One conversation, not five

I have spent the better part of this month in rooms – some on grand stages, some around small tables – with founders, ministers, investors, and builders from across Africa and beyond. And I have come home holding on to a single, simple realisation that I cannot shake.

We keep treating them as separate things that are actually one.

We fund health here. Agriculture there. Technology in another budget line. Investment in yet another. We build a programme for nutrition and a different programme for disease, and we are surprised when neither is quite sustained. But a mother in Kano does not live her life in sectors. Her health, what her family eats, whether she can earn a living, whether the clinic down the road is still running three years from now – those are not five problems. It is one life and one system.

“What is frequently missing is not capital but the plan, the implementation muscle, and the trusted hands to de-risk the first mile so that private investment feels safe enough to follow.”

This is the truth I watched land on people in those conversations. The moment we stopped speaking in our separate professional languages and simply talked as people who care about the same outcome, the walls between “health” and “food” and “economy” dissolved. They were never really there. We built them, mostly for our own convenience.

I raise this now because the ground beneath this work is shifting, and we would be unwise to pretend otherwise. The era of dependable, large-scale external funding is narrowing. I will not pretend that it is comfortable, and I will not point fingers about how we got here. But I have come to believe it is also an invitation – perhaps the most important one our generation of African builders will receive – to build differently.

For too long, we designed solutions to survive only as long as the grant did. A pilot would run beautifully, win its evaluation, get handed to a government, and silently disappear the moment the funding or the political cycle turned. We called this development. In truth, it was a kind of borrowing against the future. And the bill is now coming due.

So what does building differently actually look like?

First, it means designing for sustainability from the very first day, not as an afterthought. A solution that can only live on donor money has not yet become a system. The most enduring work I have seen builds in a real path to revenue and, where possible, a path to income for the very communities and health workers involved. That is not a betrayal of our social mission. It is how genuine local ownership is earned. People protect what feeds them.

Second, it means integrating rather than fragmenting. If food security and health and livelihood are one conversation, then we should stop funding them as if they were strangers. The most exciting ideas I encountered this month were the ones that refused to stay in a single lane – platforms that connect a farmer to a market and a clinic to a supply chain in the same breath, because they understood that you cannot improve a community’s health while ignoring how it eats and earns.

Third, it means getting honest about money – and about the fact that the money is often there. What is frequently missing is not capital but the plan, the implementation muscle, and the trusted hands to de-risk the first mile so that private investment feels safe enough to follow. We need a recognised class of orchestrators and systems architects, people whose entire job is to connect founders, governments, and capital so that a brilliant founder is not also expected to become an expert in procurement law overnight. That connective tissue is the missing layer in our ecosystem, and it deserves deliberate investment.

And fourth – this one matters to me deeply; it means treating partnership as partnership. The relationships I value most right now are not built on aid. They are built on the honest recognition that two ecosystems need each other. Africa brings urgency, extraordinary talent, and markets moving faster than almost anywhere on earth. Our partners abroad bring decades of hard-won institutional muscle, the standards and systems that turn a clever pilot into a lasting platform. Put those together as equals, with candour on both sides, and you have something far more durable than charity ever produced.

None of this is a solo endeavour. Founders cannot carry system change alone. Neither can governments, donors, investors, academia, or implementers. The work now is orchestration – the patient, unglamorous craft of getting the right people to sit at the same table and, crucially, to stay there long after the photographs are taken.

I left this month’s conversations more hopeful than I have been in a while. Not because anyone in those rooms had all the answers, but because the right people were there and willing to keep showing up. The hardest part of our work was never the ideas. Africa has never been short of those. It is the trust, the follow-through, and the courage to keep building when the cameras and the grants have moved on.

So here is my invitation to anyone reading this – in Lagos, in Toronto, in Nairobi, in Kigali. Stop funding five separate problems. Sit at the table where the sectors blur. And let us build the kind of systems that outlast the grant, the political cycle, and all of us.

Ota Akhigbe is Director of Partnerships and Programmes at eHealth Africa, where she leads the organisation’s global partnerships and programs portfolio across 21+ African countries and its presence in Washington, DC, Berlin, and the Gulf and Asia.