Why do 90% of startups fail?

This is a question that has launched countless research reports, accelerator programs, funding initiatives, and late-night founder conversations.

A study conducted in 2020 estimates that as many as 54% of African startups fail before reaching their fifth anniversary. While 75% of startups in Ethiopia and Rwanda were unable to survive, Kenyan startups demonstrated greater resilience, with a failure rate of just 24% in the same year. The reasons are familiar: limited access to funding, cash flow constraints, regulatory uncertainty, infrastructure challenges, talent shortages, and, in many cases, products that never quite find a market willing to pay for them.

At first glance, this seems to challenge the narrative of “Africa Rising.” How can a continent celebrated for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic opportunity also experience such a high rate of business failure?

The answer is simple: Africa is not unique.

Globally, startup failure rates are remarkably higher. Research consistently shows that roughly 90% of startups fail worldwide, with many shutting down within their first few years. Failure is not an African problem. It is an entrepreneurship problem.

The more interesting question, therefore, is not why startups fail.

It is why so many support systems designed to help them succeed fail to produce lasting outcomes.

After all, billions of dollars are invested annually in entrepreneurship support. In the first quarter of this year alone, $300 billion was invested into startups.

Accelerators, incubators, investor readiness programs, export development initiatives, SME growth programs, and market expansion projects exist across every region. Founders attend workshops. They receive mentorship. They gain access to networks. Some secure funding. Others receive technical assistance. Yet many still struggle to convert knowledge into sustainable growth.

Why?

Because support does not automatically translate into execution. And execution cannot improve if nobody is measuring it. And this is where Spurt! comes in. Spurt! is an ecosystem builder and a people technology solutions company that helps African entrepreneurs build more efficient, more productive and strategic businesses. Spurt! offers Monitoring and Evaluation services to investors, founder training programs, Business consulting agencies, etc to help them gain in-depth visibility into the efficacy of their many programs.

The Gap Between Learning and Growth

Many entrepreneurship programs are exceptionally well-designed. The curriculum is strong. The facilitators are experienced. The intentions are genuine. The challenge emerges after the training sessions end.

Founders often leave these programs energised, inspired, and armed with new strategies. For a few weeks or months, momentum is high. Then reality arrives. Customer acquisition becomes harder than expected. Market-entry assumptions prove inaccurate. Hiring challenges emerge. Operations become more complex. Cash flow pressures increase. Expansion plans stall. Without a structured system to monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and adapt interventions, many founders gradually return to old habits and familiar challenges.

The result is what could best be described as a “knowledge-to-execution gap.” The founder knows what should be done. The program understands what success should look like. But neither party has sufficient visibility into whether meaningful progress is actually being made.

This Problem Extends Beyond Startups

The issue becomes even more pronounced when viewed through the lens of organisations supporting business growth.

Consider an international company entering a new African market. Or an African business expanding into multiple countries. Or a development agency funding SME growth initiatives. Or an investor supporting portfolio companies across diverse sectors. The challenge is remarkably similar. Success depends not only on strategy but on execution. And execution becomes difficult to manage when progress is not systematically monitored.

For trade organisations, enterprise support organisations, investment promotion agencies, and funders, this creates a significant blind spot. They can measure activities. They can count participants. They can track attendance. But can they confidently determine:

• Which businesses are improving?
• Which interventions are working?
• Which founders are at risk of stagnation?
• Which support mechanisms should be adjusted?
• Which companies are genuinely ready for expansion?

These questions require something more sophisticated than program reporting. They require continuous performance monitoring.

What Can Be Done Differently?

The answer is not more workshops. Nor is it more funding. The answer is building support systems around measurable progress rather than one-time interventions. Effective business support programs should be able to:

1. Profile Every Business Individually

No two businesses are identical. A fintech expanding into East Africa faces different challenges than a manufacturing company entering West Africa. Understanding each business’s starting point is critical.

2. Diagnose Current and Future Needs

Many programs focus on current challenges. The most effective interventions also anticipate future bottlenecks before they emerge.

3. Deliver Tailored Recommendations

Generic support produces generic outcomes. Businesses require support that reflects their specific stage, sector, growth ambitions, and operational realities.

4. Track Progress Continuously

What gets measured gets managed. What gets monitored gets improved. Regular assessments provide visibility into what is working and what requires adjustment.

5. Provide Post-Program Support

Growth does not stop when a cohort graduates. In many cases, the most critical challenges emerge after formal training concludes.

Turning Monitoring Into a Strategic Advantage

This is the approach currently being implemented through Spurt!’s partnership with Crossover. Rather than treating assessment as a one-time exercise, the process begins with a baseline diagnostic designed to understand each business’s realities, opportunities, and constraints. The findings are then used to develop tailored support pathways for participating businesses.

As founders progress through the program, structured assessments are conducted at multiple intervals to evaluate changes, identify emerging challenges, and refine support strategies accordingly.

By the end of the program, a final assessment provides a comprehensive view of progress achieved and areas requiring continued attention.

The result is not simply training. It is a continuous improvement framework.

Why This Matters

For program managers, investors, funders, and ecosystem builders, one of the greatest challenges is visibility. Without clear performance intelligence, support often becomes reactive. With structured monitoring and evaluation, support becomes proactive. Program coordinators gain real-time insight into participant progress. Interventions become more targeted. Resources are allocated more effectively. Businesses receive support that evolves alongside their growth journey. Most importantly, organizations can move beyond measuring activity and begin measuring outcomes.

And in a world where funders, investors, and stakeholders increasingly demand evidence of impact, that distinction matters. A lot.

Perhaps the question is not why startups fail. Perhaps the better question is: How many of them could succeed if we paid as much attention to tracking progress as we do to delivering support? The future of enterprise growth may depend on the answer.

Want to take your program to greater heights? Send us an email at partnerships@spurt.group.

Why Your Startup Training Program Isn’t Efficient: Spurt!’s Expert Point of View was originally published in Solutions on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And if you are the creator who made that product, you know the feeling that follows. The doubt. The temptation to apologise for your own price. The quiet question: should I just charge less?

The answer is no. And this piece is going to tell you exactly why you should never second guess your value.

The problem is not that African-made products are overpriced, the problem is that too many people, consumers and creators alike, have been conditioned to undervalue them. That is a different problem entirely. And it has a different solution.

