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Elena Dia, who now leads ecosystem development at Senegalβs Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship (DER), says her move from banking into the startup and SME ecosystem was driven by a desire to work at the intersection of finance, development, and project-based delivery, building tools and programs that create measurable economic outcomes. Her first operational bottleneck at DER was pipeline quality: too few βprogram-readyβ startups meant the same ventures cycled through multiple initiatives, reflecting a shortage of long, intensive acceleration models and a need to shift from generic training to deeper, tailored support. She points to two standout interventions: Line Stack Invest, built with the French Embassy around clear KPIs and split funding for ecosystem development and direct startup financing; and Mastercard Foundationβs BE YES, which expands inclusion through creative spaces and innovation hubs across Senegal, pushing skills and InnoTech capacity beyond Dakar.
Dia also outlines how DER finances entrepreneurs without a banking license by running two complementary windows: an Empowerment Window for financial inclusion that disburses small-ticket vouchers via fully digitized assessments and mobile money rails (Orange Money/Wave) to reach all 552 municipalities, and an SME Support Window for larger, more structured financing routed through partner banks (e.g., BNDE and others), where DER processes applications but depends on partners for disbursement prompting an ongoing push for systems interconnection to reduce delays. On ecosystem strategy, she argues Senegal is entering a βperformanceβ phase; older cohorts (5β7 years) and early exits are emerging, yet the biggest macro risk is shrinking donor and bilateral funding, making diversification urgent. Her operating lesson is a blueprint for ecosystem builders: treat the ecosystem like a portfolio of projects with shared governance, explicit budgets, and hard measurement (follow-on funding, quality of connections, champions per value chain), and move toward sector-specific programs designed to deliberately produce winners in targeted industries rather than hoping multi-sector cohorts self-sort into champions.
