Kuo Sharper Center Blog

Who gets to build for fun? Around the world, a lot of people don’t have that luxury, especially in growth markets.” Lexi Chu, an intern at the MIT Kuo Sharper Center, had this realization during the Growth Stage Program in June where she was confronted by the purpose driven entrepreneurship that ...

In this article, Micheil Banoub shares his personal confrontations with the history of slavery through his travels. He highlights the role of systems and ecomonies in enforcing ideology, unconsciously creating many passive observers and unintentional system participants. He claims, "If history teach...

Much of the discourse around the pace at which renewable energy has taken off in Africa has centred largely on two themes: cost of capital and regulatory certainty. In reply to "The real barrier to Africa's solar energy boom" by Rabah Arezki, Linda Mabhena-Olagunju argues the wider discourse misses ...

During our Growth Stage Program in Cairo this past June, ten distinct levers of scale were explored with the participating founders. Gisele El Far, an intern at the MIT Kuo Sharper Center who documented the sessions, noticed a powerful thread connecting every insight: trust. From keeping systems ...

Are we asking the wrong questions about AI readiness? Osman Siddiqi illustrates how practical, locally built AI across Africa is already redefining the technological frontier in growth markets. Is the global debate on AI readiness asking the wrong questions about growth markets? Osman Siddiqi explor...

Andrea Kates, our Entrepreneur-in-Residence, explores how strategic alignment between corporate scale and entrepreneurial agility unlocks new models of shared value across growth markets. Drawing on insights from our recent annual conference, the article challenges legacy, extractive approaches by r...

What happens when economies grow, but people still struggle to prosper? In this reflection emerging from the 2026 MIT Kuo Sharper Center Conference, Shamil Ibragimov explores why traditional models of economic growth are no longer enough and why a new, more inclusive calculus for prosperity must be...

For years, physicists tried to answer a deceptively simple question: why do some things like cities, ideas, innovation ecosystems grow disproportionately larger and more influential than others? Why do a few nodes attract attention, resources, and talent, while most remain peripheral?

After establishing a strong foothold in Uganda and Zambia through the Shona Capital platform, Kuo Sharper Initiative (KSI), a U.S.-based impact investment fund, is now actively exploring entry into the Ghanaian market. In October 2025 I made an on-the-ground fact-finding mission that evaluated regul...

At a Glance: Is Africa ready for the AI era? This article argues that current optimism is dangerous if it masks our structural reality. While the world’s superpowers treat AI as a matter of national security and industrial policy, many African nations are still treating it as a side project.