Facilitated by Catherine Wijnberg, the Masterclass session, “Building a better, more resilient SME ecosystem” shifted the energy from global inspiration to actionable, local insight. Catherine delivered a powerful exploration grounded in lived experience, data, and a deep understanding of Africa’s entrepreneurial realities.
Drawing from her journey as a Zambian-born entrepreneur raised by entrepreneurial parents in the construction sector, Catherine offered candid reflections on what it takes to build resilient economies and scalable enterprises across the continent. Her facilitation blended data-driven rigour, storytelling, and audience participation, prompting participants to reflect on:
- What it takes to build lasting prosperity in Africa, and
- What actions we can collectively take to accelerate inclusive growth.
Much of her thinking draws from her book The Art of Acceleration, which distils lessons from Fetola’s 17-year journey in scaling impact through entrepreneurship.
The False Promise of Instant Success
Catherine opened by confronting one of entrepreneurship’s most persistent myths: the belief that starting a business guarantees instant success. She reminded attendees that real growth requires time, resilience, experimentation, and a willingness to learn from failure.
Problems Faced by the Continent
The six critical components of lasting economic success
The Fetola Growth Framework: Mindset → Method → Money → Market
Catherine presented the Fetola Model – a four-part system that has become one of the most reliable frameworks for growing sustainable SMEs:
Mindset
Building confidence, resilience, and leadership capacity.
Method
Strengthening the internal systems that allow a business to function and grow.
Money
Providing entrepreneurs with finance that is appropriate, affordable, and catalytic.
Market
Ensuring reliable demand and access to markets.
Measuring success: Why data and people both matter
Catherine underscored Fetola’s long-standing commitment to data-driven impact. Since 2007, the organisation has tracked the growth journeys of more than 1,000 SMEs, proving that data, mentorship, and storytelling work together to create lasting change.
The Regional Operating Baseline (ROB) data reveals clear regional differences in entrepreneurial activity, funding access, support infrastructure, and economic resilience. But, as Catherine stressed, the purpose of this data is not comparison – it is understanding.
She encouraged the ecosystem to see each province as a “mini-rainforest,” with its own soil (culture), sunlight (policy support), and rain (collaboration). Strengthening these conditions requires systems thinking: recognising how youth employment, education, incubation, and community assets interact to either enable or constrain entrepreneurial growth.
Participants agreed that data should serve as a roadmap rather than a scoreboard – guiding funders, ESOs, and government actors in shaping collaborative, localised solutions.
Catherine closed with a challenge to every villager: “We keep saying we’re waiting for the system to change but we are the system. Change begins when we choose collaboration over competition, excellence over sympathy, and courage over fear.”
