As the founder and CEO of the Arise Group, one of the largest infrastructure investment platforms in Africa, Gagan Gupta has, in a decade, developed a portfolio of 18- plus large-scale infrastructure projects across Africa. Present in 12 African countries and employing over 6,200 people, building industrial and logistic ecosystems, sustainability is at the core of his mission and so is developing African talent. The Gabon special economic zone he built in 2021, was the first carbon-neutral industrial zone in Africa. here, he speaks about his key strategies for unlocking Africa’s future.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" id="h-developing-africa-s-natural-resources">Developing Africa’s natural resources </h4>



For too long, Africa has been exporting its natural resources. The whole business model we built was around developing something sustainable based on the raw materials of each country and changing them forever. This continent has been exporting raw material for the last 400 years, and that is the only constant. Africa grapples with three big issues. First is unemployment. Second, you have a situation where the governments are not able to spend enough money on healthcare and education because they have a low GDP base. Third is the climate perspective. 



Everybody says we need to be looking at climate, but the continent produces [a large amount of ] the world’s cashew and sends it to Asia, where it gets transformed and goes to Europe and the U.S. So, you’re creating a massive carbon footprint for no reason. How I look at it is the continent needs long-term fixing, which will not hap- pen with donations or grants. It has to happen through fundamental change, which is sustainable and using the core strengths the countries have, and that is natural resources. 



How do you really look at transforming that and ensuring you build entire businesses around it? Therefore, what we did was look at each country’s strengths, train the youth, get them to transform [raw materials] and then export it. If you look at Gabon, we focused on timber, and in Benin, raw cashew. Instead of exporting raw, we add value and then export. Even cotton. The busi- ness model is around the sustainable transmission of the resources these countries have, which unlocks massive po- tential for the youth and creates a long-term future.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center" id="h-the-years-in-india-and-africa">The years in India and Africa</h4>



I was born in Alwar in Rajasthan. I studied in Chennai, and then did my chartered accountancy in Delhi. What I always wanted, even as a 16-year-old, was to create impact and change lives. My father used to be the CFO of a large ce- ment company, and would leave home for work at 5.30AM every day and worked hard… In the year 2000, I wanted to build an industrial zone in India, when working for Reckitt Benckiser. And then, I joined Olam – a very entrepreneurial company. I always believed in entrepreneurship and came to Africa. I had not heard about Gabon at the time, and had to look it up on the internet. It was in 2008 and I didn’t un- derstand how the countries in Africa were saying they were so poor and continued to export raw material. How can you be in a situation where you are saying you don’t have jobs and you are exporting, literally, your jobs away? And that’s how it all started. I worked with Olam for 12 years, and all of it in Gabon.



Gabon is a beautiful country, 88% of which is covered by dense green forest. We looked at it and said, ‘how can this country be having all this wood exported as raw, and at the same time the country is importing timber products from the outside’. We built the first carbon-neutral industrial zone in Africa here… Nobody could believe that this country will go from exporting logs to becoming the second-largest exporter of veneer globally. It was unimaginable, exporting to China, India, Vietnam… What really also got me living in Gabon was the people, always smiling and happy. For my kids, Gabon is their first home. I love the rain, the sun, the climate there. I spend about 20 days a month in Africa [from my base in Dubai].



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center">The transformation journey</h4>



The way I look at is, the bigger the problem you’re solv- ing, the bigger the business you’re creating. You are fixing a problem happening every day. And I believe this is the only way for Africa to progress. This is the only way you can make permanent change and create positive, long-term, sustain- able impact in the continent. Obviously, when you start, you will not be sure if it will work; there will be iterations and everything. That’s what we did. But once we did it, it became quite successful. And what will happen is that the other countries will come and say, ‘can you do it for us too?’



Understanding why it didn’t work [previously] and then fixing those points is really what will make it work… When we choose countries, we [are not in] the business of flag-hoisting. We want to go to the countries that want to take this journey with us, because transformation is not an easy job. The first thing we want to understand is if the gov- ernment is wanting to do this journey with us or not. Sec- ondly, do they have the raw material? Do they have neces- sary things for the industrial zone to be successful? Because, at the end of the day, industrialization cannot happen if you do not have the right ingredients to transform. In some cases, the raw material can even be energy. Maybe the country has a lot of energy, and you can make energy-heavy industry, or it can be talented manpower that the country boasts, and you can build something around that. So, identifying what is going to be a key input, that will be the differentiator, and what you can produce that you can export on a global, com- petitive scale. From our perspective, we are building ecosys- tems, end-to-end&#8230; Build it and people will come.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center">On African manpower</h4>



The youth of Africa is wanting to work hard, they’re avail- able, and want to make a difference. You just need to orient them in the right direction. It’s just that it’s a chicken and egg story. If you do not have industry, how will you skill them? And if you do not have skills, how will you build the industry? So, we go and build vocational training centers in partnerships before we start. And I think the only way to break some of these vicious cycles is to say, let me create it, and things will happen.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center">Thoughts on the DRC</h4>



I love the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). You can feel the energy at 5AM, you can feel the rush. The DRC is a massive market, and with the population [100 million] it has, we are building an industrial zone. I think the key challenge there is to solve for energy. Also, people who have not been to the DRC have very different images of it in their mind, so it’s about convincing people that the DRC is very safe for in- vestments, outside of mining. The government is quite com- mitted to the process. And we are looking to rehabilitate the railway that connects Matadi to Kinshasa.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center">Running and organizing marathons</h4>



I run over eight and a half kilometers every day from 5AM. That’s my adrenaline, my time of peace and problem-solv- ing. I have my routes, in Dubai, in Benin, in the DRC – where I run around the Corniche. For the last eight years, we have co-organized official marathons in Gabon for thousands.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-center">Leadership lessons</h4>



You have to be a good human being. We all need to realize that we are just lucky where we are. The family that you were born into already decides so many things in your life. So, you have to be thankful you were born in a place that could afford your education, your food, because there are so many people in the world who don’t know today what they will eat. We can claim we are smart, but I don’t think so, I think in the end, it’s about things falling in place and about being human. I don’t look at work as work. I have fun. I do it because I love it.

Gagan Gupta Image supplied

Gabon To Africa – ‘Build It And People Will Come’

The partnership and relationship between South Africa and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will deepen further and the UAE has been invited to the G20 summit in Johannesburg next year, said South Africa’s Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure&nbsp;Dean William Macpherson, at the inaugural The Africa Debate – UAE forum by Invest Africa in the emirate of Dubai on Thursday.



In a brief chat with FORBES AFRICA on the sidelines of the summit, Macpherson also reflected on South Africa&#8217;s pathways to creating better infrastructure and some of the “innovative financing” being looked at, particularly the project preparation fund, “the first of its kind” in South Africa launched in mid-October for economic growth and job creation.



“The interest has been unbelievable for that, and in fact, I&#8217;ve had a number of equity funds that have approached me saying they want to get involved in bid window too so we can really scale up and leverage the funds the government is putting in now with the private sector, which is exactly the foundation of our new infrastructure plan. It&#8217;s about collaboration between the state and the private sector on how we can build infrastructure quicker, smarter and in a more transparent way,” Macpherson told FORBES AFRICA.



The 39-year-old minister said he had fruitful bilateral meetings with the UAE’s ministers of economy and foreign affairs.



“They are young chaps like myself committed to making their countries better. And we&#8217;re already talking on WhatsApp. South Africa and the UAE share a very important historical relationship.”



His last trip to Dubai was 20 years ago but the minister says he may be returning more regularly through 2025. “I can only see our relationship deepening and growing.”



South Africa is set to host Africa’s first-ever G20 summit in 2025, and the UAE has been invited as “special guests”.



“They are one of, I think, five countries we have invited… and to all our ministerial meetings. There&#8217;s a lot we can learn. And that&#8217;s the commitment the ministers have given me,” said Macpherson, whose planned itinerary in the UAE also included visits to infrastructure projects such as Dubai’s ports.



“The UAE are really kings of infrastructure, they have understood how to rapidly scale up an economy through infrastructure-led growth, which is crucial.”



To woo investors, South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) coalition government is also “seized with” creating safer communities and more jobs, which the different political parties all agree on, added the minister.



“We&#8217;ve seen a more robust approach to crime-fighting [in the last six months since coming to power], and we welcome that… I need that in order to protect our projects and give investors the confidence. People [here in the UAE] are more interested in opportunities. I think that they&#8217;ve drawn a line with the problematic years we&#8217;ve had in the country, and they see new young leaders coming in through government, and they are saying this is the kind of vision we&#8217;re looking to support…. And [South Africa has] a lot of good business cases to be made.



In his opening remarks at the summit, before a panel discussion on Closing Africa’s Infrastructure Gaps, Macpherson reiterated that he would like to turn South Africa into “a construction site”.



To FORBES AFRICA, he re-emphasized the importance of the private sector in this regard.



“…We only have a billion rand that has been set aside for project preparation. And intentionally, we&#8217;re saying to investors that we are going to prepare these projects, we&#8217;re going to fund them properly so they are bankable, it&#8217;s now in your hands to come and join us. You make the profits, you build it, as long as it&#8217;s done on time and on budget, everyone can make something out of it. So, we are purposely saying to the private sector, we need you.



“I was in Asia a couple of weeks ago, bringing in a new multilateral bank that&#8217;s never done business in South Africa. I&#8217;m taking a personal approach to this, as I said, if you have got the money, you have got my attention. I&#8217;m prepared to put in the hours and fly around the world to see people, as long as we get those projects going.”

South African Banks And Financial Offices in Johannesburg

‘If You’ve Got Money, You’ve Got My Attention’: South Africa’s Infrastructure Minister On Wooing Investors And Inviting The UAE To Africa’s First-Ever G20 Summit In 2025

The cricket hall of famers spoke to FORBES AFRICA about how international matches are a lot friendlier with more connections between players unified by a common love and passion for the sport.



Getting two cricket legends in the same room is a feat, and when it’s a former batsman and bowler sharing an excellent rapport, it’s great content on stage, and off it – even if it’s for an impromptu five-minute interview.



On the sidelines of the Mastercard&nbsp;EDGE 2024 forum in Dubai last week, FORBES AFRICA caught up with Trinidadian former international cricketer Brian Lara and Australian former international player Glenn McGrath.



One of the greatest batsmen of all time, known for his world record 400 versus England in Antigua two decades ago, Lara opened up about the camaraderie and friendship he shares with McGrath, off the field as well, but also how the global cricketing fraternity today is a lot more connected, which formats such as the IPL have solidified.&nbsp;



“When we played, it was a little more difficult, because we were most likely, most of the time, playing country against country, [such as] Australia versus West Indies, Australia versus England. And the opportunity to sort of come together might happen at the end of a match,” Lara, who played for the West Indies and known as ‘the prince of Trinidad’, tells FORBES AFRICA.



“With today&#8217;s cricket, [especially] franchise cricket, where you know the Australians are playing with the Indian, English or West Indian players, you see that it [is] making international matches a lot friendlier. I think that is one of the key components in franchise cricket, getting players together, and you&#8217;re seeing a lot more friendships created.”



McGrath, considered one of the greatest bowlers of all time, nods in agreement, saying: “The thing I loved about playing IPL was that all of a sudden, you get to play alongside guys you&#8217;ve only ever played against, and you realize that we&#8217;re not that different. Whether you&#8217;re from the West Indies, Australia, India, Pakistan, England, South Africa, there&#8217;s a common love and passion for the game. We might prepare a few things differently, but the synergies are there and the similarities are there, and you realize that we&#8217;re not that different at the end of the day.”



Lara adds: “I didn&#8217;t play much of franchise cricket, but what is interesting is, when you&#8217;re hearing a South African talking about another South African player, his strengths and his weaknesses, or an Australian talking about another Australian player, you know that is information you have never gotten before. So, all of a sudden, you&#8217;re sharing that sort of information.



“And I think actually, there are players in today&#8217;s world who are friendlier or [have] stronger friendships like, for instance, [between] South African [cricketer] AB de Villiers and Indian player [Virat] Kohli… What they show on the surface, [it] looks like their friendship is very strong. So, that&#8217;s amazing. I know [with] Viv Richards and Ian Botham back in the day, through playing for Somerset, [it] was something very similar.”



On the personal front, Lara’s autobiography, Lara: The England Chronicles – about his matches against England playing county cricket – was released in July this year, and he says he is working on more books, and it&#8217;s just “a matter of proper timing”.



McGrath is focused on his eponymous foundation, raising money to provide support and care to individuals and families experiencing breast cancer.



“It keeps me busy, but we&#8217;ve got a great team at the foundation,” says McGrath. “If you have the right people, it&#8217;s amazing what you can achieve. Our goal is to get to every family in Australia going through breast cancer, with free support. And we&#8217;re very close to achieving that. Just [with] the fear that&#8217;s associated with the word ‘cancer’, to have someone to come along and help [you] navigate the health system, to know what&#8217;s coming up next, to allow you to make informed decisions of your treatment, and even just a shoulder to cry on, makes a huge difference.”



Earlier, as part of the ‘Priceless Surprise’ session at the Mastercard event on October 16, in a panel moderated by Indian actor and TV presenter Mandira Bedi, the two cricket greats enthralled a packed room with some colorful anecdotes from the field, and posed together for images with members of the audience.

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‘Players In Today’s Cricket Have Stronger Friendships’: 5 Minutes With Icons Brian Lara And Glenn McGrath

<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-growth-outlook-for-africa">Growth outlook for Africa</h2>



If you [look at] macroeconomics, it’s no longer one or two countries driving the continent’s growth. That versatility has started to come through, which they didn’t have earlier. The continent is currently growing at about 3.5% and that will go up&#8230; The governments in Africa realize the economies have to transform into digital economies, and there’s a tectonic shift taking place [in sectors] from manufacturing to services. The continent [will continue to] leapfrog into new tech, not just in payments; it will do well in tourism too, and the SME sector.



