28/05/2026
THROWBACK SERIES | ARCrayon
When global digital conversations arrived in Africa at scale, the real tension was not visibility — it was access.
The founder of one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies visited Kenya in his role as UNCTAD Special Adviser on youth entrepreneurship and small business development, at a moment when conversations around Africa’s place in the digital economy were becoming more urgent.
ARCrayon supported the engagement at a communications level across Kenya and Rwanda, within a multi-stakeholder environment where policy discussions and youth entrepreneurship realities unfolded side by side.
In Nairobi, hundreds of young entrepreneurs gathered at the University of Nairobi-not just to listen, but to ask difficult and practical questions:
How do you enter the system? What does scale look like from here?
Who gets to participate first?
The same conversations carried into Rwanda during a continental youth summit focused on digital trade, innovation, and cross-border opportunity.
What remained consistent across both spaces was not the speeches, but the lived realities behind the questions.
Because in Africa, the digital economy is not an idea being introduced.
It is a system people are still learning how to enter — and shape.
I I I I I I I I I
