(If this comes off as incoherent, I apologize - at the gym and it's a bit of a stream of thought
Ask clarifying questions and/or correct me please!)
All industries are built via a network effect.
We all need mentorship, experience, and stability in order to succeed in life.
This is a similar thing with businesses.
Anglophone Africa is largely the result of British colonial rule (we'll ignore Liberia for this conversation), and most former British colonies in Africa and Asia (all of South Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong, Israel, Mauritius, Gulf/Trucial States) largely share a similar kind of Business Law, which is a product of British jurisprudence.
Along with similar form of jurisprudence, a secondary factor that is needed is experienced capital - if you are starting a company, you want your investors to also be able to open doors and give you relevant advice on how to grow. For the software industry, this largely started in Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, and Austin+Dallas in the 1960s-1990s.
As the tech industry grew, a number of smart alums from these industries returned from the US (along with Japan+Singapore) to their home countries (some due to homesickness, others due to visa issues).
The first cohort to make this move back to the old country was Israelis, Taiwanese, and Koreans in the 1970s-1990s backed with a massive network of founders and VCs in the US and Japan. The second cohort was Chinese in the 1990s-2000s who were backed by US, Japanese (SoftBank), Taiwanese, HK, and Singaporean+Malaysian capital. And the third cohort from the 2010s-present was Indians backed by US, Japanese, Taiwanese, HK, SG+Malaysian, Chinesec and Israeli capital. (There was a similar domino effect in Europe as well, but that's a whole other story).
At least in East Africa's case, British telco Vodafone had a similar effect, by providing capital to gain a controlling stake in Safaricom and Vodacom, which was spun out from Kenya's and South Africa's privatized telecom
providers respectively. Safaricom and Vodacom leas a massive expansion in telecom across East Africa and South Asia, connecting millions across the regions via 2G. These companies themselves founded a subsidiary called M-Pesa to expand financing and formal banking across Africa (a similar project was started in India that became the now ubiquitous UPI).
The leadership in these companies were largely British education Africans or members of the Gujarati diaspora in Africa. At the same time, India entered an economic slump from 2010-17, which lead Indian companies to invest abroad - primarily Africa and ASEAN.
A number of the major Indian telcos such as Bharti Airtel began acquiring local telcos across Africa and the Middle East, and capital outflow from Indian PEs and VCs (most of them legally domiciled in a mix of Singapore, Marutius, and UAE) began deploying capital in both Kenya and ASEAN.
A similar capital outflow also began from China around this time, as the Chinese economic engine was in hypergrowth mode, and China oriented funds such as Ant Group, Tiger Global, and Nasper (from South Africa, which had a capital outflow similar to India during the same time period) were flush with cash thanks to the massive success of Alibaba and Tencent.
Add to that the growing ubiquity of smartphones, which was the first computing device for most of humanity, and this opened massive opportunities for various types of startups. Just like how Internet banking and the dotcom era simplified commerce in the US and Europe, Mobile driven innovations powered commerce across Africa and Asia.
Furthermore, China and India funds were more adept with dealing with developing markets in ASEAN and East Africa as they dealt with similar market conditions in China and India in the 2000s-2010s, so they could be much more nimble in these markets compared to American funds (eg. YC used to have developing market funds that they ended up shutting down a couple years as they weren't able to provide the mentorship needed that funds like Sequoia India+China, Tiger, and Temasek could provide)
The right mix of mobile penetration, capital, domain experience, and jurisprudence now exists at least in East Africa, that we will probably see a couple unicorn similar to Gojek or Grab arise in the next 10 years.
You just need 1 successful unicorn exit to enable an entire market. Alibaba+Tencent did this for China in the 2000s, Flipkart did this for India in the 2010s, and Grab+Gojek did this for ASEAN in the 2010s.