[Besides talk on] inclusion, I think access is also most important. So, if I get included, what access do I have to funding, better services, convenience and affordable products? Mobile money is big in Africa, but if you really look at the core – and I don’t think the continent is fully covered in terms of internet and mobile penetration – the per capita cost of providing these services in Africa is higher than the rest of the world. I think there are too many closed loop ecosystems that exist in Africa. You need to have open borders and open economies. And the scale will never happen in a single country. The scale can happen, and that’s why the versatility of having 10 countries have that growth rate is far more exciting than having one country that gives you double the growth rate. I feel the reason mobile phones became cheaper is when telcos (telecom companies) became interoperable between themselves, and that’s a huge learning. But I don’t see that being played out [across] the continent. I think creating broader ecosystems is the way to go.



The tourism sector will do well, and that’s not just for African tourists within the continent, it’s also for international tourists to come through. The one thing the pandemic taught us is people now value experiences more than [just] the physicality of experiences. Africa can give you that. But to do that, if you are sitting in Iceland and want to go to Kenya, how do you plan something that is customized for you? Digitization will help if you’re part of an included economy.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="676" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MSC03842-1a-1024x676.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-63421" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MSC03842-1a-1024x676.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MSC03842-1a-300x198.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MSC03842-1a-768x507.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MSC03842-1a-1536x1014.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MSC03842-1a-2048x1352.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">PHOTOS BY AJEESH LOTUS</figcaption></figure></div>


Agriculture is also going to be very big. Mastercard’s Farm Pass app is a solution that was born in Africa and exported to the rest of the world, including to India. Also significant is the work we do in education and using crowdfunding to actually get children educated.



Mastercard has been operating in Africa for almost 50 years, and now has 13 offices across the continent.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-consumer-of-the-future">The consumer of the future</h2>



The consumer of the future is every single person. You almost have to go back to classic marketing 101, that the best marketing campaign is customized or tailored to an individual. When you look at your phone, you feel you’re almost there with your customization, but I don’t think you’re fully there. I feel the whole world will turn on its head, and the consumer will become king or queen. Open, enabling ecosystems that allow people to participate fairly is when innovation comes and you can empower everybody. The other dramatic thing for you to think through is that so many companies and industries are putting billions of dollars into digitization, but look at what they’re creating. They say ‘if you come into my digital environment, I’ll give you the best possible digital experience’. But you know what? I’m not just a consumer of a single firm. I am a consumer of the grocery store down the corner. I’m a consumer of an airline. I’m a consumer of a hotel. I’m a consumer of tea, coffee. I am a consumer of the bank. Are you going to make me go into 62 different environments? I feel that’s where it will change. You will now start to have a consumer who will have a digital interface, and then basically say, ‘I need coffee and you interface with me with your APIs, and it’s not me interfacing with you’. I know this sounds far-fetched, but I see a world like that. That’s disruption, that’s power, that’s inclusion.



Every industry will want to come to you and want your business. I think the consumer of tomorrow will not classically be segmented as affluent, super-affluent, middle income etc. It’s down to every single segment, and it’s customized up to it. I think consumers will have more power than ever before. That’s true empowerment. And the whole ecosystem helps them deliver that. By the way, we are only talking about this from the consumer side. I see that on the government side as well. In the end, I’m a citizen, and governments have to give me better services. And I can see how that can come through. I consume utilities, I can see how utility companies come to me, and so on. So, the world of tomorrow is really about the consumers and how they will be at the center of how things are made for them, customized perfectly to what they want.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-uptake-of-new-technologies-and-innovations-by-various-african-governments">Uptake of new technologies and innovations by various African governments</h2>



The good news is that pretty much every government official, minister or policymaker understands the importance of digitization and financial inclusion. They get it. The question then is, how well-versed are they about the world of today versus the world of tomorrow? If you’re making policies for today, then you’re going to miss out on the future. I’m not saying that’s an issue, but that’s an area that requires a little more embellishment, in terms of knowledge structure, and thinking through the implications for the wider ecosystem in the economy. I do agree that governments have to create digital infrastructure but my question is if that’s the only way, or can you do this in a partnership? If not in partnership, you start to create single points of failures as well, especially with all of the cyber security [issues] etc. But by and large, governments are amiable to having the dialogue.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-collaboration-with-fintechs">Collaboration with fintechs</h2>



Earlier this year, we signed a multi-market agreement with MTN Group Fintech that will set in motion a new era of collaboration to connect millions of people and small businesses across Africa with digital tools such as virtual cards, to transact through secure mobile payments, expanding access to the benefits of the cashless digital economy.



What we have is partnerships on the one side with fintechs. Mastercard Start Path supports and invests in several African fintech companies (such as Paycode, Ukheshe and Karri) to scale and grow. [All of this] allows us to play in different parts of the value chain. This also is testimony to the way we work. We are about partnerships and enabling ecosystems, because we sometimes don’t want to do everything ourselves; we see somebody else do it, and are like, ‘oh, this person does this stuff very well’, so, it becomes a mini ecosystem [through] that partnership model. That’s our DNA.



I think the intent is no longer an issue. The question is, how do you do it at scale and at an economics that makes sense. I think that’s the part where most people are struggling. And that’s why it requires a new approach to how you do it. And it has to be sustainable.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-as-a-forecaster-view-of-the-future">As a forecaster, view of the future</h2>



I am very privileged to get access to information and the people I talk to… But if you were exposed to all of that, you would probably make similar predictions, walking the talk every day. It’s just as simple as that. As you get more experienced, you also start to think differently about the world of the future and what role you want to play. Nobody will ever remember you for the seniormost rank you had in a corporate, people remember you for how you enable other people, ecosystems, and lay foundations for the growth for others.



I actually do feel that in our lifetime, our mortality rate will improve by at least 15 years. I see the smartest people will proactively reinvent themselves [for that]. The way you spend your time and how you create value will be different. This will be a very big trend.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-growth-markets-in-africa">Big growth markets in Africa</h2>



The space of payments and finance is obviously big. The tourism industry is going to be very big in the future, because, after the pandemic, a lot of people realize life’s not just about the material things, it’s about being human, it’s about the experiences we have. Africa is unspoiled, it has nature, and that’s what people want to connect with. The third sector is going to be agriculture, with Africa’s large land banks. There is so much opportunity to actually have better efficiency of crop production and the supply chain to the rest of the world.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-makes-a-standout-leader">What makes a standout leader</h2>



You have to be really results-oriented, analytical and in tune with your business environment. But what makes a really good business leader and good person is somebody who knows to balance their heart and mind. Somebody recently told me that the mind is a humble servant of the heart and not the other way around. And it was a really profound statement for me, but if I really look back and think of how great decisions get taken, it’s not the mind. It’s actually when you make your mind do what your heart really thinks is the right thing to do.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-your-personal-leadership-style">Your personal leadership style</h2>



I am results-oriented, so my style is [reaching] a desired outcome which is for the greater good, and it doesn’t always mean economic profit. Then you start thinking about your team, business environment, adaptability, flexibility… And I would add one other thing – resilience. A lot of times, it’s hard out there, and I think being resilient is something that has actually stood by me in good times and bad times.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-building-an-entrepreneurial-mindset">Building an entrepreneurial mindset</h2>



It’s a bit of hard work and a little bit of luck, and experience matters. As you get more information, your mind starts to process the complexity of all of that. You look at the business environment, you start to look for trends and changes around that. And then you start to create an informal framework in your head that starts to analyze these things. It’s a little hard in the beginning, but over the years, that comes very naturally, because you’ve started to get the subtleties and insights in even simple sentences. And that shows you what the world needs, whether it’s a consumer or a customer or the business environment. And I think that is what gets you to an entrepreneurial mindset. The second thing is openness to change, openness to new things, and the ability to clench your teeth and hunker down when the going is really tough, and having the mental will to power through that time, because that’s what great entrepreneurs do.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-technology-to-come-that-you-re-most-excited-about">The technology to come that you’re most excited about</h2>



I don’t know whether I’m excited about another gadget or another technology. What I’m excited about is how ecosystems are being built and that what we need as an enabling layer is finally coming together. I was joking with somebody the other day about the Internet of Things from five years ago. Nobody talks about that now. They talk about generative AI. What I’m excited about is I actually feel we now have the technology enablement that will allow all of these things to become bigger. In other words, there will be even more innovation, and probably a new gadget will come, or a new technology will come, but what I’m excited about today is the fact that we actually have the infrastructure that will allow for all of these things to take place. Because earlier, this was conceptual. Today, this can become a reality.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-plans-for-the-next-five-years">Plans for the next five years…</h2>



I think [I will be] reinventing myself to create foundations and being involved with how the future looks. Retirement is a relative term. I have taken a personal pledge to help 100 million SMEs and 500 million people, but I don’t want to do this as a CSR exercise. I want to actually create a model that allows that. I also have a vision where even if you’re an entrepreneur and creating immense wealth, that wealth has to be shared in different countries, wherever you operate. I don’t have precise plans for each of them, but broadly, [I know] how that will work.



The answer is, [my plans] will be in AI for sure. I’ve started to kind of think about those things: it’s definitely about helping governments and industries who are creating digital infrastructure in a more inclusive way; about helping people create open ecosystems, in other words, creating foundations that allow for betterment. And lastly, giving back, and being available to people for pro bono work. I don’t think there’s a paucity of capital. I think the issue is, how do you take that quality capital and deploy it in the best possible way? I’m grateful and privileged for what Mastercard has given me, but I am taking that knowledge and helping SMEs, and [creating] more equitable systems and better convenience for citizens. I see all of that in the future.

MSC03810 copy-1a

On The Payments Ecosystem And Africa: ‘That’s Disruption, That’s Power, That’s Inclusion’

With a diverse 20-year career in hospitality across multiple geographies including Africa, Amir Golbarg can tell you how locations you never knew existed can lend to rapturous storytelling, and he has many a tale to tell on the continent.



We are in a sleek boardroom with glass windows overlooking gleaming towers at the Dubai International Financial Centre; the searing August sun in Dubai beams on, never once letting you forget the vagaries of a Middle Eastern summer.



Yet, there is a force in this room, in this moment, who takes you at once to the snowy swathes of Switzerland, to the balmy beaches of Thailand and the airy islands of Bob Dylan’s Mozambique. It’s a wandering, itinerant few moments actually, that make up the first 10 minutes of a conversation with a man who is a hotelier but with a journey that has graced most corners of the map.



Originally from Iran, but now a Danish national, Amir Golbarg heads up the Middle East, Africa and India region for the Thailandbased Minor Hotels group. As Senior Vice President, he also oversees the Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles and Mauritius. The geographical narrative does not end there.



His Persian family has been involved in politics for generations, he says. Golbarg thought that would be his calling too, but eventually, as he adds, he was “the one who broke free”.



“I realized early on, that ultimately, what I wanted to achieve was bigger,” says Golbarg, 41 now, who took the advice of an uncle and left for the cool climes of Switzerland to study hospitality management.



“I love dealing with people… and hospitality is in our culture, in our nature, hospitality is the spirit of serving… I was a Persian living across Europe. So being a nomad was kind of natural to me. I felt like the world is my oyster. The one thing my uncle taught me was that hospitality is the one industry where you can be, from the North Pole to the South Pole, as there’s always some kind of guest house or accommodation [serving people].”



A stint in the United States followed, and in 2008, Golbarg moved to Dubai, just before the unceremonious unraveling of the global financial crisis. The city was still – literally – on its way up with a steely resolve, and there were enough hotel projects to keep everyone busy.



“I got a taste of the glitter, the glamor and the glory,” says Golbarg fondly of a city he now calls home, despite his life on the road. When he first arrived, he was with the Jumeirah hotel group and subsequently moved on assignment to the Maldives.



In 2012, he joined Minor Hotels, part of Minor International that’s listed on the Thailand stock exchange.



“What drew me to Minor is it’s not just a hotel company, it’s an entrepreneurs’ company, we are all entrepreneurs in this space. Bill Heinecke, the founder-chairman, built it from the ground up, based in Thailand, and they are one of the biggest operators and owners of hotels, retail and F&amp;B in Southeast Asia.”



Minor Hotels’ portfolio currently totals 558 hotels in 58 countries and includes the Anantara and Avani brands, among many others. Golbarg oversees a total of 38 properties in operation across 10 countries and six brands, in addition to driving the development of the strong pipeline of properties within the regions across multiple brands.



“We’re not your typical hotel company, he says. “We’re not just a brand that puts flags on buildings.”



Back in the Middle East, Golbarg’s journey evolved into expanding the company’s footprint, also going into Africa, focusing on India and “really broadening the context”.



Wearing multiple hats, he now also homes in on his previous experience working on asset management, investments, mergers and acquisitions, and therefore, looking at hospitality from all those perspectives.



“We run a full-360 geography of a business. And that’s the beauty of hospitality. You touch so many lives. You touch so many industries, from agriculture to trade. The whole ecosystem of hospitality is so vast, and we like to touch every one of them. That’s what makes Minor unique. We look at it not just as a hotel and filling beds, but as a business that can change lives and economies… Because if you build the right economy, that becomes sustainable to build everything else.”



Presence in the UAE



In Dubai, over the last two years, the company launched its upscale four-star Avani property, the NH Collection brand and the luxury Anantara on The Palm Jumeirah.



“Our offerings here go from the extended-stay suites all the way to luxury. We have pretty much most of the brands covered in Dubai.”



