Sixteen months ago, Kabelo Mokoena* was on a flight to Lagos to interview the founder of a fintech startup that had just closed a major Series A round. He filed the story for a major US tech publication, one of a dozen such pieces he wrote during the funding frenzy that swept Africa’s startup ecosystem between 2021 and 2023. The narrative looked eerily familiar: a young, defiant founder, a mobile-first solution, a market of 1.4 billion people, and a venture capital cheque that would change everything.
Today, Mokoena writes B2B marketing copy for a logistics company based in the Belgian port city of Ghent. He has no plans to return to African tech journalism. “When the money was flowing, any founder with a term sheet wanted their name in those publications,” he told Launch Base Africa, speaking via video call from his apartment overlooking a canal. “Now the calls I get are from former sources asking if I can put in a good word with investors. Some of them spent years ignoring local journalists. It’s a long thing from here.”
Mokoena’s trajectory is a reflection of a much broader exodus. Over the past two years, the media infrastructure that once shaped the global narrative of Africa’s startup scene has been quietly dismantled. The foreign newsrooms that parachuted in at the peak of the funding boom now resemble scattered, thinning dots on what was once a high-density map. Meanwhile, the locally grown outlets left behind are contending with a brutal operating environment defined by financial scarcity, deep-seated distrust, and occasional intimidation from the very founders they cover. What is being lost — slowly and without much ceremony — is something inherently fragile: the independent, sustained act of documenting the African tech story as it actually unfolds, rather than how a press release dictates.
The boom and the bylines
Between 2020 and 2022, as venture capital poured into the continent at record rates — with North American investors alone accounting for more than 60% of the total in some quarters, according to data from Partech — the battle for narrative control intensified. Global media organisations responded by staffing up. Rest of World opened a Nairobi bureau and hired a string of freelancers. TechCrunch expanded its Africa coverage, as did Quartz Africa before its closure. CNN dedicated entire segments to “African Start-Up” or “CNN Inside Africa”, featuring some of the continent’s top founders. The assumption among many founders was clear: if the money came from abroad, the stories that mattered needed to appear in outlets that foreign limited partners read.
Consequently, local journalists were often treated as an afterthought. “Founders would tell me openly that a feature in a leading continental tech publication was nice but didn’t ‘move the needle’ with their US investors,” recalled Mokoena, who previously covered the Nigerian tech scene with a local publication. “So we got second-hand quotes, delayed responses, or no access at all, while foreign correspondents got flown in.”
That logic held as long as the capital kept flowing. But starting in mid-2022, the funding machine began to sputter. Total African tech funding fell from a record $6.5 billion in 2021 to roughly $3 billion in 2023, and further still in 2024. Valuations corrected. High-profile startups shuttered: Sendy, the Kenyan logistics company, closed after failing to crack the brutal economics of last-mile delivery; Gro Intelligence, once valued at over a billion dollars, shut down in 2023 with its post-mortem written largely by American journalists; Wave, the Francophone fintech, restructured with the most detailed reporting coming from outside the continent. The investors who had written splashy cheques during the pandemic quietly declined to follow on. As portfolios soured, the appetite for triumphalist coverage evaporated.
The retreat
The media retrenchment that followed was swift. From 2023, some of the international tech news outlets began laying off several Africa-based staffers as part of broader reorganisations. TechCrunch’s dedicated Africa reporter departed and was not replaced. CNN’s “Inside Africa” has largely moved away from startup stories. Smaller content platforms that had sprung up to ride the wave — startups covering startups, funded by the same venture calculus — either pivoted to consulting or disappeared.
The journalists who were commissioned to carry forward the narrative of a continent on the cusp of technological leapfrogging were redeployed or let go. And the irony is bitter: it was local reporters — the ones who had been sidelined during the boom — who had the source networks to verify what was actually happening when things fell apart. When the Nigerian naira devaluations of 2023 and 2024 wiped out dollar-denominated startup revenues overnight, local correspondents could explain, with the granularity only proximity affords, exactly what that meant for a founder who had raised in dollars but was paying salaries in naira. The global outlets, by then, had already left.
What the numbers reveal about who is reading
Yet beneath the noise of global audience metrics, a quieter, more revealing dataset is accumulating in the backends of Africa’s dedicated tech publications. Internal metrics from Launch Base Africa reveal a striking divergence: deep, careful readers — those spending considerable minutes on a single page — are no longer dwelling on fundraising announcements. Instead, the ecosystem’s most critical stakeholders — foreign investors, local operators, and policymakers — are gravitating toward journalism that dissects regulatory shifts, unit economics, and operational realities.
