Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa: How a Continent Is Escaping Silicon Valley’s Long Shadow

This book emerged from a five-year European Research Council (ERC) funded project called Geonet. The project (ERC-2013-StG335716-GeoNet) gave us the opportunity to fund both the salaries of the authors (Nicolas and Michel as full-time Postdoctoral Researchers on the project, and Mark as the Principal Investigator) and the extensive fieldwork that was required to undertake a research project of this size. Needless to say that our research in this area—and by extension, this book—would not have existed without the support of the ERC. The Geonet project incorporated three core research areas, of which the work in the book represents one. Each area of the project has been shaped by the innovative research and hard work of our colleagues in the rest of the team. Therefore, we wish to thank our Geonet collaborators: Mohammed Amir Anwar, Fabian Braesemann, Chris Foster, Sanna Ojanperä, Stefano De Sabbata, and Ralph Straumann. We are especially thankful to Sanna and Fabian for providing data-scientific inputs to this book.