10
YEARS AS AN
AFRICAN CHAMPION
FOR AFRICA’S BUSINESS
CHAMPIONS
www.africanmanagers.org
IMPACT REPORT 2023
AMI enables ambitious leaders,
businesses, and the continent’s future
workforce to thrive.
We provide learning that equips Africa's
entrepreneurs and growing companies
with the tools and training they need to
perform and succeed.
We believe skilled people
build thriving businesses,
thriving businesses create
quality jobs, and quality jobs
drive prosperity and dignity.
Table of Contents
Letter from Our Co-Founders
Data: 10-Year Overview
10 years of Highlights
Data: Focus on 2023
5 Insights: What We’ve Learned So Far
5 Actions: How We’re Leveraging these Lessons
An Ambitious Team for an Ambitious Africa
Decoding Our Impact: The Data Fine Print
12
34
47
49
YEARS
AS AN AFRICAN CHAMPION
FOR AFRICA’S BUSINESS
CHAMPIONS
Boniface’s story plays out every day across
Africa in the thousands of businesses we
support. And it goes to the heart of what
inspired us to found AMI a decade ago.
As we celebrate our 10th birthday this year,
we’re reflecting on what we’ve learned about
driving business outcomes through skills
development. We’re also raising our ambition,
as we prepare to scale our proven model for
massive jobs and livelihood impact in the
decade to come.
When we started this journey, the impact
sector’s response to Africa’s ticking time-
bomb of youth demographics was to train
young people for jobs that didn’t exist. It
wasn’t working.
It seemed clear to us that getting young
people into work, and catalysing African
economies and livelihoods more broadly,
would require new jobs. Millions of them. That
would need a vibrant business sector, with
hundreds of thousands of growing, job-
creating SMEs, along with larger business
champions - staffed by high performing
leaders, managers and employees - to build
markets, innovate and position the continent
for success on a global stage.
For Kenyan entrepreneur Boniface
Odera, business has always been
about people. Specifically, jobs - for
his community in a low-income area
of Nairobi.
Odera’s business, Mukuru Talent, supplies
sports equipment to schools and sports clubs
across Nairobi. In 2023, after professionalising
and growing his business through AMI’s Grow
Your Business programme, he created 32 new
jobs and increased revenue by 76%. Of his 48
employees, 80% are women.
OUR CO-FOUNDERS
A LETTER FROM
Like Boniface, we knew that business is
fundamentally about people. Performing
people build thriving businesses, and thriving
businesses create jobs, prosperity and dignity.
Africa has no shortage of talent. But to
harness that talent, to build the business
champions of tomorrow, there was an urgent
need to rapidly improve the performance of
business owners, leaders and employees at
every level.
We knew that traditional training couldn’t
achieve this. Our approach had to be
obsessively focused on practice - providing
business owners and their teams with
practical tools to underpin the daily habits
and behaviours needed to build strong
companies.
It needed to be rooted in the realities of
Africa’s dynamic economies. No more ‘fly-in-
fly-out’ workshops with expensive foreign
trainers. Critically, it had to scale. The
challenge - and our ambition - was too
significant to replicate the status quo. We
needed a whole new approach to training for
business outcomes that could ultimately
reach millions.
So that’s what we did. And that’s what we’ve
been doing ever since.
p 3
For every $1 spent on AMI programmes last
year, SMEs we supported generated $48 in SME
revenue and $12 in additional income for
African workers. In total, we impacted over
220,000 livelihoods in 2023 alone. It’s a hugely
impactful and efficient model.
As we look ahead, our team is focused on scale.
How can we provide millions of business
champions like Boniface with the tools they
need to grow and get Africa working?
We are working with governments and
development partners to get our tech-enabled
methodology into the hands of thousands of
other business support providers across Africa.
We’re also ramping up our work with larger
enterprises to deepen the bench of talent for
Africa’s business champions, expanding into
important new markets, such as Nigeria and
Ethiopia.
We have much to celebrate - but much more to
get done.
In this report, we reflect not only on learnings
(we’ve chosen five) but on five places we’re
taking those learnings to amplify impact. We
call these insights our ‘Ten from Ten’.
Jonathan Cook
Co-Founder & Chairman
We’ve learned so much over the last decade,
supporting over 37,000 businesses that have
created cumulatively over 97,000 direct and
indirect jobs, and generated average annual
revenue growth of 18% since the Covid crisis.
That’s more than $130M in incremental
revenue for businesses supported in the last
ten years. Women business leaders may be
benefitting most - our most recent data show
women - and youth - outpacing the average
on almost every business metric.
We’ve built a model we know can be rapidly
scaled in the next decade.
Jonathan
Rebecca Harrison
Co-Founder & CEO
Rebecca
AMI tools have been key to our
progress. They've helped us
understand where we are, where
we're headed and how best to
navigate that journey. Sharing
this knowledge and these tools
with my team has streamlined
our workflow and helped us
grow.