What Actually Goes Into the Price

When someone buys a mass-produced lotion from a supermarket shelf, they are paying for a product that was manufactured at scale, using standardised ingredients by automated processes in a factory designed to drive cost down to its lowest possible point. The price reflects that.

When someone buys a handmade body butter from a small skincare brand, they are paying for something entirely different. They just might not know it yet.

Here is what is actually inside that price:

• Skilled, hands-on labour. Small-batch, artisan production is time-intensive. A single batch of cold-pressed oil, hand-rolled incense, or traditionally extracted shea butter can take hours or days to produce. That time has value.
• Quality, traceable ingredients. Authentic African-made products are often built on ingredients sourced directly from farmers and cooperatives, ingredients with provenance, integrity, and potency that mass-produced alternatives cannot replicate.
• Small-batch production costs. When you are not producing 10,000 units at a time, your cost per unit is higher. Raw materials, packaging, and logistics all cost more at smaller volumes. That is the structural reality of artisan production.
• Generational knowledge. Many small creators are working with formulations, techniques, and ingredients that have been refined over centuries. That knowledge is not free. It was earned, passed down, and perfected, and it is part of what you are buying.
• A sustainable livelihood. Behind every African-made product is a person or a small team of people, trying to build something real. A price that does not sustain that person is not an honest price. It is a subsidy paid by the creator at the expense of their own viability.

None of this is in the mass-produced alternative. Which is why the comparison is not just unfair, it is plain wrong.

The Comparison Problem

There is a deeply ingrained habit of comparing artisan products to their mass-produced equivalents, and finding the artisan version “expensive” by that measure. A handmade candle versus a candlesold at shoprite. A small-batch hot sauce from Jay’s Kitchen versus a bottle of Tabasco sauce. A hand-woven basket sold at Lomé grand market versus a machine-made one sold at miskay.

But these are not the same product. They share a category. They do not share a supply chain, a production method, an ingredient standard, or a story. Comparing their prices is like comparing the cost of a tailor-made dress to a fast fashion alternative and concluding the tailor is overcharging.

The right comparison is not between an artisan product and a factory product. It is between the product of an artisan and its equivalent from anywhere else in the world, a small-batch French skincare brand, a handcrafted Japanese ceramic, an Italian olive oil. Nobody questions those prices. Nobody tells those producers to charge less.

The double standard is not accidental. It is the result of decades of African goods being positioned as cheap, abundant, and interchangeable. Changing that narrative starts with how creators price their work, and how consumers understand what they are buying.

What You Are Actually Paying For

When you buy an authentic made product at its honest price, you are not just buying the physical thing in your hands. You are paying for:

• Cultural integrity. A product made the way it was always meant to be made, with the right ingredients, the right process, and the knowledge of what each element does.
• Supply chain transparency. You can ask where it came from. Most authentic creators can tell you exactly which region their raw materials are sourced from, and why.
• Community impact. A purchase from an local creator supports the local economy, a supply chain rooted in the continent, and often the livelihoods of the farmers and producers behind the ingredients.
• A story worth telling. Every authentic African-made product carries a narrative, of origin, of method, of meaning. That story is not available at any price from a factory floor.

That is not a premium. That is a value proposition. And consumers who understand it do not hesitate at the price, they feel good about paying it.

For Creators: Own Your Price

If you are a creator reading this, here is the most important thing to take away from this piece: your price is your positioning. The moment you underprice your product to compete with mass-produced alternatives, you do not become more competitive. You become invisible, because you are playing a game you cannot win on someone else’s terms.

The brands that last, that build loyal customers, that get picked up by international retailers, its not because they are not the cheapest, it is because they are the most credible. And credibility is built through consistent quality, honest storytelling, and a price that reflects the real value of what you have made.

Practically, that means:

• Know your full cost of production. Ingredients, labour, packaging, overheads, and your time. Price from that foundation, not from what you think the market will bear.
• Build your margin for growth. A price that covers your costs but leaves nothing for reinvestment is not a sustainable price. You need room to grow, improve, and scale.
• Tell the story behind the price. Consumers are far more willing to pay a fair price when they understand what is behind it. Explain your ingredients, your process, your sourcing. Make the value visible by storytelling
• Stop apologising. Confidence in your price is part of your brand. If you hedge, discount reflexively, or frame your price as something to be forgiven, your customer will take that cue and milk that cow dry.

Where We Come In

Here is the thing nobody puts in the caption: having a brilliant product is only half the battle. The other half, the harder half, is everything that happens after you make it. The pricing strategy. The brand positioning. The market access. The ability to walk into a room full of retailers or investors and make them feel what you feel when you hold what you have made.

That is the gap. And it is where most incredible products quietly disappear.

MadeIn! exists specifically for this moment, the gap between “I have something extraordinary” and “the world knows about it.” We work with creators across fashion, lifestyle, homeware, food and drink, you name it, who are already doing the real work, and we give them the commercial foundations to match. Real market intelligence, brand positioning that makes the value impossible to ignore and routes to market that do not require you to figure out everything from scratch alone.

Because let’s be honest, your product was never the problem. We Africans are well-known for always been producing world-class goods. What has been missing is the scaffolding around the product. The infrastructure. The strategic layer that turns something brilliant into something that scales, travels, and lasts.

Consider MadeIn! your ultimate support system, literally. If you are a creator reading this thinking, ‘Yes, that is exactly what I need,’ then you already know where to find us.

The Pricing Is not the Problem

The next time someone hesitates at the price of your product, the answer is not to lower it. The answer is to help them understand what they are looking at.

They are looking at skilled hands. They are looking at traceable ingredients. They are looking at a supply chain that supports hadworking people in real communities. They are looking at a story that cannot be replicated at scale, standardised in a factory, or reduced to a barcode.

They are looking at something worth paying for. And African creators deserve to be paid for it, properly, sustainably, and without apology.

MadeIn! is Spurt!’s brand incubation arm for African consumer products, amplifying African creators from concept to global market. Learn more about us at madeinafricabrands.com.

