VC4Africa is the largest online community of investors and entrepreneurs working to build businesses on the African continent. In the Q&A below, Ben White, founder of VC4Africa, shares his vision for African entrepreneurs and discusses the challenges faced by Africa's Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) sector.

How do you achieve online success in a continent which still has to grow in terms of Internet access and even access to basic electricity?

Internet and Mobile penetration rates are increasing in Africa at an amazing clip. There are nearly 1 billion people in Africa and, according to the International Telecommunication Union, 9.6 percent of the population already has access to the Internet. In some countries, the penetration rates are increasing at hundreds if not thousands of percent a year. It is simply a matter of time before the bulk of Africa's population is connected to the web via either PC or mobile phone.

If 4 percent of the African population is entrepreneurial (as defined by Andrew Mwenda of the Independent), there are already 384,000 potential entrepreneurs we would want to recruit into our network. That's 384,000 potential enterprises that could provide jobs, offer valuable services and pay taxes. If 16 percent of the population follows as entrepreneurial imitators, we then have nearly 1.5 million individuals we want to connect with online. Our total target audience is the 1.9 million potential agents of change fighting to establish thriving enterprises across the continent.

How many people do you reach?

VC4Africa has members in 159 countries, and more than 400 entrepreneurs from over 30 African countries have registered their businesses online. Members of VC4Africa also meet offline at VC4Africa meetups. These are informal networking meetings that have been held in more than 35 cities around the world.

In which region of Africa have you seen the most activity?

We see lots of activity from the usual suspects: South Africa, East Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon. But we also see entrepreneurs logging on in Mozambique, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, etc. If anything, we are convinced that we are witnessing a tidal wave that is sweeping across the continent and reaching every corner.

The ventures on VC4Africa are in their early stages and require investments between $10,000 and $1 million. The primary sectors include mobile, web, energy and health care. Thirty percent of the registered ventures have some form of social mission and could be qualified as a social enterprise. Each venture is disruptive in their use of technology or in their application of a disruptive business model. Entrepreneurs are free to sign up on their own accord or as part of pre-existing partnerships. VC4Africa also hosts "startup challenges" with the first competition coming online in Cameroon.

How do you view the current state of Africa's SME sector? What are the main challenges faced by the sector?

Due diligence is one of the limiting factors for those interested in investing in Africa. It simply costs too much to find genuine entrepreneurs with a solid business idea and plan. As a result, most existing funds seek larger deals and better margins. At the same time, micro-credit is limited in its ability to support high-growth businesses beyond subsistence enterprises and leaves most potential entrepreneurs standing on the sidelines. This dynamic creates an SME "missing middle" in which a large number of potential SMEs are either forced to remain micro-enterprises, and hence have a limited impact on economic growth and job creation, or don't come into existence at all.

There are a number of potential causes for the SME missing middle, but limited access to finance is consistently found to be one of the most important barriers to the founding of SMEs and growth of micro-enterprises in developing countries. Importantly, SMEs are generally not "missing" because they aren't profitable: evidence suggests that returns on capital invested in the SME segment in developing countries are in fact quite high. Rather, there are barriers to the efficient allocation of investment capital to SMEs in developing countries, which raises the cost of investing. This tends to shut out promising entrepreneurs, or raises the cost of capital to prohibitively high levels - above the already-high rate of return on capital exhibited by many SMEs - making financing uneconomical.