The data maps perfectly onto real-world events. During the whiplash of Nigeria’s crypto policy changes in 2024, readership of deep-dive explanatory pieces surged. Similarly, across the Francophone WAEMU region, a long-form investigation into the suspension of unlicensed fintechs saw a massive spike in traffic just days before the central bank issued extensions on its freezing order. The stakeholders who actually move capital and shape policy are reading deeply, not skimming. But producing these stories requires time, access, and fierce independence — the exact resources the ecosystem has historically starved.
By contrast, the vanity metrics of the boom years are collapsing. The average time spent reading a standard $50m funding announcement in 2024 has roughly halved compared to two years prior. The audience that once viewed mega-rounds as undeniable signals of momentum now treats them with skepticism — or simply scrolls past entirely.
A history that may never be written
The hollowing-out is not just about fewer journalists receiving smaller pay cheques. It carries a structural consequence. A young ecosystem that is still forming its institutional memory relies on its chroniclers to document patterns, failures, and power asymmetries. Without that record, founders who burn capital and pivot silently can resurface without public memory. Investors who extract founder-unfriendly terms can refinance narratives. Regulators who act arbitrarily can do so without the context of precedent.
Yet too often, the relationship between founders and the remaining journalists has become adversarial in ways that corrode the craft. And the economics make that adversarialism existential, not merely uncomfortable. African tech media has always been acutely dependent on a narrow advertising base — largely the same startups it covers. Unlike a European or American publication that can draw from a diversified pool of automotive, financial services, or consumer goods advertisers, African tech outlets exist in a closed loop: cover a startup critically, risk losing the revenue. As companies have tightened their runways, advertising budgets have been among the first casualties, compounding the pressure on outlets already operating at the margin.
Into this fragile environment, founders have introduced another kind of pressure. Several journalists, speaking on condition of anonymity, describe campaigns ranging from angry WhatsApp messages to calls to editors demanding stories be pulled. One reporter who covered a messy co-founder split in 2023 faced a barrage of threats. The story was published anyway. This dynamic pushes reporters into safer territory — rewriting white papers, covering demo days — and further shrinks the space where the real story is told.
Media on the continent remains fragmented, too: most platforms operate largely within national silos, their audiences segmented along linguistic and geographic lines. Anglophone West African outlets rarely share audiences or reporting resources with East African publications. Francophone Africa remains almost entirely disconnected from both. The result is a fragmented ecosystem without the collective weight to hold any founder, regulator, or investor accountable at scale.
What remains
The art of writing the African startup story will not vanish entirely. Independent operators — solo newsletter writers on Substack, freelance contributors to the remaining platforms — continue to do serious work. But they are fragile, underpaid, and frequently one dispute away from leaving the beat. “You stay in this field because you believe what you document matters for future founders who won’t have to repeat mistakes,” says one journalist who recently left a full-time role at a pan-African outlet for a corporate communications job. “But belief doesn’t pay school fees.”
There are faint structural reasons for optimism. Subscription-based models at some African tech publications suggest that an audience willing to pay for serious journalism exists, even if it is small. The growing sophistication of African institutional investors — pension funds, development finance institutions — is producing a class of local capital allocators with strong incentives to read independently produced journalism rather than founder-authored press releases. But the window is narrow. If the outlets that have survived the current contraction do not find financially sustainable models soon, the institutional knowledge they carry goes with them. The journalists disperse. The databases are archived or deleted. The sources move on. And the next funding cycle — which will come, because capital always cycles — will be covered by a fresh cohort of international correspondents arriving in Nairobi and Lagos without context, writing for audiences who have already forgotten what the last one cost.
What the ecosystem now faces is a choice it has never had to articulate openly. If the stories that truly move capital, alert regulators, and expose malpractice require time, independence, and a willingness to publish what founders don’t want published — who will pay for them? Left unanswered, the vacuum will be filled by corporate blogs, ghostwritten founder manifestos, and a historical record that reads more like a prospectus than a chronicle.
Mokoena, from his desk in Ghent, represents a particular kind of loss — not just a journalist, but an institutional memory. He can still name the venture partners who quietly wrote off millions in 2023, the founders who inflated user numbers and later rebranded, the accelerator that turned a blind eye to gender discrimination. None of those details ever made it to print. “I have more stories in my head than I ever published,” he said. “Maybe I’ll write them one day. Who would print them now?”
The question deserves a better answer than silence.
^ Name changed on request.*