Africa Doesn't Have a Policy Problem. It Has an Execution Problem.

The paper trail is impressive. The building site tells a different story.

Africa has the innovation policies. What it lacks is the execution layer to commercialise university research. The builder class is almost entirely absent.

It happens at almost every innovation gathering on the continent. Someone sends out an invitation. The great and the good show up. The conversation is sharp, intellectual, and promising. The participants are impressive: PhDs, MBAs, MScs, programme managers, policy architects, people who have dedicated careers to the question of how Africa unlocks its research potential. And by the end of the gathering, the primary output is yet another policy brief.

I do not say that to be dismissive. The people in those rooms are doing important work. The frameworks they produce matter. You need intellect. But you also need to execute. I have sat in enough of these sessions to see the pattern clearly, a question keeps surfacing that nobody seems to want to answer directly:

Who does the actual work?

Not who writes about it. Not who funds a study on it. Not who convenes a working group to develop recommendations on it. Who files the patent? Who negotiates the licence? Who sits across from an industry partner and says: here is what our researchers have built, here is what it is worth, here is what a deal looks like?

At the overwhelming majority of African universities, the answer is: nobody.

That is not a policy problem. It is an execution problem.

The Paper Trail Is Impressive

In 2014, the African Union adopted STISA-2024 ^[1], the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa. It placed STI at the centre of the continent's socioeconomic development agenda. It articulated six priority areas and called for investing in research infrastructure, building human competence, incubating enterprises, and creating enabling environments for innovation. It was a serious document, produced by serious people, with serious continental ambition behind it.

National governments followed. Kenya built KeNIA ^[2], the Kenya National Innovation Agency, and published a National Innovation Masterplan with a stated goal of having Technology Transfer Offices operational in 50 per cent of tertiary institutions by 2030. Egypt developed its nationwide network of Technology Innovation and Commercialisation Offices. Rwanda is finalising its Technology Transfer and Commercialisation Strategy covering 2025 to 2030 ^[3].

South Africa is a pioneer in this space, with established policies explicitly requiring designated institutions to establish TTOs ^[4].

WIPO has frameworks. ARIPO and OAPI provide regional IP systems. The AU Commission has monitoring mechanisms. There are coalitions, working groups, and communities of practice convening regularly across the continent.

The paper trail is genuinely impressive.

And yet, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa ^[5], progress in implementing STISA-2024 has been "generally slow," with most African countries failing to hit even the minimum 1 per cent of GDP expenditure on Research and Development. Africa contributes just 0.1 per cent of all global patents ^[6], according to Brookings. In Kenya, despite ranking among Africa's top three countries for research output, less than 10 per cent of that research is commercialised ^[7].

The policies exist. The gap between them and any measurable commercial outcome is vast.

The Incentive Nobody Talks About

Writing a national innovation policy is the politically safe move.

It looks good. It ticks donor boxes. It gets ministerial sign-off. It can be presented at the next AU summit. It requires bringing smart people into a room, consulting widely, and producing a well-formatted document. All of those things are achievable. All of those things are fundable. And the output is unambiguous: the document itself.

Building TTO capacity at the institutional level is none of those things.

It is slow. It is unglamorous. It requires a different kind of person, someone who understands both the academic world and the commercial one. That is a genuinely rare combination. It requires sustained budget allocation rather than a one-time grant. It requires university administrators to change how they think about research, not just what they say about it. And the outputs, at least initially, are invisible: a patent filed, a licence negotiated, a spin-out company taking its first uncertain steps.

Nobody writes a policy brief about that.

The UNECA noted as much in its assessment of STISA-2024 implementation, identifying barriers that include low levels of knowledge of and information on STISA-2024, low levels of policy literacy, weak STI policy analysis capacity, and insufficient monitoring, evaluation and accountability ^[5]. Translation: even those tasked with implementing the policies do not fully understand them. And understanding a policy is very different from executing on it.

A Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Namibia said it plainly at a SARIMA Conference: he bemoaned the lack of commercialisation structures in most African universities that can help to translate academic research into commerce ^[8]. This was not a revelation. It was a widely shared frustration, documented and discussed for years, and still largely unaddressed.

Execution Is Hard Everywhere

Before we go further, let us be clear about something.

The execution gap is a human problem, not an African one. Governments everywhere legislate boldly and implement slowly. Institutions everywhere mistake the strategy document for the strategy. The road from "we have a plan" to "the plan is working" is littered with good intentions and unfunded mandates. Africa did not invent this problem.

But Africa is uniquely positioned to feel its consequences.

The United States passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. The legislation gave universities permission to own their IP and license it to the private sector. But the Act alone did not transform American research commercialisation. What did that were the Technology Transfer Offices that universities then built to actually execute on the permission. The policy was the starting pistol. The people were the race ^[9].

