Structured research across six pillars
Long shelf-life analysis built around African market realities. Not news. Not opinions. Structured intelligence.
Research pillars — click to filter
Venture Strategy & Capital Intelligence
Research and analysis for investors, founders, and venture builders navigating African startup and capital markets.
Markets, Systems & African Economies
Deep structural analysis of how African markets actually work — beyond the formal data layer.
Climate, Energy, Food & Infrastructure
Opportunity intelligence for the transition economy — climate, energy access, agriculture, and African resilience.
Data, Predictive Analytics & Decision Intelligence
Turning data into structured insight — forecasting, models, dashboards, and AI-assisted research workflows.
Sports Business Intelligence
Business-oriented analytics for football clubs, academies, investors, and sports organisations operating in and around African markets.
Culture, Context & Intelligence Notes
Analytical notes on the cultural, behavioural, and contextual factors that shape strategy and market outcomes in Africa.
All research — 6 articles
Context Is Not a Variable. It Is the Model.
Strategy advice that ignores context produces prescriptions that are technically correct and practically useless. In African markets, context — cultural, historical, relational, structural — is not a modifier of the model. It is the starting point.
Herufi Research
2025-03-12
The Economics of Football Academies in African Markets
Football academies in Africa are often run as development programmes rather than businesses. Understanding the economics — cost structures, revenue pathways, and ROI models — changes the conversation about what they can and should become.
Herufi Research
2025-03-05
Why Most Analytics Projects Fail to Change Decisions
Organisations invest in data and analytics infrastructure that produces outputs nobody acts on. The problem is rarely the data. It is the design of the relationship between analysis and decision.
Herufi Research
2025-02-20
Why Informal Markets Break Most Scaling Models
The informal economy is not a problem to solve on the way to scale. In many African markets, it is the market. Businesses that design around it rather than against it reach different — and often larger — outcomes.
Herufi Research
2025-02-10
Where Climate Capital Is Going in Africa — and Where It Isn't
Climate capital flows into Africa tell a specific story about what international investors believe and what local market realities actually require. The gap between the two is where both the risk and the opportunity sit.
Herufi Research
2025-01-28
What Investment Readiness Actually Means in African Markets
Investment readiness is not just about having a pitch deck. In African markets, the gap between a fundable business and an unfundable one often comes down to five specific dimensions that most accelerators and founders underweight.
Herufi Research
2025-01-15
Reports
Long-form downloadable research
Structured analysis for investment decisions, strategy development, and program design.
State of African Climate Venture Capital
An analysis of venture capital flows into climate-related sectors across Sub-Saharan Africa, including deal data, fund mandates, sector gaps, and forward-looking opportunity signals.
African Sports Talent Market Brief
A structured overview of how African football talent flows through domestic leagues, academies, and international transfer markets — with commercial and investment implications.
Aid Contraction & Private Capital in Africa
Examines the structural shift away from ODA and what it means for capital flows into African markets. Identifies sectors where private capital can step in — and where it cannot.
Football Recruitment Intelligence Framework
A practical framework for structuring recruitment decisions using performance data, positional profiling, market comparables, and strategic fit criteria.
African Mobility & Energy Opportunity Map
A geographic and sectoral analysis of where mobility and energy-access opportunities are most compelling across African cities, with investment signal scoring.
Venture Studio Strategy in African Markets
Analyses the venture studio model in the context of African startup ecosystems — where it works, where it does not, and how to structure it for local market conditions.
Informal Markets & Scalable Business Models
Explores how scalable business models can be designed around informal market dynamics rather than against them — with case analysis and structural frameworks.