"Grantpreneurship" in Ghana Isn't a Founder Problem. It's an Ecosystem One

Let me get the caveat out of the way early, because I don't want it read as a footnote. I am not against grants. I have spent years writing the proposals that bring in the grant money, managing the disbursements that release grant money and managing the portfolios that spend it. Some of the work I'm proudest of would not exist without a funder who was willing to pay for something nobody had figured out how to price yet or risk no one was willing to take.

Here's the part that's harder to say out loud. I think the way we've built Ghana's startup funding ladder is quietly training a generation of founders to be excellent at the wrong thing. We've made grant capital so accessible, so frequent, and so central to what it means to be "a startup" here, that a founder can spend five years raising money without ever raising revenue. And we've been calling that progress.

Ghana doesn't have a shortage of ambitious founders. It has a funding culture that rewards the wrong instincts early, and then acts surprised when the businesses don't grow or compound.

I've been on both sides of this table

This isn't an outsider's critique. I've lived on both ends of it, which is exactly why it bothers me.

Years ago I co-founded Dropifi. We became the first African startup accepted into 500 Startups in Silicon Valley. I remember what that ecosystm did to my thinking. Nobody in there cared how well I'd written anything or how well my story was told by any media house. They cared whether people were using the thing, whether the numbers were going up, and what I'd learned in the last two weeks that I didn't know before. It was uncomfortable in the specific way that useful things are uncomfortable. Later I built Hub&Fund, a platform for running accelerator operations, and watched that same pattern play out across three continents.

Now I sit on the other side. I manage a startup portfolio at an agritech incubator in Accra, funded largely by institutional money. I read applications. I build the scoring rubrics. I decide, with colleagues, which businesses make a cohort and which don't. In one recent cycle I ran a shortlisting process across 136 applications to land on a cohort of 30 businesses. I have designed investor and market readiness checklists and scoring rubrics. I've produced diagnostic reports and supported many cohorts of businesses across many aspects of their businesses.

So when I say grant money shapes founder behaviour, I'm not theorising. I'm describing an incentive I help administer and a system I am deeply involved in.

What grant money actually trains you to be excellent at

Grant money trains founders to optimize for reporting. That is not a moral failure. It's a rational response to who holds the money.

Think about it from the founder's chair. If the next tranche depends on a narrative report and a set of activity indicators, then you get very good at narrative reports and activity indicators. You learn the funder's vocabulary. You learn which words unlock things and which words close doors. You learn that "beneficiaries reached" is a number somebody wants to see go up, so you find ways to make it go up. The reports get sharper every cycle. The indicators get met. And the business underneath stays completely unexamined.

I've watched founders pitch me with real fluency about their theory of change, their gender inclusion strategy, and their alignment with national development priorities and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Then I ask what they charge, and why, what their market size represents, and the room goes quiet. Or I ask who their last ten paying customers were and what those people said, and I get a projection instead of an answer.

That's not stupidity. That's adaptation. They are answering the question they've been trained to answer, by the only people who've ever given them money.

The deeper problem is that grant reporting measures effort, not effect. Activities delivered. Workshops held. Farmers trained. Those are real things and I don't dismiss them. But none of them tell you whether a business is alive. A business is alive when somebody voluntarily hands over money for something, repeatedly, at a price that leaves something behind. Nothing in a standard grant report asks that.

The question venture capital asks

Venture capital asks a harder and more useful question. Not whether the plan was followed, but whether anyone will pay.

That single question does an enormous amount of work. It forces founders into contact with the market early, while the cost of being wrong is still small. It disciplines pricing, because you have to name a number and then defend it to a stranger. It disciplines hiring, because payroll now comes out of something you have to go and earn. It forces a founder to decide what the company is actually for, in one sentence, without the protective padding of development language.

I want to be careful here, because I'm not romanticising VC. Venture capital has its own distortions. It rewards growth over durability, it pushes founders into markets that are too small to justify the model, and in a thin capital market like ours it's available to very few people. Plenty of Ghanaian businesses should never take it and never will.

But the question travels even where the capital doesn't. You do not need a term sheet to ask whether anyone will pay. You need a product, a price, and the willingness to hear no. Most founders I meet have all three available to them and are using none of them, because the grant cycle lets them postpone the conversation indefinitely.

What grants are genuinely good at

Now let me defend the thing I've been criticising, because the case for grants is real and I don't want it flattened.