In most growing businesses across Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra, performance management follows a familiar pattern. A manager carries a mental picture of each team member throughout the year; shaped by who shows up most visibly, who speaks up most frequently, and who happens to avoid a visible mistake in the weeks before review season. At the end of the year, that picture becomes a rating. The rating becomes a record. And the people who were quietly delivering, without fanfare or self-promotion, get averaged out.

It is not a story about bad intentions. It is a story about the absence of a system. And it has a measurable cost; in disengagement, in unfair ratings, and in the resignations that arrive without warning from employees the organisation never fully saw.

This article is about what a structured performance management system looks like in practice, why it matters specifically for growing African businesses, and how Spur! is built to deliver it.

Why Do Most African SMEs Struggle With Performance Management?

The challenge is not awareness. Most HR managers, operations lead, and founders in growing African businesses understand that fair, structured performance management matters. The challenge is infrastructure.

A 2024 McKinsey SME pulse survey found that 70% of MSMEs in emerging markets identify talent performance and productivity as their top three concerns, but only 24% have a structured system in place to manage it. That gap exists not because of a lack of effort but because most available tools were designed for large enterprises with dedicated HR departments, complex configurations, and implementation timelines measured in months.

In 2025, only approximately 34% of SMEs globally have deployed a dedicated performance management software solution, compared to 81% penetration among large enterprises; meaning 66% of SMEs are still relying on spreadsheets, email-based review processes, or generic project management tools for employee performance tracking.

Growing businesses need something different. A system that is structured enough to produce fair, consistent outcomes, but practical enough to be deployed and used by a 30-person team in Lagos without specialist technical support or a six-month onboarding process.

What Does a Structured Performance Management System Actually Do?

A structured performance management system does three things that informal approaches cannot.

It defines performance criteria before the cycle begins; so, ratings are anchored to agreed, documented standards rather than a manager’s end-of-year recollection. It captures evidence throughout the year; so the review conversation draws on a continuous record rather than the last three weeks of visible activity. And it gives employees a structured channel to communicate their own contributions and experiences, so the manager’s view is supplemented rather than unchallenged.

The Nigerian Journal of Management Sciences (2023) documented why these matters in the African context specifically. In growing Nigerian organisations, appraisals routinely defaulted to memory, gut feel, and visible behaviour, producing ratings that reflected who was most present in the manager’s field of vision rather than who was actually performing. A structured system is designed to make that default impossible.

How Spur! Makes Performance Visible for Growing Teams

Spur! is built specifically for this problem. Not a general HR platform adapted for performance management, but a purpose-built tool designed for the gap between how performance actually happens in growing African businesses and how it is being seen, measured, and acted upon.

1. Structured appraisal cycles

Spur! replaces the memory-based, end-of-year review with a structured appraisal process that begins before the cycle starts. Criteria are defined and agreed upon in advance. Evidence is collected progressively throughout the year. And when the review conversation happens, both the manager and the employee are working from the same documented record, not competing impressions.

2. Continuous employee surveys

Spur! includes pulse surveys and structured feedback channels that run throughout the year, giving every employee a consistent, formal way to communicate how they are experiencing their work, document their contributions, and flag challenges before they become resignation letters. 80% of employees now prefer ongoing feedback over traditional annual reviews. Spur! is built around that preference, making feedback a continuous process rather than a once-a-year event.

3. Real-time performance dashboards

Spur! gives managers a live view of how their team is performing throughout the year, not a snapshot constructed from memory at review time. Milestones are tracked. Check-ins are recorded. Performance trends are visible across the team in real time. Performance improvement strategies built around continuous tracking have led to a 20% increase in talent engagement and retention across various organisational levels.

What Are the Results of Structured Performance Management?

The outcomes are specific and measurable.

Managers stop guessing. Employees stop wondering. The quiet contributor who has been delivering consistently without self-promotion is finally as visible in the system as the one who makes the most noise. Recognition tied to structured reviews has become a proven motivator, improving retention by 21%.

That improvement does not come from asking managers to be more attentive. It comes from building a system that makes recognition accurate, consistent, and fair; which is what Spur! is designed to do, for the specific context of growing teams in Nigeria and across the African market.

Who Is Spur! Built For?

Spur! is for HR managers and operations leads at growing businesses who are responsible for performance management but lack the infrastructure to do it properly. It is for the founder who keeps losing strong employees to organisations that seem to see them more clearly. It is for the manager who knows her team is performing but cannot produce the evidence when it matters. And it is for the employee who has been delivering consistently and quietly; and deserves a system that finally captures that.

Book a demo and see how Spur! builds performance visibility for your team

Performance Management for Growing African Teams: How Spur! Makes Every Contributor Visible was originally published in SpurtX! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By now, the pattern is familiar. The quiet employee who delivered consistently all year gets an average score because nobody documented what he did. The manager who genuinely wants to be fair sits down for the review conversation and realises she is reconstructing twelve months of work from a three-week memory. The criteria that were supposed to guide the rating were never clearly defined in the first place, so the whole exercise defaults, once again, to impression.

This is not a story about bad management or disengaged employees. It is a story about the absence of a system. And the good news is that systems, unlike people, can be built.

Week one of this series examined why performance is so difficult to track in growing African businesses. Week two explored what it costs organisations when strong contributors go unrecognised. This week is about the practical framework that fixes both problems, what structured performance management actually looks like when it is built correctly, and how to implement it without turning the whole organisation upside down.

What Is a Structured Performance Appraisal Framework?

A structured performance appraisal framework is a repeatable system for evaluating employee performance against criteria that are defined before the cycle begins, supported by evidence collected throughout the year, and delivered through a process that is consistent across every manager and every team.

The most effective approach for growing businesses combines clear, measurable objectives with regular check-ins to track progress, adjust targets, and keep employees engaged and accountable, rather than relying on a single annual review conversation.

The key word in that definition is repeatable. A performance system that works once, for one manager, with one team, is not a system. It is a good conversation. What growing businesses need is a process that produces consistent, fair outcomes regardless of which manager is running it, which team is being reviewed, or what time of year it happens to be.

That requires three things to be in place before a single review conversation takes place.

The Three Layers of a Performance System That Works

Layer 1: Criteria defined before the cycle begins

The most common failure point in performance appraisals is that the standards used to evaluate employees are invented during the review rather than established before it. This means different managers apply different standards, employees are evaluated on expectations they were never clearly given, and ratings become a reflection of the manager’s preferences rather than the employee’s actual performance.