Golbarg heaps lavish praise on the pro-business, pro-progress culture of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The emirate of Dubai itself attracted over 17 million international tourists in 2023. The figures for this year are higher. “The UAE has the highest number of our brands of any destination globally,” he says.



Abu Dhabi, the country’s capital city, is also home to Minor’s Greek-inspired, 22-key, boutique, “adults’ only” Anantara Santorini retreat, which opened this year.



“What I respect about the UAE is they take everyone on board, they involve all parties. And that, for me, is a big element, which I always encourage other governments to do. Dubai Tourism has worked with us hand-in-hand on everything that they roll out. I always say, in the best sense of the word, that they use us, which they should do. Every government should use us. Of course, we have the Rolodex, we have the loyalty platforms, we have the international know-how and exposure, and we have a ton to give back, because, ultimately, we’re on the same boat. If you bring the airline, the travel, the hotels and the ministry, together, we can’t go wrong,” says Golbarg.



There are more upcoming or new projects for Minor Hotels globally. “We’re looking at a property in Morocco. At the moment, suddenly, the demand has risen. There’s a big one coming up in Jaipur in Q4 that has already been booked up for weddings… We’re also invested heavily in Thailand, it’s our mothership.”



African odyssey



Golbarg’s portfolio also takes him frequently into the African continent; the group has an office in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Our journey in sub-Saharan Africa started with purely acquisitions. We started with a joint venture in 2012, with a lodge brand called Elewana. We have 16 lodges, primarily across East Africa; in Tanzania and Kenya.”



The company also has an Avani hotel in landlocked Lesotho in southern Africa. “It’s the steadiest performer in our portfolio,” says Golbarg. “We’re the Burj Al Arab of Lesotho. What we have is doing fantastically well.”



The story in Botswana and Namibia is no different. And his own personal favorite haven in Africa? The Anantara in Medjumbe in Mozambique.



“It’s the most untapped part of the Indian Ocean; the coral reef is stunning.” Yet another location, the barrier island of Bazaruto in Mozambique – known for its prawns and picture-perfect beaches – comes with its own special tale.



“The history we have there is actually a funny story. Part of our acquisition was a small island called Santa Carolina, which was where [American singer-songwriter] Bob Dylan’s famous song, Mozambique, was [created]. The piano he used for the song was there. We brought it along to the Bazaruto property, and we have preserved it. This location was the place-to-be back in the 1960s and 1970s; the hotspot everybody would come to in Mozambique,” says Golbarg.



Coming up in South Africa, in the business district of Sandton, in Johannesburg, is a NH Collection hotel, a fully-renovated and refurbished version of the hitherto Hilton property. It will be Minor’s first hotel in Johannesburg.



“We’re looking to expand in Africa. I think for us, what is interesting now is we want to look at the key hubs, so Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi etc. But we’re seeing a major interest now in the smaller, unique Anantara offerings, those that are resort-style. There’s a demand in that space. We have our first tented camp opening early next year in a place called Kafue, which is a beautiful, unexplored area in Zambia&#8230; we’re also looking at potentially bringing the Anantara brand to Rwanda.”



Golbarg adds that he may be treading with caution in Africa’s regulatory environment but it has been “high risk, high reward”.



Statista predicts the revenue from Africa’s hospitality market by 2027 to be about $14 billion. Is it believable?



“You know, around 64% of our total income for the regions [I oversee] comes out of Africa,” Golbarg attests.



Conservation and green energy



Among other priorities, conservation is also a big area of focus for Minor. “It has been a part of our DNA. We started our journey with elephants in Thailand; we invested in a major development to support the mahouts and elephants in the Golden Triangle. And we own the assets there. And it really helped give a second life to these animals.”



Renewable energy is another big drawcard, including Minor’s investments in hydro-power and solar farms.



“Sustainability is bigger than just being plastic-free, and my commitment is that in Africa, everything we build and everything we acquire has to be from the continent. There’s nothing worse than coming to a hotel, and the shampoo and dispensers etc are from somewhere else. So, the Anantara brand, historically, we always say it’s indigenous, sustainable luxury. Even if you look at our Jaipur property in India, I was adamant that all the stones and art we use are from Rajasthan.”



And his take on the interface of new technology such as artificial intelligence?



“AI is a great tool to minimize your backoffice tasks, but it cannot replace your front-office. Because as much as everybody talks about contactless solutions and personal check-ins, guests don’t actually want that. They still need the human interface,” he says.



As trends go, Golbarg speaks about the group’s increased investments in branded residences, resort-style living and “experiential luxury”.



“People associate Africa with certain things. The goal for us is to make sure that we extend that so it does not become just a ‘bucket list’ item, but a journey of a lifetime. Because Africa shouldn’t be a ‘bucket list’, it’s not enough, there’s more than just a bucket to fill!”

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CEO Strategies: The International Hotelier With A Bob Dylan Story In Mozambique

In an exclusive interview with FORBES AFRICA from Seattle, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, called for increased investments in nutrition to prevent child deaths, and expressed praise for the efforts being taken in primary healthcare by Nigeria and Ethiopia, following his recent trips to the countries meeting with government leaders and also Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote.



Ahead of the release of the eighth annual Goalkeepers report, A Race to Nourish a Warming World, today by the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft co-founder spoke to FORBES AFRICA, about the stark numbers, calling malnutrition “the world’s worst child health crisis”.



According to the World Bank, the cost of undernutrition is $3 trillion in productivity loss every year, and with data in the Goalkeepers report showing that 40 million more children will suffer from hunger’s worst effects by 2050 due to climate change, Gates hopes for more targeted health spending to save millions from malnutrition.



The report also cites that the total share of foreign aid going to Africa has decreased: “In 2010, 40% of foreign aid went to African countries. But that number is now down to just 25% — the lowest percentage in 20 years — despite more than half of all child deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa.”



“The Gates Foundation uses the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York every year to highlight both the progress and challenges of helping the world&#8217;s poorest children, and this year, the focus is nutrition,” says Gates to FORBES AFRICA.



The report highlights proven, even low-cost tools to help solve malnutrition, for pregnant women and young children on the continent, and also highlights how promising new research into the microbiome can improve people’s health.



Gates remains optimistic, and in Africa, admits to seeing innovations on the ground.



“I applaud the scientists who help us run these trials,” he says. “That&#8217;s been true as we come up with new vaccines, and I was in Nigeria, we celebrated the fact that they have gotten the cervical cancer vaccine out to a very high percentage of children. And often, primary healthcare delivery in Nigeria is not high quality. It&#8217;s not as well-funded as it should be, and there are a lot of execution challenges. So, when Nigeria actually does some primary healthcare really well, we applaud that, as it sets a good example. And there are some good people trying to improve it.”



On his recent trip to Africa, Gates met with Nigeria’s Minister of Health, Dr Muhammad Ali Pate, and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Both countries work closely with the Gates Foundation.



“In Ethiopia, we&#8217;ve made real progress in having a data system that lets the people there look and say, ‘okay, where are we getting the vaccines, and where are we not’, and we were a big partner in that. But it&#8217;s great [to see] kids from the university now totally running this data system and able to see if the vaccines are in stock, and if not, what can they do?



“The execution of primary healthcare in Ethiopia is quite good, even though, overall, they&#8217;re a fairly poor country, but they do prioritize it. And there are some lessons for other African countries on how that has been done. I meet with ministers of health wherever I go and sometimes with the heads of state. I did talk with Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu. He was in China for FOCAC [Forum on China-Africa Cooperation], so, it wasn&#8217;t face-to-face, but he took the time to make sure we were talking about the challenges they face and how we can help them.”



In Nigeria, Gates’ foundation also works closely with the Dangote Foundation. Gates says Dangote – also a good friend – spent “a lot of time” with him on his recent trip.



“The Dangote Foundation’s and Gates Foundation’s work in Nigeria is about 75% overlapped. We learn from each other. You know, obviously, they understand Nigeria, and we understand the microbiome. And so, that&#8217;s complementary. Aliko is in an intense period in terms of his new refinery and all, but still, the whole time I was in Nigeria, he made time. And they have a great, very professional team. We work together mostly on primary healthcare…



“We had a lot of good discussions, and Aliko Dangote and Dr Pate were in most of those. We also met with the agricultural people about chickens and milk and seeds that&#8217;ll increase agricultural productivity because [in] these countries, as their budgets are so tight, the idea that they&#8217;re going to raise food productivity is one of the clear things, so that they&#8217;re not importing as much food, and [therefore they are] creating opportunity in the agricultural system. So, it&#8217;s mostly health, because that&#8217;s our big thing, but it&#8217;s also some of the work in agriculture as well. And Dangote, both philanthropically and as a private entity, is a big partner there.”



Gates speaks about a second act or “a new global health boom to save millions of lives” in the report, but to a question on whether we will see a cure for AIDS in our lifetime, he gave it a “10- to 20-year timeframe”.



“Yes, I would say; even though, in the short run, these incredible headwinds of debt and reductions in aid and some instability in the next five years are going to be very challenging. If you take a longer perspective, where you get new research – like we are spending literally billions on the idea of an HIV cure – I think it&#8217;s very likely in the 10- to 20-year timeframe that these innovations will get done. We&#8217;ll figure it out, despite the challenges, how to get them delivered. And so, that&#8217;s why this work, including delivering it in Africa, is the big focus of the Gates Foundation, and you&#8217;ll hear from us in January as we celebrate our 25th anniversary. We&#8217;re talking about our goals for the next phase of our work, and we&#8217;re going to set some very ambitious goals. So, yes, I am optimistic on HIV specifically, and on health broadly, despite the fact that we&#8217;re in a tough period.”

Conclusion Global Solutions Summit

‘I Applaud Them’: Billionaire Philanthropist Bill Gates On African Scientists And Spending Time With Aliko Dangote As He Discusses His Foundation’s New Report On Nutrition

Sunil Kaushal, the new Co-Head for Corporate and Investment Banking at Standard Chartered, has been with the group since 1998 and in the banking business for the last 36 years. In a chat with us in February this year, when he was Regional CEO for Africa and the Middle East, he talked about the bank’s strategies in the emerging markets of Africa, where he has been traveling to for the last two decades. Seated on Ghanaian-inspired sofas in his Dubai office – boasting a full view of the iconic Museum of the Future and the walls adorned with art from Africa – he also spoke about his simple, straightforward leadership style and what drives him to wake up at 4AM every day. Excerpts from the interview:



Focus on Africa including launching digital banks across nine markets 



Africa has been one of our most important markets in terms of differentiation. We consider our presence there to be very strategic and important. We are in all of Asia; the only bank in every ASEAN market&#8230; But when you talk about Africa, each country is different in its own way. Africa is not without challenges but it has been very resilient as well. I do believe that setbacks and a host of political as well as governance issues have resulted in Africa not performing to its potential, but hopefully, in the coming years, that will change… There’s huge potential in terms of demographics, infrastructure and technology; many markets have leapfrogged.



We remain very constructive on Africa, but are also conscious about the challenges there and have navigated them, because we’ve made those risk calls way ahead of the actual events happening. We repositioned our business eight to 10 years ago on the retail side towards digital, [when] there was no rush to get it done, but we made that call early on, and took some difficult decisions. And the last seven to eight years, for every award for digital banking across every category, Standard Chartered has stood out. Africa is a very dynamic market; it requires you to have a good feel for the pulse on the ground. Big changes are happening but the continent needs a lot more in the years to come, and that’s where the fantastic opportunity is.



On the growing Middle East-Africa ties



Not many people are aware that the Middle East has been investing in Africa in a pretty significant way; from investments in mines to ports to logistics. Basically, you step back and look at what’s happening is that Africa is a big market and this part of the world (the Middle East) has got the capital, and of course, it produces energy, petroleum and petroleum products. And there’s a market there waiting to be tapped, and they’re creating their linkages. We work with clients here and one of the topics in all our meetings with the government is around access into Africa, and there are not many banks that will provide that. So it is broad-based, it is capital being invested, it is products being sold, it is assets that are being acquired. So, there’s a whole area of activity taking place and it’s only going to increase, as they get a better understanding of the continent, and you get comfortable with doing business on the continent. We have to remember that the perceived risk of Africa is much higher than the actual risk and you can only appreciate that when you’re on the ground.



Promoting young entrepreneurs



I don’t think there’s any magic formula to it. We need to support the creation of business opportunities in the economy itself. If you really develop the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement, there will be more trade, more manufacturing, more entrepreneurs; if you invest in digitization, digital platforms themselves will create self-employment opportunities for entrepreneurs to come up with new, innovative ways of selling. So, I think it’s very important to create the enabling environment. Of course, the provision of finance is very important. And again, that gets allocated and becomes available if you have the right institutions, the right governance frameworks, the ability to lend in a transparent way or in an informed way, and get your money back when it’s due. So, finance is very important as well in terms of being one of the building blocks to really promote entrepreneurship. We try to do our bit through the Futuremakers Program, which was my focus, for education, employability and creating opportunities. We worked with various institutions to incubate firms, provide them small amounts of finance, hand-hold them in terms of how they manage businesses, governance, etc. We are doing our bit, but there’s lots to be done. And I think it’s a broader ecosystem that you create, which will then ensure that businesses take advantage of that.



Mentoring young people within the organization



We have started creating a very structured way of building the talent pipeline at various levels. We have a leadership program to mentor and interact with our talent in Africa and the Middle East. The idea is that they get opportunities to work on different projects. They have an opportunity to interact with senior regional management teams, and the progress is tracked based on performance and on the leadership skills in the sectors we serve. It’s a formal program, and we’re very proud about it, and now, it’s adopted globally. And then we have another program that’s more targeted with a smaller cohort, which is building a pipeline for very senior roles. And they are then addressed by the global management team, which I am also part of, and tracked very closely in terms of opportunities. Both cohorts would be in the running whenever big opportunities come on.



