"Every instinct in the world right now says the opposite of what I am about to say." GEN President Jonathan Ortmans opened GEC+Africa in Cape Town today with a pointed message. "Countries are turning inward. Supply chains are being redrawn along political lines. The assumption now is that it is no longer safe, or even viable, for a founder in one country to reach markets and capital in another. "The honest response to that is not to build higher walls around our own ecosystems. It is to build faster across them. "Because ecosystems that connect outperform ecosystems that isolate. That is not an assumption. It is the arithmetic of how firms scale." Read his full speech: genglobal.org/gecafrica-2026…