Establishing criteria to measure performance before the appraisal period begins, covering job-specific tasks, behavioural attributes, and overall contributions to the team, is the foundation of any fair evaluation process.

In practical terms, this means sitting down at the start of each cycle and answering a specific question for each role: what does good performance look like here, and how will we know it when we see it? The answer does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be written down, agreed upon by both the manager and the employee, and referenced consistently throughout the year.

Layer 2: Evidence captured throughout the year

The second failure point is timing. Most organisations collect performance data once, in the week before the review. Everything that happened in the first nine months of the year is reconstructed from memory, which introduces exactly the kind of recency bias and visibility distortion documented in growing Nigerian organisations by the Nigerian Journal of Management Sciences (2023).

The fix is continuous documentation. Not elaborate reports or daily updates, but a consistent practice of recording milestones, noting achievements, flagging challenges, and updating performance data as the year progresses. Without a proper performance evaluation process that captures data throughout the cycle, businesses risk decreased productivity, low employee engagement, and difficulty in retaining top talent.

Regular check-ins; monthly or quarterly, depending on the team’s pace, serve a dual purpose here. They keep the manager’s picture of each employee’s performance current and accurate. And they give employees a structured, recurring opportunity to communicate what they have done, raise concerns, and document their own contributions in a way that is visible to the people who need to see it.

Layer 3: Employee surveys that surface what managers cannot see

The third layer is the one most growing business skip entirely, and it is often the most valuable.

A manager’s view of their team is always partial. They see what happens in meetings, in deliverables, and in the interactions they are present for. They do not see how an employee is experiencing their workload, whether they feel their contributions are recognised, or whether something is quietly undermining their engagement before it becomes a resignation letter.

Self-assessments and structured employee feedback; where employees reflect on their achievements and challenges before formal reviews lead to more balanced, two-way conversations and help managers uncover insights that might otherwise be missed.

Pulse surveys, mid-cycle check-ins, and structured self-assessments give employees a formal channel to share that perspective. They also create a record separate from the manager’s evaluation that captures the employee’s own account of their performance and experience. When both sides of the picture are visible, the review conversation becomes genuinely two-way rather than a top-down judgment handed down from one side of a desk.

What Changes When the Framework Is in Place

The practical difference is significant, and it shows up quickly.

Managers stop guessing. When performance data has been collected throughout the year, the review conversation is not a reconstruction, it is a summary. The manager is not trying to remember what the employee did; they are reviewing what the system documented.

Employees stop wondering. When criteria are defined upfront and check-ins happen regularly, employees know at any point in the cycle where they stand and what they are being measured against. The end-of-year review stops being an anxious unknown and becomes a predictable, structured conversation.

And critically, the quiet contributor, the one who delivers consistently without self-promotion finally has a system that sees them. Organisations that create structured forums for employees to contribute their thoughts, document their progress, and receive consistent recognition build environments where performance visibility is a system outcome rather than a personality advantage.

Well-recognised employees are 45% less likely to turn over after two years. That figure is not achieved through good intentions. It is achieved through systems that make recognition consistent and fair, not dependent on who happened to be most visible in a particular quarter.

How to Get Started Without Overhauling Everything

Building structured performance infrastructure does not require months of reorganisation or an enterprise budget. It requires three decisions, made clearly and followed consistently.

Define what good looks like for each role before the next cycle begins. Create a lightweight but consistent process for capturing performance evidence throughout the year. And give employees a structured channel; surveys, self-assessments, regular check-ins to contribute their perspective on their own performance and experience.

Those three things, done consistently, are the difference between a performance system that works and one that produces the pattern documented in Nigerian organisations: gut-feel ratings, invisible contributors, and a quiet resignation that leaves the office wondering what it missed.

That is the infrastructure Spur! is designed to provide, structured appraisal cycles with pre-defined criteria, continuous employee surveys, and real-time performance dashboards that give both managers and employees a clear, evidence-based picture of how the team is performing throughout the year.

See how Spur! builds performance infrastructure for growing teams

How to Build a Performance Appraisal System That Actually Works for Growing Teams was originally published in SpurtX! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whether you make skincare products or buy them, this is the one piece of knowledge that changes how you see every jar on the shelf.

A Quick Lesson in Colour

Raw shea butter, the kind extracted the traditional way, by hand, from the nut of the shea tree has colour. That pale yellow, that deep ivory, sometimes even a hint of green or grey depending on the region and season of harvest, that is not a flaw. That is the butter telling you it has been through nothing except the hands that made it.

The whiter the butter, the more it has been processed. Refining involves high heat, sometimes chemicals like hexane, bleaching, and deodorising. What comes out is consistent, odourless, and bright white, and stripped of a significant portion of the vitamins, fatty acids, and healing compounds that make shea butter worth talking about in the first place.According to the American Shea Butter Institute, the refining process can strip away up to 75% or more of the bioactive ingredients with ultra-refined shea butter retaining the least amount of its important nutrients.

That is the story the colour is telling. Now let us meet the three jars.

The Three Jars

The Yellow Jar — Raw, Unrefined (Grade A)

This is shea in its most honest form. Packed with Vitamin A, Vitamin E, fatty acids, and the natural compounds responsible for its skin-healing and anti-inflammatory properties. It smells nutty and earthy, distinctly African. The texture is thick and slightly grainy, melting instantly on contact with skin. This is the medicine jar. If you are buying shea butter for its therapeutic benefits, this is the one.

The Ivory Jar — Lightly Filtered (Grade B)

The middle ground. Lightly filtered to remove impurities and standardise the texture, but without the aggressive processing of full refining. Most of the good stuff is still in there. The scent is milder, the colour more uniform, making it popular for blended skincare products and formulations where a softer base is needed. A good honest option for creators who need consistency without sacrificing integrity.

The White Jar — Refined, Cosmetic Grade

Bright white, completely odourless, smooth as a dream. This is the version inside most commercial lotions and lip balms. It is not bad, it is just a different product. It has been designed for consistency and longevity in large-scale formulations, not for the skin-healing benefits of its raw counterpart. The problem arises when it is sold or labelled as though it were the same thing. It is not.

