Asteria Pirola
We talk a great deal about the funding gap facing African entrepreneurs, and rightly so. But less attention goes to a quieter problem sitting underneath it: even when capital exists, it often doesn’t find the entrepreneurs best placed to use it well and those who could use it well often don’t find the right investors. This is not always a story of a human bias in the capital allocation sphere of things. It is more often a story of mismatch. An example, an investor who thrives on fast, high-risk bets funding an entrepreneur who builds cautiously and methodically. Let us extend this example, to highlight another dynamic: a patient, relationship-driven investor who might perhaps never cross paths with an entrepreneur who needs exactly that kind of financial backer. Both sides lose, and so does the economy around them.
This is where a growing field, psychometrics applied to capital allocation is starting to offer something genuinely useful.
Psychometrics is simply the science of measuring psychological traits in a structured, reliable way. It has existed for decades in hiring, in education, in clinical settings. What is new is applying it bilaterally not just profiling the founder, but profiling the investor too, and then measuring the compatibility between the two profiles, the way relationship-matching tools measure compatibility between people.
I am currently piloting a study in Namibia that, should we do it properly, this would mean that a closer examination in instances whereby an entrepreneur possesses a certain degree of risk, in their business fundamentals can be identified well on the onset prior to any capital allocation or funding. A dynamic which I too often experienced whilst advising startup founders in Namibia. The conversation here means understanding what motivates a founder to keep building through hard years, and whether an investor’s expectations match that motivation. It means examining how each side builds and repairs trust when things go wrong because things always go wrong at some point in a growing business. And critically, for a context like ours, it means accounting for how resource scarcity has shaped the way someone thinks and decides. A founder who has built a business through load-shedding, currency volatility, and thin local capital markets has developed a different, not worse, different — risk calculus than one who hasn’t. Most investment tools built elsewhere in the world were never designed to see that difference, let alone value it.
Why does this matter for bias? If one thinks about it, a great deal of what we call “gut feel” in investment decisions is, on close inspection, pattern-matching against familiarity. Investors, like everyone else, tend to trust people who remind them of themselves, or of founders who have succeeded before. That is a human tendency, not a moral failing but it quietly narrows who gets funded, especially in ecosystems where the pool of visible, well-networked founders is small. A structured, evidence-based compatibility measure doesn’t remove human judgment from the process. It gives that judgment something more solid to stand on, rather than familiarity and instinct alone. It makes the “why” behind a yes or a no explainable, rather than a feeling nobody can quite articulate.
There is also a distinctly regional dimension worth naming. An entrepreneur building an agro-processing venture in the Oshikoto Region is not operating under the same constraints as one building a Tech start-up in Windhoek’s CBD, or a tourism-linked business in the south of Namibia. Access to markets, transport costs, seasonal cash flow: these differ sharply by region. Any serious attempt to reduce bias in capital allocation has to be able to see and respect these differences, rather than judging every founder in the country against a single national template shaped mostly by what is visible in the capital.
Despite this, no instrument, however well designed, replaces due diligence, mentorship, or the hard work of building an entrepreneurial track record. But as Namibia works to deepen its entrepreneurial ecosystem and as institutions from government to private equity search for better ways to deploy scarce investment funds prudently, tools that make the founder-investor relationship more legible, more evidence-based, and less dependent on who happens to know whom, deserve serious attention.
I am of the opinion, that the next frontier in closing Namibia or let alone, Africa’s funding gap may not only be more capital. It may be better matching of the capital we already have which is grounded in real understanding of who founders are, how they think, and the context they are building in.
*Dr Asteria Pirola is the Founder and CEO of Net-0 Network (www.netzeron.com), a Windhoek and Milan-based venture working at the intersection of applied psychology, neuroscience and entrepreneurial finance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her team is reachable via info@netzeron.com
