Measuring national entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa

• The Africa Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index (AEEI) includes 7 conditions for productive entrepreneurship across Africa. • The AEEI better predicts productive entrepreneurship prevalence in African countries than other metrics. • AEEI data aids entrepreneurial ecosystem diagnostics, monitoring and evaluation, to foster productive entrepreneurship. Productive entrepreneurship is highly needed for economic growth and development in Africa. For this to happen, the conditions for productive entrepreneurship need to be improved. However, data on the conditions for productive entrepreneurship in the African continent are scarce, which makes it very difficult to improve these conditions and interventions in a context-specific way. We tackle this challenge and source data from various public, private, global, and African sources. We use an entrepreneurial ecosystem framework to select, make sense of, and integrate this data. We use an extensive set of 21 empirical indicators to measure seven dimensions of national entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa and to compose the Africa Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index. This index and the underlying data aim to facilitate large-scale research on entrepreneurial ecosystems and collective learning for improving entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa.