Digital Start-Up Nightmares: Failure and Fractured Families in Ghana

Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.

The incubator’s so-called Wall of Inspiration. On the left, David Warlick (an edublogger) is quoted saying ‘We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.’ At the bottom, the anthropologist Margeret Mead is quoted saying: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thingthat ever has.’ © Tessa Pijnaker 2014

More than ten years ago, I walked through the gates of one of Accra’s most prestigious technology incubators. I was beginning a five-month research internship at one of their start-ups. In the weeks that followed, I got swept up by local hubs, incubators’ bright colours, and ‘inspiring’ promises of how seizing individual responsibility for Africa’s digitalization through entrepreneurship would lead to individual and collective prosperity on the continent. Since the early 2000s transnational businesses and governments have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the growth of technology hubs and incubators across Africa. These institutions claim to offer valuable training to digital entrepreneurs and accelerate start-up growth. They and their funders work from the presumption that (digital) entrepreneurship will help young African university graduates create skilled jobs for themselves and others, thus reducing the high youth unemployment rate in cities like Accra.

Entrepreneurs would sometimes speak of this promise of wealth in terms of the ‘African dream’, a spin on the promise of the American dream: that hard work and taking risks would be rewarded with a middle-class lifestyle. Hubs and incubators introduced them to Silicon Valley narratives about serial entrepreneurship: starting a new business after the old one had failed. These narratives normalize failure and hardship as an inevitable part of any digital entrepreneur’s (serial) start-up journey, providing the individual with valuable lessons that would eventually lead to them building a start-up generating millions in profits and fame. The journeys of Silicon Valley CEOs, such as Mark Zuckerberg, were commonly framed as success stories providing legitimacy to the pursuit of serial entrepreneurship. In their visits to incubators and hubs they presented themselves to African entrepreneurs as having begun their start-up journeys with very little, from tiny garages, ‘just like many Africans’, before emerging as tech billionaires through hard work and perseverance. Entrepreneurs were not encouraged to quit and little to no attention was paid to the negative long-term effects (repeated) failure could have on them and their families.

Gradually I started to hear the whispers of this dream’s nightmarish potential. When I returned to Accra’s tech hubs and incubators in 2018–19 for my PhD research, I was told many more sad and concerning stories. In an Africa article, I analyse some of these stories as providing insight in the downwardly mobile trajectories that chasing the promise of serial digital entrepreneurship can produce among the matrilineal Akan – the largest ethno-linguistic group in Ghana. Contributing to recent conceptualizations of middle-classness in Africa as an aspirational category, which (extended) families may collectively pursue, I conceptualize downward mobility as a slow process of de-kinning: becoming increasingly excluded from family networks of care and collective obligations to achieve middle-class lifestyles. For young Akan entrepreneurs, this de-kinning typically happened in two ways: not meeting the expectations of siblings and of potential partners in middle-class marriage.

Not ‘returning investment’ to siblings

Within Akan families, siblings are typically expected to provide each other with care in times of hardship and opportunities to achieve upward social mobility. The exact nature of these expectations depends on factors such as birth order and gender, with interventions varying throughout a person’s lifetime. As the young entrepreneurs in my study were raised in families who aspired to achieve lower to upper middle-class lifestyles, typically they were given or could negotiate a window of opportunity, usually after graduating university, during which their family allowed them to experiment and invest most of their resources in establishing a middle-class career and marriage. For some entrepreneurs, this window of opportunity was relatively large. For instance, children who were born second or later to parents who had obtained upper middle-class lifestyles working in senior government or corporate roles could have up to three to five years to invest most of their resources in building a middle-class lifestyle, potentially through the profits generated through their start-up. For first-born sons the window was typically much smaller, as their parents expected them to be able to contribute to providing their siblings with opportunities to achieve middle-class status immediately or up to one or two years after graduating. Serial entrepreneurship thus did not clash with Akan middle-class family values. It was only when parents or siblings tried to close the entrepreneurs’ window of opportunity to unsuccessfully experiment with running a start-up, out of care and concern for their family member’s inability to reach middle-class adult milestones, help their siblings achieve their aspirations and contribute to the family’s good name, that the promise of serial entrepreneurship could lead to serious friction between family members.

A brightly coloured co-working space of a tech hub. © Tessa Pijnaker 2014.