If You Make Products

Knowing your grade is not a technical detail, it is your story. Here is what to do with it:

1. Know your grade. Ask your supplier directly. If they cannot tell you clearly, keep looking.

2. Label honestly. If it is raw, say raw. Words like “pure” and “natural” without specifics are not the same thing.

3. Tell the origin. Shea from northern Ghana differs from shea from Nigeria or Burkina Faso. That specificity is a selling point, not a complication.

4. Price accordingly. Raw, traditionally extracted shea is labour-intensive to produce. Do not price it like the factory version.

If You Buy Products

Next time you pick up a jar, run this quick check:

1. Look at the colour. Brilliant white with no variation is a sign of refinement. Yellow or ivory with natural variation means something much closer to the source.

2. Smell it. No scent at all means it has been deodorised. Raw shea has a warm, nutty smell. Distinctive, not unpleasant.

3. Read the label carefully. Look for “unrefined” or “traditionally extracted.” Be cautious of vague terms like “pure” without further detail.

4. Question very low prices. Raw shea is made by hand. If it is priced like it came off a factory line, ask why.

That Yellow Is the Whole Point

Shea butter has been at the heart of African skincare, nutrition, and trade for centuries. The women who produce it, particularly across the shea belt of West Africa have mastered an extraction process that no laboratory has managed to improve on. When you buy raw shea from an African creator, you are buying that practice. That knowledge. That supply chain.

The colour in the jar is not an imperfection. It is the proof.

And yet, too often the creators holding that proof struggle to be seen. The African skincare founder who knows exactly where her shea comes from. The small-batch producer who cold-presses with care and can trace every ingredient back to its source. The artisan brand telling a true, specific, culturally rooted story competing in a market built around the generic and the convenient.

That gap between having a brilliant product and having the infrastructure to scale it, position it, and get it in front of the right people. This is exactly the problem MadeIn! was built to fix!

MadeIn! is a brand incubation platform for African consumer products. We work with creators who have the product, the knowledge, and the integrity, and we give them the commercial foundation to grow. Where a creator’s story includes their sourcing, their values, or their relationship with the communities behind their ingredients, we help them build that into their brand positioning. Because that specificity is not a footnote. It is often the most powerful thing they have.

Because the story of African-made is not a niche interest. It is a market waiting to be properly served.

The Curator’s Eye is a MadeIn! series exploring the ingredients, products, and practices behind African consumer goods, so that creators can tell their story with confidence, and buyers can make choices that mean something. Look out for our next edition!

Ask most managers that question and they will give you an answer. Ask them to back it up with evidence, and things get complicated.

This is not a knock on managers. It is a structural problem. In most growing businesses, especially SMEs across Nigeria and the wider African market; performance tracking happens in people’s heads. Ratings come from impressions, not documentation. Reviews are shaped by whoever had the most visible quarter, whoever spoke up in the last meeting, or whoever happened to avoid a mistake in the weeks before appraisal season.

The result is a system that feels like it is working right up until it isn’t.

The Memory Problem in Performance Appraisals

There is a well-documented pattern in performance appraisals called recency bias, the tendency to judge an employee based on recent events rather than their full performance record. Work done in the last few weeks or months overshadows consistent results delivered earlier in the year, leading to skewed ratings, unfair rewards, and overlooked achievements.

It plays out in ways that will feel familiar. An employee who delivered solidly across the year hits a rough patch in the final quarter and gets a rating that reflects those last few weeks; not the ten months before them. Another employee who struggled all year turns it around just before review time and walks away with an above-average score. Recency bias is not the only problem either. The halo effect, proximity bias, and leniency tendency all quietly distort ratings in teams that have no structured criteria to anchor them.

According to SHRM, recency and central tendency errors affect nearly 40% of annual appraisals, almost half of all reviews distorted by memory lapses or conflict avoidance.

This is not a new finding. And it is not unique to any one country or industry. But it lands differently when you are a 30-person team where one unfair rating can quietly unravel months of motivation.

Visibility Is Not the Same as Performance

There is a second problem sitting underneath the memory problem, and it is more uncomfortable to name.

In most teams without a structured performance system, the people who get recognised are not necessarily the people who perform best. They are the people who are most visible, the ones who are in the room when decisions get made, who are comfortable speaking up, who have a good relationship with their manager.

Quiet, consistent contributors often get overlooked. Not because their work is not valuable, but because nobody built a system to see it.

This is why performance reviews feel unfair in so many small businesses. It is rarely about a manager’s intentions. It is about the absence of a process. No pre-defined criteria. No ongoing documentation. No regular feedback loop. Just one conversation at the end of the year, built on whatever the manager can recall; which is rarely the full picture.

Research from African SMEs confirms that when employees perceive the appraisal process as unfair or inaccurate, it directly reduces their engagement and increases their likelihood of leaving. The damage is not always loud. People do not always resign immediately. They disengage slowly, deliver less, and eventually leave for somewhere they believe will see them more clearly. 85% of employees would consider quitting after receiving what they perceive as an unfair performance assessment. For a 30-person team, that is not a statistic. That is a real risk attached to every review cycle.

The Tool Problem

Some teams try to solve this with spreadsheets. Others use a shared document updated once a year. A few rely on WhatsApp threads and email chains to capture performance notes. None of these were designed for this job, and it shows.

It is worth being clear about what the difference between performance tracking and performance appraisal actually is. Performance tracking is the ongoing process of documenting how an employee is doing throughout the year; capturing milestones, noting achievements, flagging challenges as they happen. Performance appraisal is the formal evaluation at the end of a cycle where a manager assigns ratings and provides structured feedback. The two should work together. Tracking provides the evidence that makes appraisals fair and accurate. Without it, appraisals default to memory and impression, which introduces exactly the kinds of bias described above.

45% of managers do not think their formal performance review process brings value to the company. That figure is striking because most of those managers are not being cynical; they are being honest. When the system is built on memory, informal impressions, and annual check-ins, it is genuinely hard to see how it is helping anyone.

The problem is not effort. Most managers care about their teams and want to give fair reviews. The problem is infrastructure.

What Structured Performance Tracking Actually Looks Like

Improving performance appraisals in a growing business does not require a complex overhaul. It requires a system that does a few things consistently:

• Performance criteria are defined before the cycle begins; not invented during the review conversation
• Evidence is captured as work happens, not scrambled together afterwards
• Regular check-ins mean feedback is not saved for one high-stakes annual meeting
• Employees have a structured, consistent channel to share how they are experiencing work; not just waiting to be evaluated.

