The question Katapult Future Fest 2026 kept returning to.
Tayo Akinyemi is a keen thinker working the intersection of African tech ecosystems and the capital structures that supposedly serve them.
She’s spent the better part of two decades inside enabling institutions like AfriLabs, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) — close enough to the systemic pipework to discern leaks. No doubt, her ongoing email series, The Trajectory Africa Distilled, is a popular fixture on African Tech Roundup for good reason.
Akinyemi was recently in Amsterdam for Katapult Future Fest 2026: partly as an observer, partly as a participant, co-hosting a session on systemic investing that felt, by her account, like a natural extension of the work she and fellow analyst Osarumen Osamuyi of The Subtext have been building toward — from their Chasing Outliers whitepaper published in 2021, through their ’village square’ salon at Norrsken East Africa’s Africa/Week 2025, and now into their latest insight collaboration, Capital for Infrastructure, emerging later in 2026. Worth looking out for.
What follows is Akinyemi’s account, in her words.