Wealthy innovation ecosystems can absorb the delay between policy and execution. They have functioning TTOs at flagship institutions carrying the weight while the rest catch up. They have deep private sector engagement, established IP cultures, and decades of accumulated institutional knowledge. They can afford to move slowly.

African universities, and the researchers inside them, cannot.

Community of Practice vs Community of Execution

Here is the distinction that does not get made often enough.

A Community of Practice is valuable. It shares knowledge, builds common language, develops frameworks, and creates a sense of professional solidarity among people working on similar problems. The innovation ecosystem across Africa is full of them, and the people who participate are genuinely committed to the cause.

But a Community of Practice produces knowledge outputs. Reports. Frameworks. Recommendations. Policy briefs. These are not nothing, but they are not commercialised IP, licensed technology, or revenue flowing back into a university's research budget.

What Africa's research commercialisation system actually needs is a Community of Execution. People who show up not to discuss the problem but to solve a specific instance of it. A licensing officer at a Kenyan university who has just identified a commercially viable compound in their agricultural science department. A patent attorney in Accra navigating ARIPO on behalf of an engineering faculty that has never filed before. A commercialisation manager in Johannesburg structuring a spin-out for a researcher who has spent five years developing a water purification technology and has no idea what to do with it next.

The knowledge class and the builder class are not in opposition. Both are necessary. But right now, Africa's innovation ecosystem is dramatically overstocked with the former and chronically short of the latter.

The policy exists. The community of practice is thriving. The execution layer is almost entirely absent.

Two Entirely Different Skill Sets

This rarely gets said plainly: the people who write Africa's innovation policies and the people who need to execute them require fundamentally different skills, operate in different institutional contexts, and answer to different incentives.

A researcher producing world-class agricultural science in Ibadan is not equipped, and should not be expected, to also negotiate a licensing deal with a seed company. A policy architect designing a national STI framework is not the same person as the licensing manager who will implement it at the institutional level. These are distinct professions. And while the first two exist in reasonable numbers across the continent, the third is extraordinarily rare.

The UNECA assessment is again instructive here. When it identified the implementation barriers for STISA-2024, it was not describing a failure of intelligence or ambition. It was describing a structural mismatch between the skills required to design a policy and the very different skills required to deliver on it ^[5].

A 2024 study in the Springer Open Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship found that only a minority of African universities have fully functional Technology Transfer Offices, and most lack sufficient capacity for effective patent management and commercialisation ^[10]. A separate 2025 study across 13 South African public institutions found that where TTOs do exist, 77 per cent of TTO managers reported more than 50 patent applications filed since their offices were established. When the infrastructure is in place, the pipeline flows ^[11].

The infrastructure is the exception, not the rule.

Kenya Is Trying. But Even Kenya Cannot Do It Alone.

Kenya is the closest thing Africa currently has to a working model, and it is worth examining closely, both for what it demonstrates and for where it runs out of road.

KeNIA's Institutional Commercialisation Support project has worked through multiple phases: rapid assessments, barrier identification, TTO infrastructure setup at specific institutions, and commercialisation master plans. Its KNEIL network ^[2] has brought Vice Chancellors together in a structured cohort model. In 2025, 25 university leaders gathered for an Entrepreneurial Leaders' Training Programme. Maasai Mara University launched a TTO and began commercialising research in bioenergy and agriculture. KCA University filed 11 patents following capacity-building support from KeNIA ^[7].

More significantly, KeNIA issued a formal Request for Proposals in late 2024 to operationalise TTO as a Service (TTOaaS) under the KNEIL network ^[12]. They are building the outsourced model deliberately, because they already understand that most universities cannot afford to build a full TTO internally. This is the right instinct.

The goal is TTOs in 50 per cent of tertiary institutions by 2030. Even with Kenya's genuine political will, that target requires an approach that scales beyond what any single government agency can deliver. And critically, it is Kenya only.

Multiply that challenge across 54 countries, 1,500 plus universities, and two parallel IP systems in ARIPO and OAPI ^[13]. The maths is not difficult. Policy alone will not close this gap. Neither will a single country's national programme, however well designed.

The Leapfrog Advantage

Here is where the story gets interesting.

The West built its technology transfer infrastructure slowly, expensively, and largely through trial and error. The United States spent four decades iterating on the Bayh-Dole model before anything resembling a mature TTO ecosystem emerged. The UK, Germany, Japan, and others followed similar paths: long institutional development cycles, significant sunk costs, plenty of failed approaches before the good ones were identified ^[9].

Africa does not have to do it that way.

The continent has a remarkable track record of arriving at better destinations via unexpected routes. M-Pesa did not wait for branch banking infrastructure. Solar microgrids did not wait for a national grid. Mobile phone adoption leapfrogged landline telephony entirely. In each case, the absence of legacy infrastructure that looked like a disadvantage turned out to be an asset, because it meant there was nothing to protect, no existing system to cannibalise, no institutional inertia slowing down the better solution.