Most SMEs in Nigeria and across African markets are currently managing performance through informal channels; WhatsApp conversations, spreadsheets, occasional one-on-ones. The move to a dedicated system does not have to be complicated. What matters is that the process is defined, repeatable, and visible to both managers and employees.

When those things are in place, the appraisal conversation becomes a review of documented reality rather than a negotiation about competing impressions. Managers make better decisions. Employees trust the process. And the people who have been delivering quietly all year finally get seen.

That is what Spur! is built for, structured appraisal cycles, continuous employee surveys, and real-time performance dashboards; so the question of who is actually performing on your team has a clear, evidence-based answer.

See how Spur! works

Performance Appraisals Are Broken in Most African SMEs. Here Is What Fixes Them was originally published in SpurtX! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ask most teams how their organisation handles customer data, and you will get a reasonable answer. Ask them to show you the audit trail, and the conversation changes quickly.

That gap between what teams believe they are doing and what they can actually demonstrate is the real compliance problem facing Ghanaian businesses right now. And it is not a technology gap. It is an operational one.

Cybersecurity compliance has become a systems problem. Not just an IT problem. Not just a legal one. Businesses that understand this distinction early will be far better positioned when regulators come calling. Those that do not will face consequences that go well beyond a fine.

The Regulatory Environment Has Shifted Considerably

Ghana’s Cyber Security Authority, established under the Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038), has expanded well beyond its original scope. What began as a framework for registering and monitoring Critical Information Infrastructure; banking, telecoms, energy, healthcare, transport now extends to artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things.

On top of that, the Ghana Data Protection Bill, 2025 is set to repeal and replace the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), and it raises the bar considerably. Businesses must now appoint a certified Data Protection Officer. They must meet stricter consent requirements and comply with data localisation rules. Penalties for non-compliance can reach 100,000 penalty units.

For businesses in finance and digital services especially, this has become a multi-regulator environment that touches every part of the organisation, from how customer data is first collected to how incidents are reported and resolved.

The Numbers Reflect What Is Already Happening

Ghana’s digital growth makes the urgency concrete. According to DataReportal’s Digital 2025 report, 24.3 million Ghanaians are now online, representing nearly 70 percent internet penetration. More people online means more data being generated, more systems being used, and more exposure.

Between January and June 2025, Ghana recorded 2,008 cyber incidents, a 52 percent rise from the same period in 2024 with financial losses reaching GH¢19 million in the first nine months of 2025. The primary drivers were online fraud, ransomware, and supply chain attacks where criminals gained access not by targeting businesses directly, but through third-party tools those businesses had connected to their systems.

These figures come from the Cyber Security Authority itself. They are not projections. They reflect what is already happening to Ghanaian businesses, in Ghanaian markets.

The Core Problem Is Operational Fragmentation

Here is what the compliance gap actually looks like inside most organisations.

Data flows across too many places at once. Intake forms, WhatsApp threads, spreadsheets, email chains, third-party platforms, each holding a piece of the picture, with no one holding the full view. Consent gets captured somewhere, but tracing it back becomes its own project. Vendors are onboarded without proper risk assessments. Access controls are applied to some systems and quietly skipped on others.

Individually, each of these gaps feels manageable. Together, they create exactly the kind of fragmented operation that regulators are trained to identify.

The commercial consequences compound quickly. Teams spend hours reconciling data across disconnected tools, hours that produce no revenue. Mistakes surface late, when they are expensive to fix. A cyber incident triggers internal chaos rather than a coordinated response. Vendor risks go unexamined until a breach makes them impossible to ignore. Reputational damage, particularly in financial services, takes far longer to recover from than any regulatory fine.

As a business grows, this complexity grows with it. Visibility gets harder to maintain, not easier. The organisations most exposed are often not the smallest or least sophisticated. They are the ones that scaled quickly without building operational structure to match.

Compliance Is Now an Operational Infrastructure Problem

Many organisations still approach cybersecurity and data protection the wrong way, treating them as problems to hand off to IT or legal. A stronger firewall helps. An updated policy document helps. Neither one changes how work actually gets done across the business. That is where the real exposure lives.

Regulators reviewing compliance under Act 1038 or the incoming Data Protection Bill will not be satisfied by descriptions of what an organisation intends to do. They will expect businesses to demonstrate structured processes, controlled access, documented decisions, and coordinated governance across functions.

Describing what you do is no longer sufficient. You need to show it.

Organisations that manage this well tend to share one thing: operational structure that makes compliance a natural output of how work gets done, not a separate exercise that happens before an audit. Processes are defined and consistently followed. Data sits in one place rather than distributed across a dozen tools. Accountability is clear across every function. When something goes wrong, the response is coordinated rather than reactive.

That kind of structure does not emerge from awareness campaigns or policy updates alone. It has to be built into daily operations, deliberately, at the systems level.

Operational Readiness Is the Competitive Advantage

There is a version of this that goes beyond compliance.

Businesses that build genuine operational infrastructure where workflows are structured, data is visible, and accountability is traceable, do not just satisfy regulators. They run faster. They make better decisions. They are less vulnerable to the supply chain attacks that are already the dominant threat vector in Ghana’s current incident data.

For enterprise clients, institutional partners, and international funders, operational maturity is increasingly part of the due diligence conversation. A business that can demonstrate structured, auditable operations is not just compliant. It is a more credible partner.

The gap between organisations caught off guard when regulators arrive and those already operating at the required standard is rarely technical sophistication. It comes down to whether the work of the busines every day, across every function happens inside a structure that makes it visible, traceable, and accountable.

Where SpurtX! Fits Into This

SpurtX! was built for exactly this kind of operational challenge. Not as a compliance tool, but as the operational infrastructure layer that makes structured work and therefore compliance readiness, a natural outcome of how a business runs.

When data, workflows, and accountability live in a connected system rather than scattered across tools, the audit trail exists because the work was done properly. Vendor records are traceable because that is how the system is set up. Incident response is coordinated because processes are already defined. Compliance becomes less of a separate burden and more of a by-product of operational discipline.

