AfricInvest partner George Odo on lessons African founders never receive

This article is based on a conversation from Voices & Visions, a podcast produced through a partnership between Tutto Passa Agency and TechCabal, which explores the people and ideas shaping Africa’s innovation economy.

On some days, George Odo thinks about old people in restaurants struggling with phone flashlights to read menus. It is a small, almost funny observation. But for him, it says something larger about markets, behaviour, and how quickly systems evolve while people lag behind them.

Odo, a senior partner at pan-African private equity firm AfricInvest, has spent close to two decades reading markets before they fully reveal themselves. Today, he works on capital, policy, and entrepreneurship in Africa and, increasingly, in classrooms like those at Columbia Business School.

But the tension in his thinking is not between Africa and global capital. It is between what African universities teach and what African markets actually demand.

“I guess so,” he says when asked if he considers himself a dealmaker in a recorded conversation on Voices & Visions, a podcast backed by Tutto Passa Agency and TechCabal. “I’ve been in deal making for some time, doing deals in private equity mainly, but working with colleagues who are involved in deal making in private credit and in venture capital.”

It is a modest answer for someone who has helped deploy capital across a continent where the rules of investing rarely stay still.

Before AfricInvest, Odo spent a decade at CARE International—a humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty—working across East and Southern Africa on microfinance and SME development. The shift from non-governmental organisation (NGO) finance to private equity, he says, was not just a career move; it was a philosophical break.

“We realised handing out aid is not sustainable,” he says. “The big difference was using commercial capital instead of soft capital. Commercial capital, no second chance.”

That sentence reads like a warning because in Odo’s world, capital is not patient. It is conditional and demands discipline, structure, and clarity from day one, something he believes many African founders still underestimate. And something, he suggests, that African universities rarely teach well enough.

In Odo’s telling, one of the biggest distortions in African entrepreneurship is intellectual importation.

“People come with term sheets that work elsewhere and try to copy-paste,” he says. “It doesn’t work like that. You have to think about context.”

That word ‘context ‘ comes up often when speaking. It is his shorthand for everything that makes African markets structurally different: fragmented demand, uneven infrastructure, thin capital markets, political volatility, and a funding ecosystem still heavily dependent on foreign investors.

Emerging markets now account for roughly 30% of global private equity and venture capital activity, he notes. But Africa remains a small slice of that. Capital, when it arrives, is selective.

“We’ve seen flows come back, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, but it is still cautious,” he says.

The risk, in his view, is not just financial, but also systemic.

“You can’t have an election where someone claims to win by 98%,” he says. “Investors don’t like instability.”

Infrastructure gaps compound the issue. Africa, he notes, still hosts just a fraction of global data centre capacity. Intra-African trade remains stuck below 20%, far behind other regions where it exceeds 50%. These shape how deals are structured, how startups scale, and how far capital can stretch.

Odo’s critique extends to how African universities are still teaching entrepreneurship as an aspiration. Students in business schools across the continent learn business plans, pitching and market sizing frameworks. But they rarely learn how capital actually behaves in early-stage environments.

Or how dilution works in practice, and why a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) note might be preferable to equity in certain seed deals.

“I advised him not to take it as equity,” Odo says of a founder who had been offered $1 million in early capital. “Take it as a SAFE note or convertible bond to avoid dilution.”

According to Odo, this is the kind of advice that usually circulates in investment committees, but not African lecture halls. And for him, that is precisely the problem.

The gap in the market, therefore, is exposure, not enthusiasm. Kenyan universities, he suggests, still sit too far from the mechanics of deal-making in real markets, where capital is structured, risk is priced, and founders negotiate from unequal positions.

Even succession planning, he notes, is rarely taught with urgency. He points to a pattern in which family-owned businesses struggle to transition from founder to professional management, or from first-generation wealth to institutional continuity.

Without that transition, scale remains limited.

One of Odo’s sharper observations is that Africa’s formal economy misreads its own informal strength.

“SMEs and MSMEs have much higher cash flows,” he says. “A micro business selling secondhand clothes gets cash flow all day.”

Banks, he adds, were slow to recognise this reality until institutions like Kenya’s Equity Bank and NCBA began shifting toward cash-flow-based lending models. That same blindness, he argues, still exists in parts of the startup ecosystem, where attention is often skewed toward venture-scale technology rather than cash-generating businesses.

So why is a man like Odo teaching or engaging with institutions like Columbia at all?

In his framing, the answer is not that African universities lack talent; rather, they often lack proximity to capital at scale. At AfricInvest—which now counts Nairobi as its second-largest office after Tunis—he has watched how global capital behaves when it meets Africa’s complexity.

In the end, Odo’s argument is not that African universities are failing. It is that they are incomplete.

They teach entrepreneurship as inspiration when markets demand execution. They teach business models while investors price risk. And somewhere between those two worlds sits a generation of African founders trying to translate ambition into companies that survive contact with reality.

“You must think about context,” Odo says again, almost as a refrain.

Listen to the full podcast on Spotify.