Perspectives on sustainability and climate change



The bank is deeply engaged. And I generally feel that in all forms of financing we do, sustainability is going to play a big part and link to climate change. But it’s broader than just climate change transition. It’s adaptation. And ESG investing. It is around how we manage in a way that our portfolios are well-protected. So, we’ve made various commitments around the financing. We have created a new business line out of it, and I think it’s going to be the most exciting, which is sustainable finance. It is an opportunity for us to really differentiate ourselves because we have started early. And we invest a lot in our people, in our products, and the accolades we receive are a testament that we are doing extremely well.



Personal leadership style 



It’s more about ensuring that when you have a strategy in place, execution becomes very important. And that comes through straightforward, simple communication and a sharp focus on delivery. That’s very important. Otherwise, I find you waste a lot of time in conversations without action. My own leadership style would be to really get the best out of people by engaging them and getting the buy-in on a common purpose. Otherwise, you sort of lose them. You can have very fancy aspirations, but if your team is not aligned or doesn’t buy in, it’s going to be extremely difficult. So, invest time to really get the alignment. Once you do, you need to focus on delivery. If you’re firm and fair, people generally see it and deliver their best. So, mine is a pretty straightforward, simple, no-nonsense style.



My approach always has been, ‘don’t come up with problems’, because that’s the easiest way – to outsource your problems to your boss, and I have zero time for that. If you come with a problem, also come with a solution. If you don’t have the solution, don’t come with the problem. So, it forces people to think two steps ahead. It’s not that I don’t like to hear what the problems are, but then come up and say, ‘listen, if this is a problem, let’s try and do it this way, and I think it will work’. To me, that’s a more intelligent conversation. It’s my job then to clear the blockages and get them the resources to make that happen. I’m not expecting every junior person to have access to all the resources, but at least come up with ideas and become more stimulating. People appreciate that.



On the entrepreneurial mindset



That’s extremely important, but you also have to be nimble enough. You should recognize that if a certain thing is not working, even if you’re invested in it, you should have the ability to move on and be vulnerable enough to do that than say, ‘no, I’ll persist, and I’ll persist’. It does not mean you’re not tenacious. You have to be tenacious, but if you realize that you have made a mistake, you should have the humility to accept it and then move on and change course. [One of the] big things that kill people at top positions is ego. Particularly in this region, where things keep changing so dynamically, make a call. You get your best shot. If you realize you made a mistake, change course.



Secret to staying the course



Endurance! There is no shortcut to success. My advice to all youngsters is, first of all, ask yourself, ‘what are you trying to really achieve, and are you really good at it?’ And then, ‘are you investing enough on a daily basis to master it?’ Because if you’re saying ‘I’m going to be the number one in payments or cyber or digital’, then invest every day and try to be the best at it. Because this is something which builds on, it has the flywheel effect, once you’ve accumulated the knowledge base.



Growing up in Mumbai



My father was an engineer and from a family of doctors, so, when I took up finance, I was told that there’s nobody in the family who can help me as there was no one in finance. From my early teens, I decided I wanted to be a banker, I had no other desire. My father worked for a steel company, and we lived in this community close to the steel factory, and I used to visit his office, in town at Nariman Point, and I used to see all these fancy banks, you know, people in suits and ties. They dealt with money and I said, ‘okay, what do I need to do to deal with money?’ So, I learned finance. My very first job was at American Express in Mumbai and then I went to New York. But I was ambitious to learn about every facet of banking: treasury markets, corporate banking, retail banking&#8230;



Anecdotes on your first job



I used to dress up very well, always in dark blue. Those days, you had to travel in the Mumbai local train [to get to work], so I would fold my jacket and put it in my briefcase, and wore it at work. I did that for a year or so before getting my own first car, a Premier Padmini, which I loved.



Coming to the Middle East in 1998



That’s when the entire Sheikh Zayed Road stretch was developing. There was nothing but sand, and they said, ‘we’re going to have 700 buildings’. Dubai is a phenomenal story, [because of ] the leadership and there are so many lessons to learn from it. I am a big fan of Dubai.



Thoughts when you wake up everyday



That I want to make a difference. The one thing I can do sitting at the top is clear the blockages. And I say it with all sincerity. Many a time, people don’t tell you the full picture, so, you kind of probe them, or try to use your connections to figure out what’s blocking things. Because this is a great bank. It has a great history and massive potential. We are in the world’s most dynamic market. We are a super connector of capital, trade, etc. Not many banks can claim to have that, so how do you really clear the blockages? What frustrates me sometimes is if you’re not getting things done quickly.



Idea of relaxation



I play golf. I’m a very relaxed person. I sleep at 9.30PM and get up at four o’clock. I am able to switch off every day as you should. I love to go for holidays in Africa. I’ve traveled to South Africa many times but would love to do Serengeti, Masai Mara and Victoria Falls.

Sunil Kaushal (Image by Priscilla Selhorst)

CEO Strategies: The No-Nonsense Global Banker On His Straightforward Leadership Style

Leadership lessons from Imtiaz Patel, the man who began by teaching accountancy and playing cricket in apartheid South Africa, going on to help transform the country’s sports and entertainment landscape. 



It was 1988, the year London’s Wembley Stadium beamed to the world a jam-packed pop music concert in tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 70th birthday.



Far away, in apartheid South Africa, the collective global cry to free incarcerated revolutionary activist Mandela echoed. The first stirrings of change could also be seen in the country’s cricket grounds, signifying the potential of sport to influence social transformation.



South Africa was inching tantalizingly close to getting back to international cricket (after a global boycott of apartheid sport for over three decades), and in the townships, young Black children were taking to the game with new zeal.



Imtiaz Patel was a lanky 24-year-old at the time, from small town Schweizer-Reneke in the country’s North West province, joining the cricket development program to fully commit to pursuing the sport.



“It was at the height of a very passionate, positively-emotive time. The cricket development program [founded by South African cricketer Ali Bacher] was taking cricket to the townships, and we were all talking unification, we were all making a difference to people’s lives, and building facilities. We were so passionate, those were dreamy times,” recalls Patel, his eyes sparkling at the thought, on a warm afternoon in June as we sit in the larney mezzanine floor lounge of the Grosvenor House hotel where he stays in Dubai.



It’s a million miles from those times before democracy in South Africa, but Patel, who helmed pan-African video entertainment business MultiChoice in various capacities for almost a quarter of a century, paints the picture like it was yesterday, full of hope, full of excitement for what was to come, a future that included him.



“I ran the cricket program in Gauteng, which included all the townships such as Alexandra and Soweto; they devolved the program to the provincial units, so I worked for Gauteng cricket,” he says.



In the “deep, dark days” of apartheid, 300kms from Johannesburg in his hometown, where his grandfather had started a business in the 1930s, Patel had a conservative upbringing but “conscious” of the social misgivings of the time, and the family loved cricket.



“In many ways, your experiences in your formative years shape you,” he states. The family owned a store in a “beautiful rock building” in the center of Schweizer-Reneke, and his grandfather showed the young Patel his ledgers and books.



“He always talked about how, during the Great Depression, he helped farmers get goods and stuff from him, and they only paid him three to four years later; and these were White, Afrikaans customers,” says Patel.



“My grandfather used to be sent a train ticket in the 1930s by the Kohinoor Club in Johannesburg. He would travel all night on a Friday by train, play cricket on the weekend, and return home Sunday night. And my father played for non- White South Africa… Cricket was in our blood, in our family, in our history. But because I grew up in this little town with Indian families, our school was a shop, because the community had to support the school.” They couldn’t attend a White Afrikaans school because of the segregating structures of apartheid. “We were 20 kids in school. Each desk was a class; the desk next door was another class; the desk next to that was another class. And there was one teacher teach- ing four classes in one go.”



Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, Patel would venture with his father to watch a game of rugby or tennis but had to sit outside the fence, or inside the car. “I used to wonder, ‘but why can’t I play with you [White people]?’ I never got bitter, but I said, ‘hold on, you were in our business this morning as our customers, but I can’t play tennis with you’? I think that’s where one learned the ability to hold contradictory thoughts, because there’s this contradiction of ‘you love your customers, but they are also representative of an oppressor’, and you can’t mix with them. It was a very difficult concept. And then, because it was a small town, I spent many hours alone. Solitude was an interesting thing…



“When I played a higher level of cricket in Gauteng, I just took a view that you can’t be bitter, because, where do you go with bitterness? I felt, in a sense, a bit sorry even for the people who were privileged. I felt they had this view naively, so, I think in everybody’s heart, there’s some goodness.”



Patel went to high school in Kimberley in the Northern Cape province where he roughed it out until a stint at Wits University in Johannesburg.



In 1987, raising his own funds and on his own steam, he traveled to play cricket in England, the first time with White South Africans, many of who he subsequently became good friends with.



“I realized early in life that there were too many barriers between us, that systems were creating walls and the walls created problems that didn’t allow people to connect, to see each other as human beings.”



He decided to teach accounting to students in Soweto for three years, which is when he also met the man who had “a remarkable in- fluence” in his life, a mathematician and headmaster at Wits named TW Kambule. Patel taught accounting in the morning, was a cricket coach in the afternoons, and in the evenings, would sell broken biscuits out of the boot of his Volkswagen Citi Golf hatchback. He soon took up the role as Director of Professional Cricket un- der the United Cricket Board of South Africa (now Cricket South Africa), guided and mentored by Bacher, where he stayed two years. It was a heady time for South African cricket and one of the companies Patel dealt with commercially in the late 1990s was South African sports broadcaster SuperSport. This was going to chart the next 25 years of his life.



“I didn’t want to die thinking the only thing I knew was cricket; I had an interest in business. So, when I got [a job] offer from SuperSport, I accepted. Frankly, in terms of position and title, I was going backwards, but I felt I wanted to go and learn, and it was a much bigger organization. It was a leap of faith,” says Patel. “Ali Bacher was so angry he didn’t speak to me for two years because he was disap- pointed, as he had thought his protege would take over from him.”



A new South Africa was calling. “Because the country had just come out of apartheid, every organization was White. I felt like, ‘we can’t be having walls’. So, I had no problem joining SuperSport (owned by Naspers), even though my friends attacked me heavily for joining a White organization (at the time).”



In 2003, Bacher invited him to the final of the Cricket World Cup for coffee, shook hands and made peace. “He said to me he was just very angry because he saw me as the anointed successor, and I left.”



In 2005, Patel became the CEO of SuperSport South Africa and in 2007, the CEO of SuperSport International. A year later, he was headhunted to replace Malcolm Speed as CEO of the International Cricket Council (ICC).



“In fact, the interviews for that were here, in this hotel [Grosvenor House in Dubai], believe it or not, how is that for a coincidence?” laughs Patel. “I remember this because the interview process took so long… [and] my heart told me this wasn’t the right thing. So again, I did a crazy thing, I turned it down, which surprised many, and I stayed with SuperSport.



“It was hard to say no to the ICC offer, because it was a very high- profile position, you fly first-class and would be mixing with kings and queens, but I’m grateful I said no. There’s always a guiding light.” At this point, Patel relates his memorable encounter with Naspers’ chief Koos Bekker. “I flew to Cape Town to meet Koos, who was my ultimate boss, to tell him that ‘I’m considering the ICC appointment’. Soon after I landed, my wife called and said ‘by the way, they’ve announced the ICC appointment, it’s all over the wires’. I was supremely embarrassed to go see Koos, because I was going to tell him, and it had already been announced. I was very disappointed, but I was honest to him and said ‘I came here be- cause my wife and I were thinking about a new life, I have a passionfor cricket, as you know, this is a very big thing, it’s a dream etc, and my problem is, they’ve announced it’.



“But you know, there’s a very important lesson in this. I think smaller people like myself would have been very angry and said, ‘you’ve gone behind our back’, but Koos was understanding and supportive. He didn’t want me to go, and said ‘take your time, I’m not angry with you’…



“I am very grateful for the people around me and the big leaders like him I learned a lot from.” Patel stayed with the group and in 2010, became the Group CEO of Multichoice South Africa; in 2015, the Group CEO of Naspers Video Entertainment; and in 2019, became Chairman of Multichoice Group. During his innings at SuperSport, he secured the rights to numerous sporting properties, including the English Premier League and UEFA Champions League. After pioneering cricket’s Twenty/20 format in South Africa, he went on to conclude the transformative broadcast deal with South Africa’s Premier Soccer League (PSL) that entrenched DStv in the mass market in South Africa. They had a partner in Dr Irvin Khoza, the head of PSL, who was steadfast in his belief the partnership would work.



“I had the support of our board and our business, and then the fact that we fundamentally knew that this was for the greater good, that everybody would benefit, economically, the players, the referees, the facilities, the clubs, and today, it’s a machine. It’s in the top leagues in the world. So, I think we transformed local football, and that vision and that conviction allowed us to continue.



“The late Essop Pahad, who was a minister in the presidency, too had a strong conviction about the national imperative that foot- ball must be available to the masses. He guided us, but was also tough on us. We had many meetings at the Presidential guest house in Pretoria on Sunday afternoons. He took no prisoners, and when you were out of line, he let you know; he was such a formidable personality.”



Currently an advisor for MultiChoice, among other things, including his role as the Chairman of the South African Business Council in Dubai, Patel is also the Chairman of Moment, a fintech company aiming to revolutionize Africa’s payments landscape; a collaborative effort of MultiChoice, Rapyd, and General Catalyst. It’s a whole different ball game but Patel is getting into the swing of things.



