Small projects, triple returns: Africa's tiniest tech teams are beating the big spenders

Here is a result every manager should sit with. An analysis of the 2026 CIO100 Awards — nearly 1,300 organisations across ten African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Africa, Rwanda and Uganda — found that technology projects costing under $10,000 returned a median of 3.6 times their investment, comfortably beating the roughly two-times return of the biggest-budget programmes. Small projects are also surging: they were 27.2% of entries, more than double their 2023 share, and 38.2% of all projects were built in-house, without outside vendors. 'Meaningful outcomes' come from 'smaller, problem-specific projects,' said Arnold Ng'ang'a of Deloitte — not only from expensive, large-scale programmes. In other words, a small team that knows its problem intimately is not the underdog. On this evidence, it is the favourite.

SDG 8 · Decent work and economic growth — Mechanism: market force