That is the practical distinction between organisations that are exposed and those that are not.

Explore how SpurtX! supports structured operations: spurtx.tools

Read the Full Report

For a detailed look at Ghana’s regulatory developments, sector-level impact, and a practical framework for assessing your organisation’s readiness across governance, compliance, technical security, and operations:

Access the full report

Cybersecurity Regulation in Ghana Is Tightening; Most Business Systems Are Not Ready was originally published in SpurtX! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most CVs read like a job posting written in the wrong direction. Where a job posting says what the employer needs, a duty-based CV says what the candidate was responsible for and the reader, who already knows what a marketing manager does, learns almost nothing.

Hiring managers and recruiters spend an average of seven seconds on an initial CV scan. In that window, they are not looking for a comprehensive record of your employment history; rather, they are looking for evidence that you can do the specific job they need done and do it well. A plain list of duties provides neither.

The problem is not that candidates are underqualified, but rather that they describe their careers in a way that hides the most persuasive information: what they have actually achieved.

A CV is not an archive. It is an argument, and the argument is that you are the best person for this role.

Duties vs. value: what the difference looks like

This distinction is clearest in an example.

Duty-based: “Responsible for managing the company’s social media accounts and developing content strategies.”

Value-based: “Grew Instagram following from 4,200 to 31,000 in 11 months by building a content calendar around audience data. Engagement rate increased from 1.2% to 4.7%.”

Both describe the same role, but one tells the employer what you were supposed to do and the other tells them what happened because you were doing it. The second version answers the question every hiring manager is asking: if I bring this person in, what will change? This reframing is more about precision, not exaggeration. Most professionals have achieved more than their CVs suggest; they simply have not written it down in a way that communicates their achievements clearly.

Why duty-based CVs feel safer

Many professionals default to duties because it feels accurate. They list their past responsibilities and believe they are being honest, which they are, but accuracy is not the same as persuasiveness, and a CV is meant to be a persuasive document.

There is also the anxiety of quantification. What if the numbers are not impressive enough? What if the achievements are hard to measure? These are real concerns, but they have solutions. Not every achievement needs to have a clean metric. Some are qualitative: you simplified a process that others found confusing or managed a relationship that was close to breaking. You delivered a project that had been stalling for six months. These are achievements, and they belong on your CV, framed as outcomes, not activities.

The instinct toward duty-based writing also reflects a misunderstanding of what hiring managers value. They do not want to know that you were responsible for a team of eight; they want to know what that team produced. They do not want to know that you managed client relationships; they want to know whether those clients stayed.

How to rewrite your CV: a practical approach

1. Start with the outcome, then work backwards

For each role, ask: what was measurably different because I was here? Begin your bullet points with the result, then explain how you achieved it. This is the reverse of how most people write, and it is far more compelling.

2. Use the formula: result + context + method

Strong CV bullet points tend to follow a consistent structure, even if they do not state it explicitly: what changed (result), in what conditions (context), and through what approach (method).

Example: “Reduced client onboarding time from 14 days to 6 by redesigning the intake process and training the support team on the new workflow.” Result: 8-day reduction. Context: onboarding. Method: process redesign and training.

3. Quantify where you can, and qualify where you cannot

Numbers are powerful, but they are not always available. When they are not, use relative language that still conveys direction: “significantly reduced”, “consistently delivered above target”, “first in the department to implement”. These are less specific than figures, but they are still more informative than a neutral duty statement.

4. Cut the filler phrases

Phrases like “responsible for”, “assisted with”, “involved in”, and “worked on” are among the weakest constructions in CV writing. They describe proximity to work, not authorship of results. Replace them with active verbs that specify what you actually did: built, led, launched, negotiated, cut, grew, resolved.

5. Tailor to the role

A value-focused CV still needs to be relevant. The achievements you surface should mirror what the job posting signals is important. If the role emphasises growth, lead with growth metrics. If it emphasises leadership, lead with team outcomes. SEO for a CV works the same way as SEO for a webpage: relevance to the query is what gets you ranked.

What your CV should feel like to read

A strong CV creates a specific effect in the reader. Each role produces a picture of someone who arrived, assessed a situation, did something concrete, and left things measurably better. That picture accumulates across the document. By the time the reader finishes, they should have a clear sense of what kind of professional you are, what kinds of problems you solve, and what they can expect if they bring you in.

That is a completely different reading experience from a list of duties, and it is the difference between a CV that gets a response and one that gets filed. The reframe is not complicated. It requires honesty, specificity, and the willingness to claim your own work. Most professionals have achievements. The task is to write them down in a way that makes them visible.

How to Stop Writing Your CV Like a Job Description was originally published in Paperclip Editing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Employee recognition is often seen as a cultural initiative, something that improves morale of the employees, but sits outside the core operations of a business. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this perception can be misleading.

Recognition is not just about making employees feel appreciated. It directly influences engagement, productivity, and retention. The consequences faced when recognition is absent or inconsistent can be more expensive than many leaders expect.

Recognition and Motivation

Employees rarely expect extravagant rewards for doing their jobs well, but they do expect that their meaningful contributions will be noticed. Recognition acts as a powerful signal that work matters. According to Workhuman, each moment of recognition contributes to a greater likelihood of high performance. This goes to show that when leaders acknowledge effort, they reinforce behaviours that support the organisation’s goals.

Employees begin to understand what success looks like and feel encouraged to continue contributing at a high level. Without recognition, that feedback loop disappears, and so employees may continue completing tasks, but the motivation to go beyond minimum expectations gradually fades.

The Rise of Quiet Disengagement

One of the most common outcomes of low recognition is disengagement. This disengagement rarely takes the form of open dissatisfaction, at first. Instead, employees simply begin to invest less energy in their work. They do what is required but stop volunteering ideas, supporting colleagues, or taking initiative on projects. This pattern is often described as quiet disengagement. For SMEs that rely heavily on small, collaborative teams, even minor disengagement can affect overall productivity.

The Financial Impact

Low recognition does not only affect culture, but it also carries measurable costs. Disengaged employees are more likely to look for opportunities elsewhere. When experienced team members leave, organisations face recruitment costs, onboarding time, and lost institutional knowledge. 74% of employees who feel unrecognised are more likely to say they do not plan to be at the organization in one year

For SMEs operating with limited resources, replacing skilled employees can be particularly disruptive, as recruiting new talent often requires weeks or months of effort, and new hires need time to reach full productivity. These costs frequently exceed the investment required to build strong recognition practices in the first place.

