Is getting a degree abroad giving African startup founders an edge with securing investments? That’s what a recent analysis by The BigDeal, a newsletter covering African startup investments, suggests. The analysis found that Africa-educated CEOs raised less — both in number of funding rounds (44%) and in amount (28%) — than their foreign-educated counterparts, with US-educated CEOs leading the charge, followed by their UK-educated peers. While the analysis does not provide reasons for the disparity, Quartz Africa suggests that CEOs “studying in and understanding the cultural dynamics of where most funding comes,” helps give them an edge when working with foreign investors, who last year accounted for a bulk of investments in Africa’s megarounds.

The good news: Egypt is bucking the trend, along with South Africa, with some two-thirds of funding raised and the total volume of rounds in both countries involving locally-educated CEOs. The American University in Cairo also got a special mention, ranking third in terms of number of alum CEOs who raised funding in Africa last year, after South Africa’s University of Cape Town and Stanford.

SIGN OF THE TIMES- Amid the global chip shortage, Taiwan is rushing towards setting up specialized all-year round chip schools to train younger semiconductor engineers, Reuters reported. The plans have proven crucial as chip companies spend bn(s) of USD into capacity expansion to make the chips, which act as the brain of every electronic device in the world. Taiwanese leading chip firm TSMC, for example, is set to spend up to USD 44 bn and hire over 8k employees in the workforce, while Samsung is building a USD 17 bn chip plant in Texas. Four semiconductor graduate schools have been established in Taiwan’s leading universities last year, with a combined capacity of around 100 masters and PhD students, while another has been approved.