Structured research across six pillars
Long shelf-life analysis built around African market realities. Not news. Not opinions. Structured intelligence.
Research pillars
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
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