Panel: Power of Partnership - African Telecoms Emerging Role as ‘Start-up Multipliers’

In Africa’s increasingly demanding business environment of shrinking margins and slowing investment, telco-start-up collaboration is emerging as a powerful diversification of the telecoms business model. The sweet-spot is combining the telco’s size and scale with start-up innovation and agility to accelerate technological innovation and adoption.

We’ll unpack the challenge of uniting the objectives and workflow of these seemingly very different organisations, and share best practice and learnings from early African telco-start-up partnerships to explore how they are serving as growth unlockers for African telecoms.

• Devil in the detail: the foundation of any good partnership is a clearly defined strategy, based on mutually agreed objectives. But how do these two organisations come together to create that? And how are responsibilities and the process decided?
• Data-driven: telcos are data aggregators, how telco-start-up partnerships leveraging the power of data to find partners, guide investments and inform business decisions