A0370
Title: Startups in African agriculture sector: Insights from the computational linguistics
Authors: Nouhaila Belaid - Africa Business School (ABS)-Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) (Morocco) [presenting]
Ivan Savin - ESCP Business School, Madrid campus (Spain)
Abstract: Africa's agriculture sector holds promise for sustainable development, which is of utmost priority given the current challenges in population growth, resource scarcity and climate variability. Startups, especially in agriculture technology, are key drivers of innovation. Employing structural topic modeling, textual descriptions of 36,232 African startups in the Crunchbase database are studied. A new classification of startups in Africa is offered that includes 30 topics ranging from real estate and telecom through healthcare and education to cybersecurity and cryptocurrency. While the Crunchbase database has an internal classification, companies are attributed to classes by individual company owners, resulting in inconsistencies, gaps and inaccuracies. The approach allows the mitigation of these challenges. Startups are found in this continent, demonstrating a trend towards more cross-industry operations, i.e. recombining more business topics in one company. For example, many companies work on the intersection of agriculture and blockchain, farming and insurance, or healthcare and AI. It is also found that topics like real estate, manufacturing and AI are concentrated in South and Northern Africa, while Eastern Africa attracts more startups in renewable energy and agriculture and West Africa for online marketplaces and e-commerce. Topics that attract the most venture capital investments are mining, telecom, renewable energy and startup incubators.
