up to the pace of entrepreneurs, or will red tape throttle growth? Will innovation remain Nairobi-centric, or will it spread across counties and into rural communities? Will women founders and underserved groups gain true access to markets and finance, or will inclusion remain a convenient slogan?

Events like the AfriNovation Festival reflect both the hope and urgency of these questions. It is not another sterile conference—it is a cultural convergence. A panel on AI runs alongside a showcase of African music and fashion.

A five-kilometer run in Ngong Forest ends in the planting of ten thousand trees. A climate-tech pitch battle concludes with founders leading a reforestation effort. The message is simple but profound: Africa does not have to choose between growth and regeneration, or between tradition and modernity. It can—and must—do both.

The seeds of innovation are already in Kenya’s soil. They are in hackathons at universities, in women-led startups rewriting gender norms, in young creatives fighting for IP recognition, and in climate-tech founders turning waste into value. The question now is who will water them. Because innovation in Africa is not a spectator sport. It is an invitation—to policymakers, investors, corporates, and citizens—to help cultivate a future where African ingenuity is not the exception but the rule.

Wangechi Wahome is CEO of Anza Village, Co-Founder of the Anza Grow Academy, and convener of the AfriNovation Festival. She writes on innovation, policy, and intellectual property in Africa.