“First of all, the philosophy is not retirement, there is no such thing as retirement. I have a learning mindset. I want to spend a lot of time with young people, and this will keep me busy. You learn, you earn, and you return.” Although he is on an Emirates flight to South Africa every six weeks – “my heart is in Africa” – he is all praise for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which he also calls home. “How many countries in the world have achieved what the UAE has in such a short space of time? They have created belief and a level of trust and credibility that is remarkable.” For a 60-year-old who has a lifetime of anecdotes to recall of his meetings with some of the world’s greatest sportsmen, there are newer vistas ahead. “There isn’t an end game. You can never say you have made it,” says Patel. 



“I have been fortunate to have had luck, God’s grace and people who believed in me and gave me op- portunities. And it’s circular; the only way you can thank them is to do the same for others. It’s a flywheel of positivity and a really powerful thing.”

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CEO Strategies: 60 Not Out – The South African Game-Changer In Business

We met Africa’s largest lender in one of the world’s most dynamic financial markets. In Dubai in June, we spoke with the Johannesburg-based Kenny Fihla, the Chief Executive Of Corporate and Investment Banking at Standard Bank, a 160-year-old institution with a footprint covering 20 African countries.



Kenny Fihla, the Chief Executive of Corporate and Investment Banking at Standard Bank, talks about renewable energy, sustainability-linked financing solutions, impacting emerging markets, and the lessons that can be replicated across the continent. More in this insightful interview with the man who started his career in the trade union movement in the 1980s in South Africa, and has been with the bank for over 18 years.



Q. In your role at Standard Bank, you have spearheaded several transformative initiatives, and have a passion for climate change and are also involved in leading renewable energy projects. With its energy deficit and energy poverty that makes Africa vulnerable, you’ve been scaling up these initiatives. Can you tell us what you have planned?



A. The demand for energy transition in Africa is huge. It is estimated that Africa will need about $1.2 trillion worth of investment to enable, firstly, energy security and, secondly, the transition away from fossil fuels into more sustainable energy. That’s a lot of money, and that amount is not readily available within the African continent, which requires then partnerships with other investors and pools of capital from outside of the continent. From a Standard Bank point of view, we have committed to originating and raising, and we’ll also put our own money – anything between ZAR250 billion to ZAR300 billion ($13.6 billion to $16.4 billion) – in the space of five years. We are already 40% of the way there, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. That’s just one institution, and given the total amount of money required, it is just not enough. We need the partnerships of a range of financial institutions to enable Africa to have energy security and transition.



The second challenge is ensuring that people who are not connected and do not have access to electricity actually get access. It is estimated that less than 50% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa has access to electricity. That’s over 700 million who do not have access. We need to provide them with reliable, cheap, and sustainable energy well into the future. We also have to look at transitional measures to enable access.



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The third element has to do with the impact of moving away from fossil fuels into renewable energy projects. Some towns, like those built around coal mines and coal-fired power stations in South Africa, will need to transition in a manner that does not create massive unemployment and poverty to those small towns. So, a just transition is key. We must undertake it responsibly so that it does not cause hardships for ordinary people. We have partnered with various players and initiated renewable energy projects in South Africa, expanding to other geographies. We have also seen the entry of players who aggregate and generate the electricity and rent out, or people pay based on the amount of electricity they use. And we call those aggregators, because people don’t have to initiate the capital outlay upfront, but rather can pay as they use. And we think that’s going to expand and cover most of sub-Saharan Africa. That solution is going to enable decentralized energy, where you don’t have to invest massive sums of money building the national grid, but you create localized grids that give people access to electricity and deal with energy poverty and energy shortage.



Q. Your mandate is to achieve a portfolio mix that is net zero by 2050, transitioning to a low-carbon economy. In emerging markets such as the DRC and Namibia, how far have these projects come in terms of realization?



A. There’s a lot of ground that has been covered. We have already enabled about 3.5 gigawatts of electricity that is under construction at the moment, in the form of solar installations, power plants and wind plants that have been developed. We’ve also partnered with a number of institutions, including governments, who are working on various initiatives, the first set being those driven by state-owned entities, where they will issue tenders, invite the private sector to build renewable energy generation, which will then fit into the grid. That has been the bulk of what we have been doing up until now. The second set relates to private companies building their own self-generation initiatives, either for their own buildings or their own plants. That portion of our work is covered in South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and expanding to even more countries. We think the biggest growth is going to come from that second piece of work that we do with private companies. The third set that we do, is with companies who effectively are in the business of managing and running solar or energy generation. They can do that on behalf of government, or they can do that in order to supply to individual homes. That portfolio is also growing, and we will invite investors to come into sub-Saharan Africa, partner with us as we identify these projects; invest because we think it is good business to be done, but it also has a massive impact in terms of unlocking the economic growth potential and just improving the quality of life of ordinary people within Africa.



Q. Speaking of the private sector, how do you incorporate your activities with the SME sector? How are you unlocking support for them in terms of sustainability-linked financing solutions?



A. The solutions that we’ve developed cover a wide range of banking products, from giving people access to the sort of existing loans to fund solar or wind initiatives. That’s much easier for individuals, because you can use your home loan to effectively take a little bit extra in order to put solar panels on the rooftop. For small businesses, the best solution lies in the use of aggregators who can develop solutions for a specific area and get individual companies within that area to effectively subscribe and have access to reliable, cheap and much more sustainable energy over a long period of time without having to fork out massive capital upfront, because small businesses tend to run on very tight cash flows. Aggregators provide an appropriate solution for them.



Q. In practising responsible investment, how difficult is it to get multilateral, multi-stake-holder support and from governments? What are the regulatory hassles and risks?



A. The situation has improved over the last couple of years, and I wish some of the changes were made much earlier. South Africa had a limit on what people could self-generate; [it was] one megawatt. That limit effectively stopped the private sector from investing and generating electricity on their own. That limit has been removed completely in the last three to four years, and we have seen an explosion of private sector self-generation, and of investment into the energy sector within South Africa, which just shows how regulations can stall the development of a particular sector and deprive the country of access to additional funding as well as to new energy forms and new energy supply.



The second set of regulations that needed to be sort of resolved was harmonize the rules between national government, the energy department, Eskom (national power utility) as well as municipalities. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in that space, but a lot of ground has been covered. For example, if someone generates electricity in one part of the country, and there’s already surplus supply in that area, but the demand lies tens or hundreds of kilometers away, how do you transport or wheel that electricity to the other end? You need great infrastructure. What is the tariff regime between the supplier and the demand? And how do you know that the electricity that is supplied by a private supplier on this end will actually go to a customer who’s contracted to that supplier on the other end; what are the pricing mechanisms between the two? And what is the pricing mechanism with regards to the grid? What are the rules of dispute resolution, legal contracting and so on. All of those is being sorted out, and we think over time, those roles will settle and make it easy for integrated electricity supply that has multiple players, with the national grid providing the sort of transportation infrastructure to move from one end to the other. South Africa is slightly advanced in that regard, but we think the policy framework and rules are replicable in other parts of Africa.



Q. Do you see a point where Africa is exporting these concepts to the rest of the world?



A. I think there’s a lot that Africa can export to the rest of the world. I mean some of these bad experiences are, in themselves, good lessons. The whole concept of loadshedding, where you proactively manage demand and supply and plan when to switch off in [certain areas], is on its own, a useful experience in order to protect the grid, but you don’t want to live perpetually in that situation. And so, the second lesson is that if governments and regulators quickly remove the regulatory obstacles, you can unlock massive potential from the private sector and from your community. And South Africa is a case in point. There are about 12 gigawatts worth of electricity currently under development; that is about 20% of the installed capacity of Eskom. That’s quite a lot, and that has happened in the last couple of years, which just shows that if you create the right regulatory environment, you can unlock the potential and the power of the private sector. And there’s something powerful in that, and there’s a lesson that can also be replicated in other sectors; that government needs to set the rules, but those rules must enable society to grow and to develop, and must be aimed at tapping into the potential and the capacity of the rest of that society. The third lesson is that partnerships are a powerful way of dealing with challenges and problems that confront many of our countries. We all want to get to the best possible out come, and if we try and do it individually, unfortunately, our efforts will have limited impact, but if we align the interests of different stakeholders, suddenly, the impact is substantially bigger, and we get to the desired goal much quicker.



Q. South Africa is going through a historic phase right now after 30 years of democracy. The country has entered an era of coalition politics. From a banker’s point of view, how do you view the current political landscape?



A. I think it’s an interesting scenario, we live in interesting times. But if one looks at what has been happening globally, coalition governments are not new. They have been in existence in many of the European countries for quite a while. Some of them are much more stable and better functioning, others are stable but dysfunctional. And so, we would want to gravitate towards a more stable and better functioning coalition government and South Africa has had a history of a government of national unity after its first democratic elections, where President Nelson Mandela went out of his way to create a government of national unity, despite the fact that the African National Congress (ANC) had the majority. Now we’re forced by circumstances, because no party has won a majority in parliament, but there are some positive things that have come out. The ruling party has accepted that it has lost its majority, it has endorsed the outcome of the election, and is managing the transition in a responsible manner that is something extremely positive and good for Africa and for the developing world. Secondly, there’s engagement across political parties, and the initial reaction from some of the major parties has been extremely positive, with all of them committing to work in the interest of the country, bar one or two who have objections for their own reasons, but by and large, most political parties have committed themselves to working together in the interest of South Africa with a view of stimulating economic growth and ensuring that the will of the South African electorate is respected. I think that alone demonstrates a high degree of maturity, and it’s something that must be cherished.



So, I’m far more optimistic about the future of South Africa. Of course, it will bring new dynamics, it will change the rule of the game, but I think it’s going to have much stronger checks and balances, and if managed properly, it could actually stimulate massive economic growth in South Africa and send a very positive signal about the art of the possible, if people rise above their petty political differences and act in the interest of the country.



Q. As a bank, how are you leveraging AI, blockchain, and other new technologies in the world of financial services?



A. The financial services industry is in a process of continuous change. We have seen the emergence of new technologies, of much cheaper forms of providing banking services. Old banks have convoluted IT infrastructure, more like spaghetti, with massive risks and a lot of manual work in order to try and pull things together, but technology has enabled the simplification of many of these services. Payments now have become easily acceptable, covering a range of players, even beyond banks; the cost associated with those services has become significantly cheaper, and blockchain is providing an avenue to modify that even further and also reduce inefficiencies and improve the effectiveness of financial institutions. We’ve also seen the use of technology which enhances the leveraging of data. Banks are sitting on a massive amount of data on the basis of client behavior and so on; that data is not currently being optimally used to benefit clients, to anticipate what their needs are likely to be and proactively offer solutions best suited for them. Suddenly, with AI, we can do that, and we have started to do that as Standard Bank in some of our product offerings. But of course, there are also risks that come with AI; AI is dependent on the data you have, the historical patterns, and if those historical patterns were discriminatory, we are likely to have discriminatory practices being perpetuated now by machines, because they are picking up on those data and patterns and using them to develop new solutions… You also need, therefore, a human being to work with machines in order to look out for discrimination for inherent practices that may not be fair and equitable across your entire time with the client base.



Q. We’re in Dubai, known for its digital economy and for being a leading hub for attracting foreign direct investment. What lessons can be learned from the city’s success? You have a presence here at the Dubai International Financial Centre. Please tell us about your association with the United Arab Emirates (UAE).



A. I see a lot of potential the African continent can derive from the association and interaction between corporate funds from the UAE and the Middle East, broadly speaking, with opportunities in the African continent. We spoke about the energy transition and the amount of capital required. This region has well-established sovereign funds and entities that have the capital and are looking for opportunities. Our office here seeks to make those connections so we can leverage what we don’t have and offer clients, as well as investors from the Middle East, opportunities that sit in the African continent, which have significantly higher return and massive growth prospects into the future. The second-most important lesson here is about the leadership, demonstrated by the UAE’s President as well as other leaders. It’s unbelievable, where a place not endowed with arable land, not endowed with minerals, and not endowed with a large population, has been able to transform itself into a significant hub that connects the Middle East to Europe, to Africa, to the Americas, to Asia… The transformation is unbelievable, which just shows the power of leadership and of having a proper vision and being able to execute that vision with diligence, discipline and consistently, over a period of time.



Updated on August 30 2024; Kenny Fihla has now been appointed as the Deputy Chief Executive of the Standard Bank Group and Chief Executive of Standard Bank South Africa. His responsibilities will include the Group&#8217;s Africa regions and offshore businesses.

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CEO Strategies: South African Corporate Titan On Impacting Emerging Markets And ‘The Art Of The Possible’

Dibakar Das Roy&nbsp;explores&nbsp;sensitive&nbsp;issues&nbsp;of&nbsp;race,&nbsp;color&nbsp;and Identity in his&nbsp;first&nbsp;feature&nbsp;film set&nbsp;in&nbsp;New&nbsp;Delhi starring Nigerian actor Samuel Abiola Robinson.



&#8220;You know, there’s a lot of common space that can be explored,” says Dibakar Das Roy, writer-director of the Indian film, Dilli Dark, that’s currently doing the rounds of international film festivals.



The space that he mentions and transcends with his new film is the one occupied by the two blockbuster behemoths – Nollywood and Bollywood – dominating screens, OTT platforms, box-offices and the cinematic conscience worldwide.



