Recent findings of a study on Kenya’s startup space, fintech ventures alone accounted for just over 30% or 93 out of the 308 tracked startups. This figure is almost three times more than that of the nearest challengers, namely agri-tech and e-health, which both accounted for 10.1% of Kenya’s tech startups that were tracked between January and November 2022.
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However, as explained in Disrupt Africa’s study report on the Kenyan startup ecosystem, the dominance of fintechs is not unusual.
“Fintech takes the top spot in most African countries as it solves fundamental problems for the populace, is an area in which novel tech solutions tend to be well received and quickly adopted, as well as offering attractive returns for investors,” the report said.
Besides accounting for the largest share of tech startups, fintechs also employed more workers (3,100) than other sub-sectors. Agritech and e-commerce are the only other tech sub-sectors that employed more than a thousand workers.
Also Read: Snapshot on Africa Economic Performance By The Beginning of Q4 2022; So Far .
Meanwhile, as shown by the study’s breakdown of the fintechs’ areas of focus, remittances (24%), as well as the lending and financing (21%) space, appear to be the more popular categories. According to the report, part of the reason for this is that “these areas cover many of the most fundamental financial services that are still lacking for much of the population.” The report added that such categories have been “the jumping-off point for fintech ecosystems continent-wide.”
Concerning the tech startups’ use of blockchain, the study found that 12 of the 30 blockchain-based ventures are fintechs. E-health (6) and agri-tech (5) are ranked second and third, respectively.