Boniface Odera
Mukuru Talent, Kenya
As we keep growing, our commitment is to
keep measuring our impact rigorously and
sharing what we discover.
We hope these data and insights can go
well beyond AMI to help shape the whole
ecosystem, building a robust business
support sector that will drive impact at
scale for Africa’s business champions,
creating millions of new jobs in the decade
to come.
p 4
Data citations and references included in the body of the report.
10 Years as an African Champion
for Africa’s Business Champions
2013 - 2023
12x
in employee income
ROI
48x
in SME revenue
ROI
Through our evidence-based business growth programmes, delivered in 39 countries since 2013,
AMI has achieved exciting results for businesses across Africa:
businesses
supported
37,000+
97,000+
direct and indirect
jobs created
1,464,800
livelihoods improved
For every $1 in training costs,
$12 in SME employee
income generated
For every $1 invested,
$48 in SME revenue
returned
$130M+
added to African
economies in 10 years!
Youth and women exceed the
average on revenue growth
Women-led businesses exceed the
average in job creation
p 5
10
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
Learners engage with AMI’s
first online courses
African Management Insitute (AMI)
incorporated in November 2013
Awarded 2nd place in the Enterprise
category for the global The Wharton
School Reimagine Education Awards 2014
First workplace learning client
M-KOPA enrolls in the AMI
Leadership Development Programme
Flagship Grow Your Business programme launched
for SMEs
Closed $1M investment to fund pan-African growth
with Investisseurs et Partenaires (I&P) .
In our first five years we trained over 20,000 individuals through
70 blended learning programmes in 13 African countries
Expanded to Rwanda with Mastercard
Foundation Hanga Ahazaza programme to
train 7,000 youth in Hospitality & Tourism
sector
Expanded presence to Uganda;
partnership with the Private Sector
Foundation Uganda (PSFU) to develop
standards for strengthening SME
support ecosystem
AGRA and AMI launched Centre for
African Leaders in Agriculture (CALA)
Moved to fully virtual delivery in response
to Covid-19; launched 'Business Survival
Bootcamps' for 2,300+ businesses
Launch of AMI Enterprise, with revamped
workplace learning offerings for Africa’s
ambitious companies and their teams
SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS
2013-2023
In 10 years, AMI has reached over 94,000
individuals in 39 African countries
p 6
Agreed new partnership to enter Ethiopia
Reached over 100 staff with a
presence in 8 countries
Closed seed funding with impact and
angel investors
Kenya country office established
South Africa country office established
Delivered programme for women drivers
with Uber in Kenya and South Africa
Launched the Thrive Community of
entrepreneurs drawn from across
Africa; reach expanded to 39 countries
Food Systems Practice launched
Expanded presence to Senegal
Launch of Open Programmes for business
growth and workplace learning
p 7
2023 Impact
AMI’s ANNUAL IMPACT OVERVIEW
In 2023, AMI reached over 3,700 businesses through our
programmes. SMEs in our business growth programmes
averaged an 18% annual growth rate and created on average
one new job every year. Almost 40% of these SMEs accessed
finance. Overall, our programmes had an impact on an
estimated 221,669 livelihoods. Critically, this impact was
delivered more cost effectively than ever before.
Youth and Women-Owned Businesses
This year's youth and gender data is remarkable,
with women-owned businesses accounting for more
than half of those supported, and women and young
people outpacing men for the first time on almost
every growth metric.
High Return on Investment
Businesses generated $48 in revenue for every $1
invested in an AMI programme, with an estimated
25% of that going direct to employee incomes (x12
livelihood RoI), That's sector-leading impact and
cost efficiency.
We also see our top performers generating outsized
impact, emerging as Africa's future business
champions.
Would this growth have happened without AMI's
support? We're running an RCT to test for that. But
meanwhile, 88% of entrepreneurs say they either
would not or may not have achieved this growth
without AMI's support.
Entrepreneur Approved
20,880
jobs improved
& grew revenue at an average of
p 8
221,669
livelihoods impacted
2023 Impact
IN NUMBERS
3,744
businesses
reached
performing businesses
created on avg.
15.4
Top 50
jobs each
Revenue & Job Creation
3,288
direct full time
jobs created
in 34 countries
across Africa
169% in 1 year
Participating businesses reported a median
Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.92%
CAGR
Spotlight
On Youth
p 9
Women-led
businesses created
an average of
of all jobs created
were for women
1.4
jobs
26
Spotlight
On Women
2023 saw exciting gains in results for women-led
businesses, performing better than male-led
businesses’ averages in all highlighted data
20
81
24.6
median annual
revenue growth for
women-led
businesses
ahead of the
average of 18%
youth participants -
(age 34 and below)
across programmes
average annual
revenue growth for
youth-led businesses,
far exceeding the
average of 18%
of all
programme
participants
were women
50
Youth businesses
outpaced the average
women-led businesses
accessed finance
37.7%