Recognition Strengthens Retention

Employees who feel recognised tend to remain more committed to their organisations, because recognition, in its littlest form, reinforces a sense of belonging and contribution. And so, when employees believe their work has impact, they are more likely to stay engaged with both their roles and the company’s broader mission. For SMEs competing with larger organisations for talent, this advantage is especially important. While larger companies may offer higher salaries or more extensive benefits, smaller organisations can build loyalty by creating environments where contributions are genuinely seen and valued.

Recognition as a Strategic Advantage

For SMEs seeking to grow and compete in increasingly complex markets, employee engagement is a critical asset, and recognition plays a central role in maintaining that engagement.

When organisations build cultures where effort is consistently acknowledged, they encourage behaviours that strengthen collaboration, innovation, and accountability. Over time, these behaviours become part of the organisation’s identity. Recognition, when treated a priority rather than a gesture, becomes a driver of both performance and retention.

The Hidden Cost of Low Employee Recognition in SMEs was originally published in SpurtX! on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Africa is brimming with entrepreneurial talent. Founders are launching innovative businesses in fintech, healthtech, agritech, and beyond. But too many promising startups never make it past the early stages. Funding is often cited as the main barrier, but the bigger challenge is execution.

Accelerators, incubators, ESOs, and donor-funded initiatives invest in founder development, yet even well-funded programmes frequently fail to deliver consistent, measurable impact across multiple locations. The missing ingredient? Operational infrastructure, the systems that ensure support reaches founders reliably and consistently, from first engagement to tangible outcomes.

The Execution Challenge at Scale

Delivering startup support nationally or regionally involves more than workshops or mentorship. When programmes expand across cities, states, or countries, coordination quickly becomes a bottleneck. Common operational gaps include:

• Uneven support across hubs: Different programme locations interpret guidelines differently, leaving some founders with fragmented or inconsistent support.
• Limited visibility into progress: Participation and milestone completion are often tracked informally, making it difficult for managers to know who is thriving, who is stagnating, and where intervention is needed.
• Milestones without enforcement: Demo days, funding readiness, and skill development may be planned, but delays or drop-offs are discovered too late to correct efficiently.
• Knowledge leakage: Workshops and mentorship sessions generate valuable insights, yet without structured capture and follow-up, learning dissipates after programme completion.
• Overdependence on manual coordination: Managing founders through spreadsheets, emails, WhatsApp, or informal channels creates confusion, duplicates work, and reduces efficiency.

These gaps mean that many initiatives exist on paper but fail to produce measurable, scalable outcomes not because the founders or facilitators lack talent, but because the support systems themselves are too weak to scale reliably.

How Solutions Bridges the Gap

This is where Solutions, Spurt!’s strategic advisory arm, steps in. We help organisations transform ambitious programmes into repeatable, measurable, and sustainable delivery systems.

Our approach focuses on two connected tracks:

1. Strengthening local operators

• Capacity-building for hub managers: We equip local teams to act as active delivery engines, not passive coordinators.
• Curriculum tailored to real needs: Learning and training programmes reflect the challenges operators face on the ground.
• Structured, measurable learning: Sessions are sequenced and mapped to objectives, ensuring skills translate into actionable outcomes.
• Long-term knowledge preservation: Resources are captured and maintained to reinforce skills beyond one-off events.

2. Standardising startup support without rigidity

• Milestone-driven incubation: Startups follow a stage-aligned curriculum to understand expectations and measure progress.
• Locally delivered, centrally monitored: Hubs can adapt to local realities while maintaining consistent programme quality.
• Real-time peer and mentor support: Guidance is available as needed rather than at fixed intervals.
• Clear visibility into engagement: Managers can identify gaps early, enabling timely interventions.

By implementing these systems, Solutions transforms ambitious initiatives into programmes that work at scale, delivering measurable outcomes across multiple regions, states, or countries.

A Case in Point: iHatch

iHatch, a national incubation programme in Nigeria covering all 36 states plus the FCT, exemplifies this approach.

With Solutions, iHatch moved from workshops and informal check-ins to a structured operational model:

• Hub managers trained and supported to act as local delivery engines.
• Founder journeys mapped and tracked with clear milestones, visibility, and follow-up.
• Knowledge capture, engagement monitoring, and progress reporting systems that preserved insights beyond programme cycles.
• Central oversight combined with local autonomy, keeping quality consistent while allowing regional adaptation.

The result? Measurable outcomes across all regions, without the usual drop-offs or inconsistencies.

Where SpurtX! Fits

While Solutions builds the operational frameworks, SpurtX! supports day-to-day execution. It helps teams:

• Track participation and milestone progress in real time, spotting gaps before they escalate.
• Coordinate projects, timelines, and responsibilities across hubs or teams.
• Support engagement and recognition, keeping founders motivated and active.

SpurtX! is not a replacement for operational design, it complements it, making daily execution transparent, trackable, and manageable.

Why Operational Infrastructure Matters for African Innovation

Africa’s ecosystem already has talent, ideas, and ambition. What limits scale is not lack of founders, rather weak systems. With proper operational infrastructure:

• Programme managers gain visibility across locations, not just snapshots at the end.
• Local operators gain confidence and consistency, reducing reliance on improvisation.
• Founders receive structured, repeatable support, improving retention and outcomes.
• Organisations can measure progress accurately, making interventions proactive rather than reactive.

Solutions provides the frameworks and expertise to make this possible. Tools like SpurtX! ensure that execution remains aligned and measurable, turning intent into results.

Take the Next Step

If your organisation runs startup programmes, multi-location incubators, or ecosystem support initiatives:

• See how Solutions transforms national ambition into repeatable, measurable impact.
• Explore operational frameworks that strengthen hubs, standardise support, and improve founder outcomes.
• For extra clarity in day-to-day execution, learn how SpurtX! can help track engagement, milestones, and coordination.

Request a SpurtX! demo: spurtx.tools

Scaling Startup Support Across Africa: Why Operational Infrastructure Matters was originally published in Solutions on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.