One day in December 2014, I had a conversation with an entrepreneur Kwabena Osei,[1] who told me that he was on his way to shut down his start-up. He shared that this outcome did not only mean that he had not met the expectations of his VC investor, but also that he had been ‘unable to return investment’ to his family. He explained that as the first-born son to parents who saved up money so that he could be the first in their family to go to university, they had expected him to ‘return their investment’ after graduating from university, in the form of securing a job and using some of his salary to fund his younger siblings’ secondary and university education. However, inspired by the promise of serial entrepreneurship, he had invested all his time and money in his start-up, neglecting his obligations to kin. Now that he needed his family’s support to navigate these crises and find a job, they had ceased all contact with him in shame and disappointment. He felt he could no longer rely on their care. Several entrepreneurs who had experienced their parents or siblings closing their window of opportunity in similar ways coped by hanging on to the promise of serial entrepreneurship. They moved away from their siblings, either within Ghana or abroad, to start yet another new start-up hoping this time they would be successful.

Missed marriage chances

To continue collective obligations of care and mark the family’s middle-class status, young Akan entrepreneurs were expected to enter into middle-class Christian marriage and to produce children. Entrepreneurs’ downward mobility could manifest in the form of a limited ability to achieve this goal. For instance, in 2018 various male entrepreneurs who had experienced start-up failure shared that their experience had gone hand-in-hand with their long-term, similarly aged girlfriends breaking up with them. According to them, women their age (in their early thirties) were ‘too demanding’: they wanted to get married and have children, while they had not accumulated enough resources to pay bride price to the bride’s family. Instead, many male entrepreneurs who coped with (repeated) start-up failure opted to date women much younger than them, usually recent university graduates, as they perceived these women as not wanting to get married yet and thus more compatible. I analyse this as a sign of downward mobility; by opting for this kind of relationship, male entrepreneurs delayed contributing to their family’s collective efforts to reproduce middle-class status through marriage and ensure the provision of care and opportunity by children.

The long-term ripple effects of start-up failure

During a conference I attended in 2024, one academic wondered whether the digital entrepreneurs did not permanently become downwardly mobile, as she imagined they had the skills to eventually ‘bounce back’ into middle-class lifestyles. The answer to this question is yes and no. Most entrepreneurs who experienced periods of (repeated) start-up failure and fractured sibling relationships eventually managed to generate income through waged work at a corporation or start-up, and to repair their relationships with family members. However, some effects of start-up failure rippled through these entrepreneurs and their kin’s life for much longer, for instance in the form of an inability to ‘catch up’ on saving for middle-class markers of adult family life. As they approached their late thirties, these entrepreneurs had no children, remained unmarried and could not achieve other material markers of middle-class status, such as buying a home or owning a new car. Some entrepreneurs also ended up developing start-up stress-induced chronic illnesses or came to feel so removed from their family, friends and start-up dreams that they committed suicide.

Staircase leading to one of Accra’s tech hubs, featuring messages such as ‘Be Brave’, ‘Believe’, ‘Innovate’, and ‘Inspire’. @Tessa Pijnaker 2014.

Now what? From ‘bubble’ to a just digital future for Africa

For Ghanaian entrepreneurs, speaking about the full impact of (repeated) start-up failure can be incredibly hard. In hubs and incubators, framing failure according to the narrative mould provided by serial entrepreneurship is the accepted norm. By framing failure as lessons for the individual to overcome, the start-up community can maintain the idea that success will eventually come their way. Typically, entrepreneurs are worried that openly speaking about the true impact of start-up failure on them and their kin will lead to disapproval from the start-up community. They worry it might be perceived as discouraging new students from signing up for entrepreneur training programmes, or lead to the ‘start-up bubble’ bursting, in the form of funding for entrepreneur training programmes and capital provided to Ghanaian start-ups by foreign businesses and governments drying up. They also fear that openly speaking about their failures might bring (more) shame to themselves and their kin or feed into racial stereotypes about Ghana and Africa as ‘lacking’. These concerns illustrate a crises of solidarity: out of compassion for colleagues, kin and the nation, these entrepreneurs stick to individualized narratives that make them responsible for solving issues caused by others, such as Africa’s ‘missing jobs’ problem, and are reluctant to unite to put the structural problems that affect their entrepreneurial work and health on the agenda. One small step towards alleviating the mental health crises among young African entrepreneurs would be the fostering of more supportive practices and narratives about entrepreneurial responsibility and well-being.