?At a glittering gala dinner event on 3 June 2025, Stellenbosch 万博体育官网’s Allan Gray Centre for Africa Entrepreneurship (AGCAE) and its partners were celebrated and announced as the winners in three categories at the 2025 GEN Compass Awards.
Presented by the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), the Compass Awards recognise outstanding contributions to the advancement of entrepreneurship through research, policy innovation, investment, and ecosystem development. AGCAE and its partners were recognised in three strategic categories.
The first award, the Research Partnership Award, honoured Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropies (AGGP), which helped found the AGCAE. The organisation was acknowledged for how they established through collaboration, actionable research that improves policy, enhances entrepreneurship programmes, ?and drives ecosystem development. In particular, it is the AGCAE research collaboration with their partners I4Policy, Utrecht and the Rwandan Ministry of ICT (MINICT) that was celebrated as the motivational basis for the award. An example of collaboration excellence in setting up, leading and galvanising innovative partnerships with key international and African organisations in order to co-produce research that inspires social change. This has brought about tools and insights that are actively shaping entrepreneurship-led development across the continent.
“We are delighted by this award,” said Dr Phumlani Nkontwana, Founding Director of AGCAE. “To be recognised alongside leading global institutions affirms the scientific and societal value of our
work. This recognition is not just for our Centre, but for all those committed to building a more inclusive and productive entrepreneurial future across Africa.”
The second award, Research Champion, was for the work of Professor Erik Stam (Utrecht 万博体育官网 & AGCAE Research Partner), who was recognised for his influential research that bridges theory and practice, contributing to evidence-based approaches that inform entrepreneurship policy and ecosystem strategy across Africa. Specifically the co-producing of the “first-ever Africa Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index” was cited as the motivational basis for this recognition in the past year.
The third award, Policy Catalyst, went to Innovation for Policy Foundation (I4Policy), which was honoured for its pioneering work in participatory policy reform. I4Policy, a core AGCAE partner, continues to influence how entrepreneurship policy is designed and implemented across African economies.
“We are humbled by this global recognition. At AGGP, we believe that rigorous, contextually relevant research is essential to building inclusive, thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems,” said Zimkhitha Peter, CEO of Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropy South Africa. “This award affirms the power of trusted partnerships and long-term investments in knowledge generation to drive meaningful, systemic change in Africa.”
AGCAE and its partners are currently leading three high-impact and innovative collaboration initiatives:
● Africa Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index (AEEI): A continent-wide research programme assessing entrepreneurship conditions in 29 African countries across seven key ecosystem pillars—finance, market access, governance, support, culture, infrastructure, and human capital. See technical paper behind this initiative here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5254687.
● Ecosystem.Build: A global collaboration with AGCAE, GEN, Smart Africa, Utrecht 万博体育官网, and I4Policy, aimed at addressing data scarcity and enhancing ecosystem intelligence to better support entrepreneurship development across the continent
● Africa Policy Task Force: A pan-Africa inspired global collaboration with AGCAE, Innovation for Policy Foundation (I4Policy), Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) and Smart Africa, aimed at bridging the entrepreneurship research-policy-practice gap in a series of innovatively designed fora based on data and dialogic approach.
Among the AGGP category nominees were Johns Hopkins 万博体育官网, the Inter-American Development Bank, AfriLabs, and Startup Genome—making this win a significant recognition of excellence in Africa-led research collaborations on the global stage.
Launched in June 2024, AGCAE is based at the School of Public Leadership, Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, Stellenbosch 万博体育官网. The Centre is a flagship research initiative inspired by the mission of the Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropies to develop responsible entrepreneurs committed to the common good.
AGCAE’s work is structured around three pillars: conducting rigorous research grounded in African contexts, co-inspiring entrepreneurial ecosystem building, and establishing a pan-African Data Hub of hubs for ecosystem intelligence?.