So even if it has been shot in India, in the narrow, dusty alleys and packed streets of New Delhi and Noida and the archeological sites of Mehrauli – away from the staple Chandni Chowk and Connaught Place locales of mainstream Bollywood cinema – there’s a tangible connection that could take the film to the lively lanes of Lagos. This link is a man named Samuel Abiola Robinson, the Nigerian actor who plays the lead in Dilli Dark, also Roy’s first feature film.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="684" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-with-the-lead-cast-image-supplied-1024x684.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-62444" style="width:638px;height:auto" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-with-the-lead-cast-image-supplied-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-with-the-lead-cast-image-supplied-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-with-the-lead-cast-image-supplied-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-with-the-lead-cast-image-supplied-1536x1026.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-with-the-lead-cast-image-supplied-2048x1368.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Roy (left) with the lead cast; Image supplied</figcaption></figure></div>


The connection is also cultural, with a storyline profiling Michael Okeke, as one of the many Nigerians living in Delhi, studying for his



MBA and dreaming of a corporate career in India, but gets “hopelessly stuck”. He works as a small-time drug delivery guy to make ends meet, and it is “this job and his African identity which keeps his life coming back full circle; and his search for gainful employment lands him in the fringes of society, where the only person who takes him in is a sketchy godwoman”.



Robinson is well-placed to play Okeke. Like his character, he too, in fact, is a Nigerian living in Delhi, and so on many levels, was able to relate to the film’s storyline. Robinson has been based in Delhi, since his success playing the title role of a football star in Sudani From Nigeria, a 2018 hit film in the South Indian language of Malayalam, and now airing on Netflix. “He becomes the protagonist, a symbol of every person who is kind of going through the same othering that is happening,” says Roy of Robinson’s Okeke.



“There were two primary ideas behind the film; the first was the whole tendency to look at colorism in Indian society; and the second is a larger global theme, to look at identity and belonging, and issues of who is from what country and who belongs where, and what decides nationality, so on and so forth&#8230;” adds Roy, who left a career in advertising in the United States (U.S.) to return home to India to learn filmmaking “on the job”, in this case, interspersing historical and contemporary narratives.



“It’s the intersection of two cultures where the protagonist is a foreigner, who starts realizing there are connects that the two continents have had for a very long time. One of the things I wanted to do is look at the cosmopolitan nature of Delhi and how it was, say, centuries ago, and that the whole concept of Delhi being a global city is not a new one…. about 600-800 years ago, there were people from Ethiopia walking the streets of Delhi…”


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<figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="684" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-on-set-with-Robinson-image-supplied-1024x684.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-62442" style="width:732px;height:auto" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-on-set-with-Robinson-image-supplied-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-on-set-with-Robinson-image-supplied-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-on-set-with-Robinson-image-supplied-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-on-set-with-Robinson-image-supplied-1536x1026.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Roy-on-set-with-Robinson-image-supplied-2048x1368.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Roy on set with Robinson (left); Image supplied</figcaption></figure></div>


The inspiration for the film also stemmed from personal experience, of the time Roy spent in Delhi growing up, when he himself “faced a decent amount of bias and bullying for having darker skin”. In the long run, he came to terms with it but wanted to take “a fresh look” at the issue, reference history and this started his fascination for storytelling, and the film. 



Roy admits his primary intent is to create stories that bind India with the world. 



“Even when I’m looking at telling cross-cultural stories, I feel I want to start off with India as a base, because India has had an intersection with so many different cultures, and so many different nationalities through its history, whether we’re trying to do a period drama, or something contemporary, and that is the one thing that really fascinates me – the interaction of characters from different backgrounds, coming together,” says Roy. “&#8230;It’s a beautiful dichotomy that exists, and here’s this character [Okeke] who comes in to contemporary India, in the 2020s, and he’s also from the African continent, but he’s not seeming to find a place for himself in a time that is supposed to be more open…” 



Keen on a theatrical release for Dilli Dark, Roy says his “self-funded” 93-minute dark comedy (in Hindi/English but “anyone can understand it”) has already received “great responses” at film festivals in Mumbai, Estonia, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, the U.S. and other cities. He is also hoping to find the right distribution channels on the African continent. Other than that, he has a great love for the cinema and series’ coming out of Nollywood. 



“Nollywood is a massive industry. There’s a lot of love for Bollywood there&#8230; And what really strikes me as strange is that there haven’t been many collaborations between the two industries,” says Roy. 



Perhaps Dilli Dark is a start.

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‘Nollywood Is Massive; Lot Of Love For Bollywood There’: Indian Filmmaker On The Intersection Of Cultures

Tall and in colorful five-inch Louis Vuitton heels, epitomizing grace and success, Sabrina Elba, the model, United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), activist and founder of S’ABLE Labs, was in Johannesburg on March 8, when she spoke passionately to a packed ballroom of female powerhouses at the FORBES WOMAN AFRICA Leading Women Summit, on the challenges of being a black female founder, about African botanicals and her work with husband and Hollywood icon Idris Elba. 



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A multi-hyphenate, Sabrina Elba launched S’ABLE Labs with her husband Idris Elba, aware that quality products for melanated skin were lacking. Her company works to build a more ethical and transparent supply chain focused on the wellness of the planet and its people by partnering with local farmers in West Africa, Somalia, and South Africa, among others. Here are excerpts from the interview:



Q. You’re from Vancouver, now based in London with Idris Elba. You are of Somali heritage and Idris Elba’s parents are from Sierra Leone and Ghana. Besides the shared history, you have common goals, such as climate change, farming and food security in Africa and been on several platforms together. How have you both managed to revitalize your interest in Africa?



A. We’ve always been passionate about Africa, and it’s actually one of the reasons we connected the way we did; him being from West Africa and myself from East Africa; we always had this passion to give back. I came back to visit a lot and he did too; we were in love with Africa. And the reason we actually ended up in agriculture together, is because we both have this mission, this big dream to see Africa for its full potential. And it’s one of the reasons we work with IFAD as well, because we both agree that the aid model can be very cyclical. And IFAD is just one of the amazing organizations that looks at adaptation for rural people, that has long-term solutions, that builds independence, that presents Africa as an investment opportunity, and that was something we were super passionate about. So, we actually bonded on this, which is crazy that we both get to do the work together now. And I’m so thankful to be back whenever I can. It’s funny because everyone’s like, ‘oh, don’t you just love going East?’, I’m like, ‘no, I love going everywhere’. I genuinely love the continent. It’s such an amazing place, and we love Johannesburg!



Q. You’ve been married for over five years now – we’ve all seen pictures of that beautiful ceremony in Morocco. You have said before that you’ve always been encouraged by your husband’s entrepreneurial sense. You’re also a celebrity who cares, because you have set up not just ‘another beauty project’. You’re using African ingredients, going back to the roots of our traditions, for your skincare brand. Tell us how this journey has been, inculcating African culture.



A. I’ve definitely grown an entrepreneurial bone. I didn’t think I had one. I wanted to be a lawyer my whole youth. And then of course, I met this amazing guy and was like, ‘maybe I’ll go to London for like two years and see what that’s like’; I never went back to Vancouver. And I watched Idris be his own boss, start business after business, because he was so passionate about the things he was doing he wanted to do it himself to have that power and control to navigate the spaces he was in, in a way that has fundamentally built his personality, his persona, and I admired that. But when it came to starting the skincare business together, I was in a place where I had done so much work with agriculture before, with IFAD&#8230; And I was in a place where I came around to beauty as a concept because I was so frustrated with my skin and being now able to showcase these amazing botanicals from all over the continent, and showcase them in a way that really boosts their efficacy with other ingredients. 



For example, we have the African resurrection plant in one of our new products; combined with okra and retinol, people get this beautiful marriage of botanicals. Science has become such a passion of mine. And African botanicals are so powerful. They exist in the harshest climates, and are more powerful than other antioxidants we’re seeing around the world. So, it’s this notion that people should start looking to African founders and black founders as the experts that lead in a lot of these issues around skin. And I’m excited to see that change. There’s this weird conception that ‘oh, there’s a black founder behind this brand, I guess it’s only for black skin’. Just because it’s a black founder doesn’t mean you put our group of consumers in this tiny hole. If you go to a retailer in the U.S., you’ll find products catered towards African skin or black skin or black hair in a separate section… So, the retailer’s then telling the customer ‘these products aren’t for you; it’s for a different set of people’. And I think that has done more harm than good… We discovered, through the work we’re doing, how abusive the agricultural sector is. If you look at shea in West Africa, it’s unfair wages, unsafe working conditions.



I mean, people are dying, children are dying. For what, for shea beauty products on our bathroom counters? It was the silliest thing I’ve heard, and we didn’t want to contribute to that. So, we do our own sourcing… we do clinical studies for each of the products so we can show how efficacious they are. So, it’s not just a farmer walking into a room saying ‘buy my ingredient because it’s this powerful’, he can actually have clinical data sheets to now back up how powerful it is, which was so important to us, because most brands will come in and test the formulation together, but we really wanted to show the strength of these ingredients on their own and then the strength of the product. And then, we have these amazing results and people tell us ‘your new product [leads to] 120% reduction [of ] hyper-pigmentation, how do you do that’ and we say ‘it’s African botanicals’… that’s become such a point of pride for us to be able to sit in a room and talk about how okra is good for your skin. We’re just trying to give it a bit more light, shine and context in what we’re doing. Because if you look to your auntie, your great grandma, they know what they’re doing when it comes to skin and wellness. They are true innovators.



Q. What were or are the challenges of being a black beauty founder?



A. Sometimes, I walk into a big meeting or an investor meeting, and they won’t see me as the CEO, they’ll want to have a meeting with Idris. And I’m like, ‘no, no, I’m right here, what do you want to talk about, I can talk numbers too’. But it’s just that you really have to step up your presence to be able to hold your own in rooms like that. I am privileged also to say the brand has had a lot of traction, because it is founder-led. Although, sometimes, that can work against skincare, when there’s a celebrity every week launching a brand. And I’m like, ‘just go away, if you’re not passionate about this, go away’. But at the same time, it’s given us access through a lot of doors, and I’m forever thankful for that. And we’ve been able to grow the brand. And I say we’re moving at the speed of trust, because we have these small conversations in rooms, and we really talk about how the products are efficacious. And, and how we look at hyperpigmentation, a holistic view, and we have these amazing, intimate conversations, and we build a bigger community. And then we take that same method and have a great intimate conversation again, it’s a lot more work, but I think that’s the way to do it. And I think with a skincare brand, you have to really trust the brand and understand the ethos because you know, you are putting it on your face.



Q. Would you and Idris move to Africa and live here?



A. It’s in the 10-year plan for sure, but the hardest part is, where? Because I’ve been to so many amazing places in Africa. And still, I’m probably not 50% of the way through it because it’s so huge, just massive&#8230; I think the way South Africa has been so accepting of Idris and has put Idris on this sort of platform, you’ve shown so much love to him. Really, Johannesburg is in his heart, it honestly is and I think it makes me love it even more. I spent all day yesterday at Woolworths and Pick n’ Pay. And because you’ve the best snacks, and I’m not kidding, I’m taking back speckled eggs by the pound. They are so good. People don’t realize how good the food in South Africa is overall, but the snacks and the chakalaka, so good… But we have to come back together, Idris is definitely a bit jealous that I am here.

Sabrina Elba; image supplied (1)

Model-Activist-Entrepreneur Sabrina Elba: ‘People Should Start Looking To African Founders As The Experts…’

The Nairobi-based co-founder of Craydel, an online career guidance platform, speaks to FORBES AFRICA about its ambitions to democratize higher education and scale across Africa. But first, more on what sparked his entrepreneurial journey.



Manish Sardana is in the midst of a busy day, opening yet another office, a bigger one, in Nairobi’s upscale Westlands area when we catch up for a conversation on Craydel, the edtech startup he successfully co-founded in Kenya in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.



“Right now, we have five offices – three in Nigeria and two in Kenya – and about 70-odd employees and we are growing rapidly,” the platform’s 43-year-old CEO says about the growth of what was once “just an idea in his head”.



At a time when most startups are battling to survive and retrenching staff, Craydel is hiring rapidly and on its way to profitability in 2024, he adds. On the cards: expansion to more markets such as Ghana, Uganda and South Africa. The investors are keen and Sardana is optimistic.



“When you are building something that has a real vision trying to solve a real problem, you get people gravitating towards you,” says Sardana of his platform that dispels misinformation and biases for students and guides decisions on college and course selection.&nbsp;Craydel is building the tech infrastructure to empower African learners to search, match and apply to their best-fit higher education institutions.



In 2021, Sardana, along with his co-founders <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-nguru-38677638/?originalSubdomain=ke" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">John Nguru</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/shayne-aman-premji/?originalSubdomain=ke" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Shayne Aman Premji</a>, secured $1 million for Craydel in a pre-seed round led by Enza Capital, a private venture fund that invests in early-stage tech startups across Africa. Subsequently, they secured another $1.5 million to grow the platform.



Craydel – a play on the word ‘cradle’ – &nbsp;hand-holds students wanting to pursue higher education – from graduation to post-graduation to PhD – at any point in their student or professional career. In fact, 50% of their postgraduate enrolments are working professionals looking for a career change, says Sardana.



The tech startup has 380 direct partnerships with universities so far and seeks to democratize access to tertiary education, in turn, addressing the low gross enrolment rate, of about 9%, in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This includes working professionals who have not been to college before, for want of access to capital and resources.



Two years in, Sardana says they have figured out the formula for success.



“We know that if you do X, Y and Z, you are going to be successful. That equation is very clear to us now.



We want to show that we can build a real unicorn out of Africa, creating real impact.”



But there’s a reason why Craydel may as well be on its way to savoring billion-dollar success in the future. Sardana has a track-record of building and scaling successful businesses from the ground-up.



His penchant for entrepreneurship had its humble beginnings in India, and followed him to Africa, a continent that he now calls home and one that has “given so much” to him.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“I owe it to Africa,” he explains of his mission to expand opportunities in education.



“One of the things I realized early on in life is to observe things around me… What I love is looking at ecosystems and how things work, and understand how it is broken, and use technology to disrupt that ecosystem. There&#8217;s also a theory I use, which is called ‘perpetuators versus agitators’; wherein perpetuators perpetuate an ecosystem because it benefits them, while an agitator can really shake this up from the outside and create a better, more efficient ecosystem,” says Sardana.