The same logic applies to technology transfer.

Africa can look at 40 years of evidence from established TTO ecosystems, identify what worked and what did not, and build the optimised version, networked, outsourced, continent-scale, fractional, from day one. It does not need to go through the expensive, slow, institution-by-institution process that the West used, because the outsourced model that the West is only now beginning to explore as an alternative is available to Africa right now, as a starting point.

This is not catching up. It is arriving at the destination via a better route.

The execution gap that currently looks like Africa's greatest vulnerability in research commercialisation could, if the right infrastructure is built quickly enough, become the source of its most significant advantage.

The Opportunity Is Personal

This moment belongs to two groups of people in particular.

The first are those who have spent decades in African academia and innovation: the professors, the policy architects, the institutional leaders who have given careers to building the knowledge infrastructure that exists today. That work was not wasted. But legacy is not measured in frameworks authored or conferences chaired. It is measured in what you leave that actually functions after you are gone. A commercialised patent. A researcher who stayed because the system finally worked for them. A university that generates revenue from its own intellectual property for the first time. That is legacy with a pulse. The execution era is the last chapter available to write, and it is the most important one.

The second are those early in their careers who have watched the policy cycle their entire lives and are quietly, politely furious about it. They did not grow up waiting for a better framework. They grew up watching brilliant people leave. They have the technical skills, the networks, the hunger, and increasingly the tools to build the execution layer that the knowledge class never quite got around to. They do not want to inherit a more sophisticated policy document. They want to inherit a working system, and if one is not being built fast enough, they are entirely capable of building it themselves.

The gap between policy and execution is not just an institutional failure. It is an invitation. To the generation winding down: go out as a builder, not just a thinker. To the generation coming up: the system is not waiting for you to be ready. It needs you now.

What Execution Actually Looks Like

Practice is unglamorous. It looks like a licensing manager spending three months reviewing a patent landscape for a novel agricultural compound developed by a research team in Lusaka. It looks like a commercialisation officer attending industry conferences not to speak, but to listen for where demand actually is. It looks like a spin-out company failing and being restructured, because that is what early-stage commercialisation looks like.

It does not look like a policy brief. It does not look like a community of practice kick-off. It does not look like a strategic framework with six priority areas and a 2030 target.

It looks like someone doing a specific thing, for a specific researcher, at a specific university, so that a specific piece of intellectual property makes it out of the filing cabinet and into the world.

Multiplied across 1,500 universities. That is the scale of the execution challenge. And that is also the scale of the opportunity.

The Outsourced Model Is Not a Compromise. It Is the Answer.

The question is not whether every African university needs a full internal TTO. Most cannot afford one, and trying to staff and sustain one would take longer than the researchers can wait.

The question is: what is the fastest path to execution-layer capability, at continental scale, for institutions at every level of maturity and budget?

Kenya has already pointed toward the answer. Technology Transfer as a Service. An outsourced model that brings TTO capability to institutions that cannot build it internally, delivered through a network of expert practitioners who understand both the academic context and the commercial one. It does not require every university to become an expert in patent law, licensing negotiation, or spin-out structuring. It requires them to connect to people who already are.

That connection is what MARATTO™ was built to provide. Not to add to the policy conversation. Not to convene another community of practice. To join the builder class, and to bring African research with it.

Africa's universities are full of researchers who deserve more than a framework. They deserve someone who will actually do the work.

MARATTO™ is Africa's Outsourced Technology Transfer Office, giving universities the commercial connective tissue to identify, protect, and commercialise their research, without the cost of building it internally. If you lead a university, research institution, or innovation agency and want to explore what outsourced TTO looks like in practice, get in touch.

About the author

Phin Mpofu-Masamba II

Venture & Ecosystem Builder

Phin Mpofu-Masamba II is the Founding Curator of Dazzle Africa, the trust and intelligence layer facilitating trade and growth across Africa's startup-to-scaleup ecosystem. Dazzle Africa's flagship product is MARATTO, Africa's outsourced Technology Transfer Office, giving universities the infrastructure to identify, protect, and commercialise their research without the cost of building it internally. Dazzle Africa sits within V.ONE, his boutique Venture Studio that builds digital platforms solving real problems across commerce, community, and comparison. With 25+ years of experience building global startup ecosystems, Phin previously served as Director of Global Community at Startup Grind, where he helped scale the community to over 600 chapters across 120 countries. He has a deep passion for building infrastructure that keeps African innovation on the continent, addressing the brain drain, resource drain, and structural drain that hold back commercialisation of world-class research. His work has earned recognition including being named to the Maserati 100 and winning the CMX Professional of the Year award. Phin currently resides in Cheshire, England with his wife and three children.

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