Every few months another city is described as the next Silicon Valley. The phrase is meant as a compliment and functions as a category error.
The comparison imports the wrong scoreboard
Silicon Valley's model depends on a specific set of conditions: enormous pools of risk capital, an acquirer class willing to pay large sums for companies that never made money, a legal system that makes those transactions routine, and a labour market where failure carries little stigma. Those conditions produce a particular kind of company and a particular definition of success — very large outcomes, very rarely.
Judging a market without those conditions by that scoreboard guarantees it looks like it is failing, no matter how many good businesses it produces.
What is actually being built
Companies solving problems that the incumbents in their own markets have not solved: payments where banking penetration is low, logistics where addressing is informal, health services where the public system is stretched, education where the state cannot meet demand. These are large problems affecting large populations, and solving any of them is worth doing whether or not it produces a decacorn.
Several of the continent's most consequential technology businesses would be considered unremarkable by Valley standards and are transformative in their own markets. Both things are true.
What a better frame would do
It would ask how many people a company serves who previously had no option, whether it employs people well, whether it is still trading in five years, and whether the money it makes stays in the economy it operates in. Those are harder to chart than funding totals, which is largely why they are not charted.
The sector will keep being misread as long as it accepts someone else's measure of what it is for.