Grants are good at precisely the things commercial capital is bad at. They pay for training. They pay for infrastructure. They pay for the first cohort of an idea nobody has priced yet, in a market too thin and too risky for anyone chasing returns. They absorb the cost of failure in places where failure would otherwise be catastrophic for the person failing.

The KIC AgriTech Challenge trained more than three thousand young Ghanaians and supported over ninety ventures. That could not have been funded any other way. No investor was going to underwrite agribusiness capacity building at that scale for people with no track record and no collateral. Grant money did that, and the ecosystem is materially better for it.

Grants also buy time in sectors where the payback period is genuinely long. Agriculture runs on seasons, not sprints. A processing business might need three cycles before the unit economics even become legible. Commercial money loses patience long before that. Concessional money can sit still.

The problem isn't the existence of grants. The problem is when grants become the whole ladder, and that leads me to the trend I have seen in recent years:

Grantpreneurship

That's what I've heard it called. Grantpreneurship. The practice of building a career, and sometimes a fairly comfortable one, out of moving between funding cycles rather than building a business that can stand without them.

You know the profile. Registered entity, decent website, a pitch deck that's been refined across fourteen applications. Three or four grants and two competition wins over five years. A LinkedIn presence that reads like a genuine success story. Almost no customers. No pricing they've had to defend. No month where the business survived on its own revenue.

And here's what stings. These are often the most capable people in the room. They're articulate, organised, and hardworking. They've just directed all of that capability at the wrong target, because the ecosystem told them it was the right one. We built a game and then blamed them for playing it well.

The cost isn't only individual. It shows up at the portfolio level. Every cohort we run, some proportion of the businesses are practising for the next application rather than for the next customer. That's capital, mentorship, and facilitator hours going into ventures that were never going to convert. Meanwhile the ones quietly serving real customers with no polish and no deck often don't apply at all, because they don't speak the language.

The sequencing argument nobody makes

There's a sequencing point that gets lost in all of this, and I think it's the most important thing I have to say.

For-profit motivation can absolutely be leveraged for non-profit benefit. I believe that strongly. But it only works in one direction, and only once the business is established and genuinely sustainable.

A company that has found its market can carry a training program. It can hire from the communities it serves. It can subsidise the unprofitable customer segment out of the profitable one, and it can keep doing all of that long after the funder's reporting cycle closes and the grants officer moves to another organisation. That's real, durable social impact, and it compounds.

A company that has only ever been funded to deliver activities cannot carry anything. There's nothing underneath it. When the cycle closes, the impact closes with it. We've all seen the projects that ended the month the money ended, and we've all quietly agreed not to talk about it.

So the order matters more than the instruments do. Build a business that survives its own customers. Then use it to do the good you wanted to do in the first place.

Founders who take grant money before they've done that first part aren't getting a head start. They're getting a longer runway on which to avoid the only test that counts.

What I'd actually change

I don't think the answer is fewer grants. I think it's grants that ask better questions. A few things I'd push for, including in the programs I run:

• Make revenue a gating condition, not a bonus indicator. Not size of revenue. Existence of it. Somebody paid, at a price you set.
• Report on customers alongside beneficiaries. Both numbers are legitimate. Only reporting one of them tells founders which one we actually value.
• Stop rewarding application quality as a proxy for business quality. They correlate far less than our selection processes assume, and the gap is widest for exactly the founders who are closest to their customers and furthest from our vocabulary.
• Build explicit graduation logic, and build it together. A founder's third grant should be harder to get than their first, not easier because they now know the format. But no single organisation can enforce that alone, and this is where the ecosystem has to grow up. Right now we operate as a set of disconnected doors. A founder exits one programme, walks straight into the next one down the road, and nobody in either building knows it happened. We each see one slice of a career and mistake it for the whole thing. The funders, incubators, and accelerators in this country need to start talking to each other about repeat participation, and we need to be honest that some of what looks like a promising pipeline is actually the same fifty people in rotation. That doesn't require a database or a formal consortium to begin with. It requires a shared willingness to ask a founder where else they've been funded, to actually check, and to treat a long grant history as a question rather than a credential.
• Say the quiet part to founders directly. Tell them, in orientation, that this money is scaffolding and not a business model. Most of them have never heard anyone say it.

And if you're a founder reading this, the test is simpler than any of the above. Ask yourself what happens to your company if every funder in Ghana disappeared tomorrow morning. If the answer is that you'd be fine because your customers would still be there, you're building something. If the answer is anything else, you already know what to work on.

Go and find out if anyone will pay. Everything else is rehearsal.