Local Competence Building and International Venture Capital in Low-Income Countries: Exploring foreign high-tech investments in Kenya's Silicon Savanna

Purpose: In this paper, we explore the new phenomenon of international high-tech investments into entrepreneurial ventures at the case of Kenya. Classifying investors and start-ups, and mapping the interaction structure between them, we aim at identifying investment patterns that can contribute to competence building and sustainable development in less developed economies in the global
South.

Design/methodology/approach: Classifying investors and start-ups, and mapping the interaction structure between them, we aim at identifying investment patterns that can contribute to competence building and sustainable development in less developed economies in the global South.

Findings: Looking at data from Kenya, we observe that there is a new type of mostly young investors that support innovative ideas in sub-Saharan Africa. Such ideas manifest as social and technological innovations that are often very much different from technology used in the west.

Originality/value: We develop a novel classification of technology investments in low income countries by exploiting the rich information and graph-based structure of the CrunchBase dataset, thereby sheeting light on an up to now under-researched emerging phenomenon.