Uganda, April 27 -- There is a particular kind of frustration that haunts regulators across emerging capital markets in sub-Saharan Africa. 

It is not a lack of innovation. Entrepreneurs are everywhere, ideas are cheap, and grant-makers have spent years bankrolling early-stage fintech across the continent.

The problem is conversion. Products are built, paraded at conferences, then quietly die. Too often, the grant is treated not as seed capital, but as the exit.Josephine Ossiya, the chief executive of Uganda's Capital Markets Authority (CMA), is tired of watching this cycle repeat. 

"You get the development grants, but sometimes you stop at that place and do not commercialise that idea," she said.Her institution's answer is a...