Joy Obuya did not need help being talented.

She had already spotted a market segment many fashion brands ignore: people with non-standard sizes. So she set out to build Nawiri, a fashion brand for everybody and every body. 

She had already done the hard part of starting, which is a step most people agonize over. What she now needed was infrastructure support. 

Through the Fashionomics Africa Accelerator, Joy reworked Nawiri’s pricing using actual cost analysis rather than instinct, and that shift changed the business. Revenue grew from $12,000 in its first year to a projected $140,000+ in 2025. Her production unit grew to 15 people, and sustainability became part of the company’s growth model.

But the version of Nawiri that prices sustainably, grows year over year, and creates jobs does not emerge from talent alone. It needs support systems around it. It needs access, structure, and the right interventions at the right time.

This is the story our 2025 Impact Report tells  across education, health, and creative industries in 49 countries.

We named this report Stories of Change because the mission, using technology and social capital to accelerate economic prosperity for Africans, is ultimately about people. 

Prosperity isn’t an abstract idea. It’s a teacher in Nairobi who returns to her classroom with renewed confidence after discovering an EdTech tool that improves learning outcomes for her students. It’s a health worker in Kwara State using a digital tool that connects patients to care they would otherwise have delayed or avoided. It’s a spoken-word artist in Lagos who, for the first time, earns consistently from her creative work.

The numbers in this report are real, and they matter. In 2025, CcHUB supported 3,312 ventures across 49 countries. Those ventures and the institutions around them served 1.89 million people. We deployed $4.18 million to startups and companies in our programs, and for every dollar invested, those startups raised an additional 5x in outside funding. But the numbers are the shadow cast by the people, and the stories are the substance.

A game developer in Lagos

Take one young game developer in Lagos.

He received a scholarship to a game development program at SAIL Innovation Lab, a hub CcHUB supports. He built his first prototype and earned a certification. He was referred to Dimension 11 Studios, the team behind Legends of Orisha, where he interned for six months. When that ended, he kept building from our coworking space. He entered a hackathon, impressed a mentor, and got introduced to a startup founder.

Eighteen months after that first scholarship, he had become the co-founder and CTO of a startup building a social impact climate game.

CcHUB didn’t script that chain of events. But every link in it—the training, the referral, the workspace, the community, the hackathon—was infrastructure we built or supported. 

This is what we mean by compounding. 

640 women

Across creative industries, 640 women launched or scaled ventures through CcHUB’s creative economy programs in 2025.

Zainab Aliyu has been building AABOUX, a luxury leather brand, since 2017. She invested over $50,000 of her own money, sourced craftsmen from Kano, developed a signature stitchless construction method, and showed at Coterie New York and NY Now. Through the Lagos x Paris Fashion and Design Accelerator, funded by the French Embassy in Nigeria, she received foundational business training and, for the first time, showed at Who’s Next in Paris through an institutional pathway rather than self-funded hustle.

Elizabeth KJ Umoru, a spoken-word artist, joined the Creator Economy Incubator through the Gates Foundation-funded Entertainment and Media Hubs program. She expanded from traditional poetry videos into talking-head content, grew to a consistent monthly reach of 100,000 views, secured her first brand partnership, and began earning consistently as a creator.

Joan Rispa, a Kenyan filmmaker dedicated to inclusive storytelling, completed the Gender Equitable Storytelling Directors Course and is currently in production on a new film project.

In each case, the talent was already there. What changed was access to training that addressed real business gaps, to markets that were previously out of reach, and to networks that turned isolation into credibility.

What 2025 proved

The people in this report—Joy, Zainab, Elizabeth, Joan, the game developer in Lagos, the health startups in Ilorin, and the teachers across Nigeria and Kenya—didn’t need CcHUB to be talented.

They needed stronger pathways, better infrastructure, and more connected systems.

That’s what we built. And in 2026, we’ll build more of it.

Download the full report: Stories of Change: Building the Conditions for African Prosperity on impact-2025.cchub.africa