Top 10 African cities with the highest number of business founders

Business Insider Africa presents the top 10 African cities with the highest number of business founders.
This list is courtesy of Ondeck, an organization that assists businesses in scaling.
Kigali is Africa’s most entrepreneurial city.

The existence of vibrant and successful business founders is essential to a region's economic, social, and cultural fabric. Their efforts extend beyond financial achievement, benefiting the community's entire prosperity and vibrancy.

There are cities in Africa with a high concentration of founders. These locations generally reflect Africa's ingenuity since they host a cluster of some of the continent's brightest and most innovative minds. This begs the question of which cities have the greatest number of founders.

According to a report by Ondeck, an organization that assists businesses in scaling, the most business-inclined city in Africa can be found in the subcontinent of East Africa. However, other regions on the continent are also represented, with ten standing out. Below are said ten cities.

Methodology

To arrive at the result, Ondeck retrieved the total number of local LinkedIn profiles in 150 countries, the top 10 most populated cities within those countries, every U.S. state, the 100 most populated cities in the U.S., every U.K. city, and the top 250 global cities of Startupblink’s Global Startup Report 2022.

To find the proportion of workers within each location who are business founders, Ondeck repeated the search on LinkedIn by searching for the job title “founder.” The platform could then rank locations by the number of business founder profiles per 10k LinkedIn users overall.

Ondeck's 10 African cities with the highest number of business founders Ondeck

The report found that “Rwanda’s capital city Kigali is the most entrepreneurial city in Africa, counting 116.5 business founders for every 10k LinkedIn profiles. It’s also the home of the Norrsken Foundation’s startup hub Kigali House, billed as the “largest hub for entrepreneurs in Africa,” below is the list of the other cities that followed suit.

Top 10 African cities with the highest number of business founders

Rank	City	Country	Score
1.	Kigali	Rwanda	116.5
2.	Abuja	Nigeria	111.1
3.	Kampala	Uganda	106.4
4.	Cape Town	South Africa	103.4
5.	Nairobi	Kenya	97.0
6.	Gaborone	Botswana	93.6
7.	Johannesburg	South Africa	87.7
8.	Harare	Zimbabwe	85.2
9.	Dar es Salaam	Tanzania	84.7
10.	Lusaka	Zambia	78.3