Why you haven’t started your business yet

In 2023 we surveyed the Tunga developer pool about what the Tunga Academy should contribute to achieving. We asked African software developers what their ambitions were, and where they see themselves in 5 years.

These were the top answers:

• I want to start my own business
• I want to found or co-found a tech company
• I don’t want to code forever, I want to be an entrepreneur

If this is you, keep reading.

Brookings’ Foresight Africa 2024: more than 3 in 4 African young people plan to start a business within 5 years. The 41 devs in our 2023 survey were one expression of a continent-wide pattern.

So what’s holding you back?

What’s stopping you has a name

Economists at the Toulouse School of Economics studied this. Without public safety nets, successful African professionals carry the financial weight of their extended family. Brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, in-laws. School fees, medical bills, weddings, funerals, day-to-day support.

They call this the Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis (FMHH). The finding: between 8 and 12.6 percent of Africa’s formal-sector workforce are “missing entrepreneurs.” Would-be founders kept out by the math. Each professional who launches a startup stops being the safety net for 10 to 15 people.

If you’ve been carrying an idea and not starting, this is what you’ve been pushing against. The math has been against you. Quitting your salary, or even taking a 12-month income hit while you build, isn’t a personal calculation. It’s a household one. A family one. Sometimes a village one.

What’s different now

5 years ago, starting a tech business often meant leaving. Relocating to an ecosystem with capital and customers. Cold-emailing into Silicon Valley networks. Severing the support web that holds an extended family together precisely when you needed cash flow yourself. The FMHH cost was at its highest right when your safety-net role mattered most.

That isn’t the path anymore. The capital came closer:

• African tech raised $4.1B in 2025, up 25 percent year-over-year
• Kenya led at $1.04B
• Kampala was the fastest-growing city in East Africa’s top 10, up 54 percent

And the peer signal moved with it. African tech-Twitter from the last 60 days reads like this:

• Wendy Akinyi in Nairobi: paying users and a SAFE on a $10M cap inside 90 days, building Spairally for AI public safety
• Numida from Kampala: over $20M in loans processed by mid-2025
• A 21-year-old in Kenya: $50K pre-seed for an AI vending machine

None of these are unicorn moonshots. They’re devs your age, building from where they already were.

The FMHH constraint hasn’t dissolved. But the trade-off has shifted. The moment is open. You don’t have to leave anyone to take it.

What we did with this finding

We sat with the survey for a while. The most honest reaction was: this isn’t really our problem. We place developers with European companies. Our economics work whether or not those developers ever found their own businesses. Walking away would have been defensible.

But Tunga exists because economic opportunity flows to talent, wherever that talent sits. African youth carving their own path toward founder roles is the most direct expression of that mission we’d ever seen in our own data. So walking away wasn’t an option.

There was a second reason, more commercial. Tunga is built by entrepreneurs and serves entrepreneurs. Our clients are mostly founders and CTOs of growing companies. They get more out of developers who think like operators, who see the business behind the ticket, who have skin in the game of building something. A pool of developers with founder ambitions is, structurally, a better pool of developers for our customers.

So we built TechWings Africa (TWA). A program for African tech professionals who aspire to become entrepreneurs.

How TWA removes the reasons not to start

The program runs 6 months, fully sponsored. Two tracks:

• Build Now: for developers with something already running (a side-project, an MVP, a first stream of revenue) that needs focus to grow
• Future Founders: for developers with the idea but no validation yet, who want the structure to test before committing

Each design choice answers the structural picture above:

• Full sponsorship removes the income trade-off the Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis describes. You can step into building without dropping the support you provide your family.
• A cohort of 30 peers and a standing mentor network reduce the isolation that derails most solo founders.
• Customer validation is built into Future Founders. Building 18 months on assumptions nobody tested is the most common way African founders burn capital and energy.
• Coaching cadence keeps progress legible week by week. The project doesn’t drift.

Applications for Cohort 2 close end of May 2026. The math may have been against you. But this program is your lever to change that.