‘Serial entrepreneur’



His first tryst with entrepreneurship was at the age of 10. From a middle class home in Delhi – with three rooms and 16 family members – Sardana was born to parents who worked in the government and instilled in him a love for reading.



He engaged this by creating “a sharing concept or library with a common pool of books and comics from everyone in one place”, renting books out to friends and relatives. The venture failed, but not without him realizing how much he enjoyed the process of creating it. All through school and college, he found enterprising ways to make pocket money, becoming “a serial entrepreneur more out of necessity than anything else”.



His parents allowed him these entrepreneurial bouts, so long as he was going to top his class, study economics and go on to become a civil services officer. Whilst studying for an economics degree in Delhi University’s Hansraj College, Sardana was also teaching students. But disillusionment set in.



“I mean 90% of what I studied two years ago, I had no recollection of, and I could not see how that education was going to ever help me in life. And especially because I had kind of exposed myself to building businesses, I did not see any practical application of what I was studying.”



Along with a couple of friends, he soon set up his own publishing business – a college magazine in Delhi University that proved to be very popular on campus. He hustled, spending nights at the printing press and knocking on advertisers’ doors during the day, thumbing through the Yellow Pages directories and traveling across Delhi on his dad’s scooter. This was in the year 2000.



“My parents said I have got to stop this and do my master’s degree,” says Sardana. His mom filled out a form to the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. Some of India’s greatest economists such as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and former Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh have taught at the institution. &nbsp;



Sardana cleared the entrance exam, quite by default. “I really did not study for it. The only way I cleared the exam was because I was teaching my classmates and charging them money for it. So I would [conduct] private tuitions for my own classmates, and in the process of teaching them, I would kind of learn myself.”



Very soon, he realized it was all theoretical economics and he had no passion for it. It didn’t challenge him enough, so three months into the course, he quit.



After that, he tried to rekindle the magazine business but had to close it down. He also authored an economics textbook for class 12 students. A year on, he went on to do his MBA at the FORE School of Management and was subsequently hired by advertising agency FCB Ulka. Before long, he felt “jaded” in the industry doing marketing campaigns. But Sardana was also closely watching from the sidelines the big renaissance unraveling in India’s technology sector.



“That was in 2004-2005, the internet was coming up, Amazon was becoming a big thing and Google had come up. I saw the power of technology really changing and transforming ecosystems and got really excited about it,” he recalls.



After that, he worked four years in a successful edtech startup called Vriti, and the company managed to raise a total funding of $35 million.



“It was a lot of money at the time… Eventually, I sliced the part of the company I was running and set up as a separate company. I sold my company to a financial investor. So that was my first successful exit, which I was really happy about.



“And then, after seven years, I needed a break, I was very much done. Startups can also be an emotionally-draining experience, you know, especially when you are just married and have kids.”



A six-month break ensued, during which time he also helped his wife set up her bakery business, delivering her cakes door-to-door in their black Maruti Esteem car.



That was in 2014 when Sardana’s Africa rendezvous was just about to begin.



‘Owe it to Africa’



One of his former bosses who had been following his journey in the technology space told him about an opportunity in Africa with multinational communications company, WPP to focus on the digital marketing side of the business.



Within 10 days of receiving the offer, Sardana was on a plane to Kenya, his first trip outside of India. It took him three years to settle down, to understand the market and the consumers, and he was promoted to Managing Director for WPP-Scangroup in SSA.&nbsp; &nbsp;



He won a lot of business for the company but the entrepreneur in him was beginning to surface, again. He built a marketing automation platform called Optimus for the company, which is when he met and worked with his current co-founder and CTO, Nguru.



He presented the product to the board but it didn’t work. He presented it to one of their clients, Barclays in Kenya, and thereby to the bank’s leadership in South Africa, who were very impressed and gave him a chance to deploy it across their markets, which he calls his “first lucky break”.



“Once Barclays happened, you know, success creates more success. Suddenly, at WPP, the guys woke up!”



Sardana says Optimus was also deployed by leading African entities such as Kenya Commercial Bank, Equity Bank, the Old Mutual Group and Airtel.



The epiphany after that was inspired by his wife, whose bakery business was also doing well.



“She said to me ‘you know, you guys keep building all this sophisticated technology for large blue chip companies, but what about building something to help small businesses like us scale’?



“That was my first moment in Africa when I said, ‘okay, I&#8217;m making a lot of money for myself, am building a lot of wealth for my organization and for my clients, who are very rich people to start with, but we are really not doing anything of any significance, of impact, using our skill sets, and our insights for the large masses, the small business sector. If you understand Africa, it&#8217;s really run on the back of very micro SMEs.”



This led to the creation of Optimus Mini for small businesses. Eventually, that platform was called Goby – “the smallest fish in the world”. He explains the philosophy behind it.



“The big fish eat the small fish. So we wanted to empower the small fish to fight and compete with the big fish, by giving them access to all the technology and resources they needed. It was essentially e-commerce-as-a-service platform, allowing small entrepreneurs to upload their product pictures and prices, and it will set up an entire e-commerce shop for them online, integrated with payment gateways and logistics partners to deliver the products.”


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="682" height="1024" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-682x1024.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-60328" style="width:335px;height:auto" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-682x1024.jpeg 682w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-200x300.jpeg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-768x1153.jpeg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-1023x1536.jpeg 1023w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-1364x2048.jpeg 1364w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Manish-Sardana-image-supplied-scaled.jpeg 1705w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 682px) 100vw, 682px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Manish Sardana; image supplied</figcaption></figure></div>


It really was just Nguru and Sardana developing it at that point.



“John is an exceptional technology guy, he&#8217;s amazing. I would come up with a product design, the user experience, the strategy, the business side of things and he would build the technology. Technology was always my handicap – I always regret not learning to code. I have all the stuff in my head but can’t build. I tell John he completes my handicap,” says Sardana.



In three months, they had 3,000 merchants signing up, deeming the platform a success. This was while they were still with WPP-Scangroup, when they had the reach, the capital and client access afforded by the company.



When Covid-19 struck in 2020, e-commerce took off and so did Goby. Leading brewer AB InBev approached them to sign on for “a B2B version of the product” to take orders online and deliver alcohol. Diageo, too, came along.



But the time had come for Sardana to go on his own, even if it meant giving up a lucrative salary and the comfort of a full-time job at WPP.



“Working with Manish was always magical, a journey into the future,” remembers Serah Katusya of that time, when she was the Managing Director at Mediacom, a sister agency at WPP-Scangroup; she is now the CEO of Belva and founder of WildMango.&nbsp;“He challenged and inspired with the same energy. He paved the way for many of us into tech, into thinking and building business solutions.&nbsp;He was definitely an agency leader decades ahead of his time.”



By the time he left WPP, Sardana had enough confidence in his abilities to build and scale real businesses. He wanted to build something in a very different space, specifically, in education.



“I think that was a very big inflection point in my life… that I was wasting all my knowledge, talent and experience building things for big companies, and I wanted to solve real problems on the ground. So that kind of gave me an exceptional amount of clarity… seeing the lives of ordinary Kenyans, doing fascinating things with very little resources and transforming their lives became a real thing.”



‘A cradle for young students’



Sardana’s research showed that there were government subsidies and funding for primary education but there was not a lot of momentum in higher education.



“The higher education infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa is extremely weak. The problem is that in most schools, the career counselor is essentially a teacher with the least amount of workload…. This entire industry is run by agents who don&#8217;t understand career counseling; they essentially push students to universities, and make money.”



According to Craydel, more than 16 million African students spend $30 billion on higher education each year.



As a continent with the youngest population in the world, Africa presents tremendous opportunities in this regard, and Sardana was quick.



“We wanted to build a cradle for young students in Africa, for them to get all the nourishment in terms of the right advice, the career counseling, the psychometric assessment, and the right technology to get them off on their own feet.”



Whilst they were setting up the company, and during the pandemic, Sardana met Premji, the third co-founder, who is now Craydel’s CFO.



“Shayne is Canadian, but like me, stayed in Africa for 10 years. We stayed on the same street in Kenya but never knew each other. During the pandemic, he was changing houses, and walked into our apartment building. That&#8217;s how we met. He had a lot of experience in investment banking, and was doing extremely well in his career…



He is also impact-driven, so said he wanted to quit his job and join us full-time… he was extremely instrumental in raising our first round of a million dollars,” says Sardana.



For now, the trio is looking forward to what lies ahead. Their “vision and impact story” is shaping up.



“We&#8217;re in a good space now, and really excited about building this journey,” concludes Sardana, as he sets off to launch the company’s brand-new office, surely, one of many more to come.

Craydel co-founders John Nguru, Manish Sardana and Shayne Aman Premji; image supplied

‘We Can Build A Real Unicorn Out Of Africa, Creating Impact’: Kenya Co-Founder On Building An Edtech Startup 

Launch Africa, a leading early-stage pan-African venture capital fund has invested in 133 startups in 22 African countries closing over $36 million in its first round. Janade du Plessis, its co-founder, shares the crucial highlights of this journey into the continent and what Sol Kerzner taught him.



It is important for Janade du Plessis to start from the beginning, recounting the time, the imagery and the vibe of the vibrant, sandy, sprawling Cape Flats area to the east of Cape Town where he grew up in South Africa.



It is important for the co-founder of Launch Africa Ventures and Five35 Ventures – two companies prominent in the venture capital (VC) space in Africa today – to start with his mother.



Based in ‘Mother City’ Cape Town, he is close to the subject – and memories of a childhood that inescapably defined his future.



Those experiences have been invaluable, in traversing the continent and adding value to the lives of entrepreneurs – especially women – in Africa’s deepest pockets.



He has traveled to 50 of the 54 African countries, his bio states, but there are things you cannot include on your résumé – such as the beads of sweat and the tears of entrepreneurship that an itinerant life can bring.



But the 40-plus Du Plessis isn’t complaining, he is used to the hustling. It was in his past, and he sees it in his present, in the many people and startups he hopes to turn around on his travels.



“I come from a family of female entrepreneurs, so the first six years of my life before school, all I saw was hustle and women running businesses. They always went somewhere and came back really tired afterwards. My mom was hustling to feed the family, my aunt had a bakery…the women were doing things in their communities. This was stuff I learned from a young age,” he says.



Du Plessis taught himself to make things and sell them – baby steps for the future entrepreneur – and he also sold vegetables, peanuts and raisins to the community, learning the basics of cost management he still uses today.



“I always saw my mother struggle as an entrepreneur. Had the environment been ready, she would have been a fantastic leader in a big organization, but she never got the opportunity&#8230;That is why I am so deeply passionate about investing in women.”



For many, this sentiment is an afterthought, a token tick-mark or the tail end of any corporate narrative on success.



Not for Du Plessis. His Five35 Ventures is a pan-African female-focused VC fund investing in Africa’s female tech founders. Since its launch in April last year, it has completed 18 investments and is continuing to capital-raise, as currently, “only 1% of all VC funding goes to female founders”.



“I grew up under apartheid. Although they were hustling, my mom and aunts could not scale their businesses ever. It wasn’t allowed [at the time]…we don’t have those challenges anymore and yet, women still struggle. That’s my motivation to really provide capital to people left out or for some reason, marginalized…”



The “boring finance guy” that he calls himself did 18 years in the corporate world, including stints at the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Nigeria and Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) in South Africa, before founding Launch Africa. The corporate journey was an imperative rite of passage, especially in a country coming out of the apartheid era heralding the dawn of democracy and beckoning its educated youth to seize new opportunities.



With a post-graduate diploma in Actuarial Science from the University of Cape Town, Du Plessis’ first assignment was as a corporate finance analyst in Johannesburg for Standard Bank, on the trading desk and then in the mergers and acquisitions (M&amp;A) team, moving on to Goldman Sachs as an M&amp;A analyst in New York for three years, where life only meant work. “People said, ‘oh, you lived in New York’ and I was like, ‘I did not see anything, I was working’. But obviously, the world opened up for me. And looking back now, Africa really opened up to me. Nobody knew my name. They would just call me ‘Africa’, because I was the only intake from the continent.



“They would walk up to my desk and say ‘Africa, there’s this guy in Nigeria, can you contact him’? I quickly learned that, ‘ah, there’s a whole opportunity for me to make a name for myself’. So I upskilled and really became passionate about the continent.”



An MBA degree from the London Business School followed and thereafter, the chance in London to learn from the best through his stint as Executive Assistant to South African business magnate and legend Sol Kerzner, the founder (now late) of Kerzner International.



“For two years, I absolutely loved it,” says Du Plessis. “I went from this very technical corporate to learning how business is actually done on the other side, and Sol Kerzner was an excellent businessman. He always told me, ‘never hire for personality, always hire for a role’. He taught me to always use other people’s money and make sure your stakeholders are happy.”



Back in Johannesburg, Du Plessis was offered a position as a director with hospitality group Tsogo Sun, and thereafter a role in corporate finance and M&amp;A at RMB, where he stayed seven years, before deciding the GPS on his personal radar was not just South Africa, but all of Africa.



This trajectory led to him moving to Nigeria and starting his own social impact fund, Abrazo Capital, in 2004, when he even raised money from the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation.



The mandate of the fund was to connect women in rural areas to peri-urban and urban areas and create a supply chain, but there weren’t enough sustainable businesses in those rural areas, so Abrazo created its own businesses, bringing in women, training them, making them managers, and eventually, shareholders.



“[In the end], we do a management buy-out of ourselves in those businesses. So we create our own exits, obviously pumping some debt into it, and then we take the money out&#8230;”



The fund created 19 businesses in 14 African countries, and Du Plessis got to live in some of the continent’s most rural and under- developed areas.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/vcrenu.png" alt="" class="wp-image-59315" style="width:288px;height:357px" width="288" height="357" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/vcrenu.png 349w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/vcrenu-242x300.png 242w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 288px) 100vw, 288px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Janade Du Plessis</figcaption></figure></div>


“I got to know these environments very well. And we had an exit IRR of 19%, where all impact funds back then were returning between 4% and 9% in dollar terms. So it was highly successful. It required me to be in those areas for three to nine months at a time. I am pretty much a city boy, but I loved it because you are building something, you’re seeing it emerge, and you’re seeing the impact it makes to other people’s lives,” smiles Du Plessis.



“Once you empower women, you know there is a shift. For me, that was not only an impact fund but a life-changing fund.”



The AfDB called to say they liked his model and appointed him their Chief Investment Officer (Private Sector) which Du Plessis was for four years but he yearned to return to the grassroots and work with entrepreneurs.



He wanted to come back to South Africa, and this was also when big tech was making waves.



An assignment with Nedbank as the Head of Venture Capital &amp; Alternative Investments in Johannesburg followed.



“We invested in Aerobotics, which was our first deal. It was a star performer. We came in at the pre-seed round, and funded it right up to Series A.”



Both at Abrazo and the AfDB, agriculture had been one of Du Plessis’ prime focus areas, so this was personally exciting.



“Through my Abrazo connections, overnight, after we did the investment, I introduced Aerobotics to about 40 co-operatives I previously worked with. Aerobotics have an amazing team, and [the company] is going to be a unicorn one day,” he predicts.



After his tenure at Nedbank, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in October 2020, Du Plessis co-founded Launch Africa with Zachariah George.



“When I took the Nedbank job, one of the first things I did was sign up Startupbootcamp (a network of multi-corporate-backed accelerators helping startups scale internationally) as a service provider to provide us pipeline.” This is when he met George, a former Wall Street investment banker, now Launch Africa’s Managing Partner with Du Plessis. “Zach too has an amazing story, very different from mine and very interesting. He came to South Africa to watch the Soccer World Cup in 2010 and never left because he was like, ‘this is the land of opportunity’.



“He and I were always talking but from different perspectives, like his startups were great, but they were just not investment-ready for where all the capital actually sits, which is Series A and beyond. So we quickly realized that there is a massive gap at the seed stage; companies coming out of accelerators were doing whatever they could to raise Series A; but what they actually needed was 18 months of enough runway so they could get market traction, build a team; they don’t actually need that much capital, but they need time to build out the capacity of the team and get clients. This was the thesis of Launch Africa [based on the environment in 2019-2020],” says Du Plessis.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="800" height="800" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/1679918960663.png" alt="" class="wp-image-59336" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/1679918960663.png 800w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/1679918960663-300x300.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/1679918960663-150x150.png 150w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/1679918960663-768x768.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Zachariah George</figcaption></figure>



George attests that it has been a great journey so far but hard work: “People ask me, ‘Zach, how did you build the biggest VC fund in Africa with Janade in just two years?’ I tell people that if you are looking for shortcuts, don’t work in the VC industry.”



In April last year, they closed the first fund raising $36.2 million from 258 high-net-worth-individuals, family offices and funds; investors further invested an additional $16 million over and above into 44 of their startups.



They are invested in 133 startups across 22 African countries.



Seed Fund 2 was launched recently targeting $75 million to continue the work they did in Fund 1.



These are numbers Du Plessis is very proud of as he breathlessly reels off the facts: “We wanted to also change who we raised from. All the VCs in Africa are funded by the same people at the end of the day. I worked with a DFI and knew the restrictions they put on you and we wanted to have a high-value, quick decision-making fund. We targeted C-suite executives of global organizations to say, ‘your organization doesn’t have to invest, but why don’t you give us a minimum of $100,000’. In return, you get to see a high-volume fund, you can learn as much as possible, and you get co-investment rights without any fees&#8230;So what that means is ‘we will manage these deals on your behalf, and we don’t charge anything for it’. And that resulted in us raising $36.2 million.”



Next up was going beyond the big economies of Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and Kenya, looking for more countries with an ecosystem that builds tech platforms – such as incubators and accelerators – where they could build relationships with them as with the corporates – such as banks and retailers – in these countries.



As examples, Du Plessis says they were the first institutional investor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo into a fintech called MaxiCash that’s “doing phenomenally well”; they were also the first in Sudan with an Uber-like ride-hailing service called Tirhal.



“As we understand these markets more, we are now actually more optimistic about Francophone Africa because of seeing early signs of these great startups being built. We come in very early, but the upside in terms of returns is obviously much higher. So I’ll tell you our star investment is a company called Gozem, the Uber equivalent in Togo and Benin.”



With a team of 14 spread across the continent, and an advisory board, there have been many challenges to overcome.



“VCs in Africa have to do so much more than anywhere in the world,” acknowledges Du Plessis.



But it’s all worth it.



“Being a fund manager is 60% admin, and 40% pure joy,” he laughs.



Du Plessis also runs the Abrazo Foundation in Cape Town, for refugee LGBTQ youth. It’s his “side hustle”, rehabilitating homeless young African people, who have escaped their countries looking for freedom, “because they can’t be who they are in their own country”. He manages to find them jobs or place them in companies.



“They come to South Africa where there are no employment opportunities and end up on the streets. They are skilled people who can value-add in society.”



It’s how Du Plessis defines impact. “For me, it’s all this, doing something that lives beyond your time.”

Entrepreneur businessman standing on lightbulb shaking hands with VC on money coins stack. Successful business negotiation, partnership. Selling startup business or merger agreement

Venture Forward: How This VC Fund Got To 133 Startups In 22 African Countries

Gaurav Dhar, a tech investor and second generation fintech entrepreneur in Dubai, has a keen eye on the sector in Africa, saying the continent will see larger and larger funds coming into enabling environments–and there are also some key lessons from the Middle East.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“THE CONTINENT OF AFRICA HAS ITS OWN PATH OF ADOPTION FOR TECHNOLOGY, INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE DIFFERENT ECONOMIES… THERE IS HUGE POTENTIAL BUT THE UNLOCKING OF IT HAS TAKEN DIFFERENT TRAJECTORIES…”
</blockquote>



At the Dubai Fintech Summit in May, Gaurav Dhar is outside the lavish Madinat Jumeirah hotel where the event is being held, walking out of the venue into the afternoon sun in a dapper blue suit. Like the weather by this chic coastal property, he is warm and welcoming, referring to our chat a few weeks earlier.



As the Group CEO of Marshal Fintech Partners, these are the events you will typically find him at in the spiffy Middle Eastern emirate, those that focus on investments, fintechs, startups, venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation.



Just like Dubai, the city he was born and raised in, his specialties too are as dynamic and diverse. 



Like any third generation expatriate, Dhar says he has a great sense of pride locating his activities out of the glistening emirate, yet doing business for the world, even for Africa.



“I consider myself an ambassador of the UAE. I have Indian roots, but for all intents and purposes, I consider myself an honorary Emirati. Because there is this pride when you [have been] part of the story of building this country in some way, shape or form.” Dhar’s grandfather came to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the early 1970s to become the General Manager of General Motors, when the country had just been carved out as seven emirates from its hitherto existence as the Trucial States.



Dubai was still a dusty city being developed around a port, bringing in tidings and tidy profits from the sea.



“The UAE was its own little paradise, and now is this behemoth global player… Our business evolved along with the country–it was a very side-by-side story,” says Dhar about how after his grandfather, his father, Anil, too followed in the late 1970s and took to “the landscape that was fresh, exciting, mixed and new”.



He worked at Unilever and Texas Instruments before “manifesting his own destiny” and deciding to go his own, turning around an office furniture and supplies company, slowly implementing it also as a technology-focused enterprise, incorporating typewriters, photocopiers and fax machines, as more and more businesses in the region started looking for ways to formalize and store work.



“My father wanted to follow the next trend…and understand the space where again, he could control his own destiny, as opposed to waiting for Xerox or Microsoft to tell him what to do, how to build or what his revenue could be,” recalls Dhar. Called Marshal Equipment and Trading LLC, the company started in the UAE, expanding across the Gulf Cooperation Council states and Africa. “It has been profit-generating for over 35 years and consistently growing,” says Dhar, speaking from his new office on Dubai’s ritzy Sheikh Zayed Road, also home to the almost-kilometer-long Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower. When his father started his business, it was in a small office in Deira–a historic district bursting with character, old forts, wind towers, the legendary Clock Tower and the shimmering waters of the creek.



As a curious child growing up in this space, watching the business evolve, Dhar’s answer to questions while studying at Doon School in India was always that the family was in “payments technology”. His mind was already on the job.



The business grew from one country to another and so did the public penchant for payments technology slowly gaining currency in the boardrooms and bourses of Dubai as “people also started understanding the blocks that make up the fintech system”.



When Dhar–who studied law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and calls himself “a second generation fintech entrepreneur”–first started exploring fintech, it also took a little convincing to get Dhar’s dad, who is 70 this year, to get on board.



“When we started talking in 2015 about the concept of nonprofit generating companies that are pure valuation-based, you can imagine his reaction, as a businessman, it was initially to say this is not going to fly, this is not going to work as a concept, because it’s very easy to spend money, but it’s very difficult to make money.”



Dhar started spending time in San Francisco, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India and other places to understand more of what was happening in the “high-risk, high-return, high-failure-rate” venture capital space in this regard.



About seven years ago, Dhar, in his personal capacity, started investing in fintech in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States, and three years ago, the company’s name changed to Marshal Fintech Partners–as it got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East.



With over 19 years of experience under his belt in various aspects of business, Dhar now has a well entrenched interest in fintech ecosystems and solutions.



“It’s very exciting to be a part of this evolution, where the ecosystem from a startup or investing point of view has started maturing and we were part of that as it started again…



“If I were to have an intellectual conversation in detail about payments technology with my father, he is extremely wellequipped, because he was there as it was being written, assembled, and literally adopted by all parts of the ecosystem in the Middle East, so he’s extremely capable,” smiles Dhar.



The business growth has been organic, as the entire ecosystem works mutually on codependency and reciprocal relationships from a technology, landscape, business and venture capital perspective. Along the evolution journey, through these collaborative interactions, Dhar says he has also formed networks and friends with “tangible value exchange” and “a genuine desire” to drive economic growth and create job opportunities in the Middle East and Africa.



The Middle East has historical ties with Africa, and Dhar continues to build connections on the continent, often featuring founders of African fintechs and Web3 startups on the podcast series (on Spotify, Apple, YouTube) he hosts every week. “The continent of Africa has its own path of adoption for technology, infrastructure and the different economies… there is huge potential but the unlocking of it has taken different trajectories…



“Let’s not forget that the Middle East has a lot of sovereign wealth, and they have been engaging in investing internationally for decades…So along with that wealth comes access to knowledge, learning, and exposure, so it has been much faster.



“I think the African continent again has it in pockets, but it’s not been [able to] move that timeline faster to have the whole continent benefiting from the influx of capital. So these are very separate ecosystems with different outcomes,” he says.



But there is no doubt there are massive opportunities and synergies between both regions.



“What you’re going to see is larger and larger funds in Africa, either pooled from Europe, or within Africa itself. Entrepreneurship still needs funding and fueling.”



“Whoever is going to be the most-friendly regulator is going to win, then the most-friendly telco operator is going to gain massively; and then the third is with the government allowing people to understand subsidized ecosystems to spark long-term talent staying in those ecosystems, and the understanding of educating properly what is happening in that ecosystem.” Effective partnerships between the government and the private sector is one thing the Middle East has done extremely well, he adds. 



“They have written the playbook for this essentially–the marriage between the government or the federal ecosystem and the private sector has been very close. They talk to each other and push each other to do bigger and better things. And one of these things in the UAE is the venture capital space. And that perhaps is something that needs to happen more in Africa.”



Also a board member of the MENA FinTech Association, a trip to Africa is on the cards soon, but when Dhar is not spending his time on advisory boards and “giving back” to the entrepreneurial community, he dabbles in his other interests: F&amp;B, collecting vintage cars and hosting vintage car rallies every year, where all roads eventually lead to Dubai.

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Guru Of Fintech: The Dubai Entrepreneur With An Eye On Africa

The East African country of Rwanda is deepening its economic and investment ties with the UAE, its leading trade partner that it has now signed five new deals with.



Anyone who has visited both Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) long enough will be able to testify to the striking similarities between the two countries – pro-progress leadership, a readiness for innovation, an enabling investment environment, the important status accorded to women in nation-building, and the safety, stability and security they offer investors, citizens and tourists.



The two nations may be over 4,000km apart, but all of these common nuances and traits converged at the Rwanda-UAE Business Forum that toured the emirates of Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Dubai in February.



The delegation from Rwanda’s private sector, the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) and the Rwandan Embassy in the UAE held roadshows to explore investment and trade opportunities between the Middle Eastern hub and the surging East African nation, known as “the land of a thousand hills”.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Emmanuel-Hategeka-the-the-Ambassador-of-Rwanda-to-the-UAE-pic-supplied-1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-57916" width="461" height="308" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Emmanuel-Hategeka-the-the-Ambassador-of-Rwanda-to-the-UAE-pic-supplied-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Emmanuel-Hategeka-the-the-Ambassador-of-Rwanda-to-the-UAE-pic-supplied-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Emmanuel-Hategeka-the-the-Ambassador-of-Rwanda-to-the-UAE-pic-supplied-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Emmanuel-Hategeka-the-the-Ambassador-of-Rwanda-to-the-UAE-pic-supplied-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Emmanuel-Hategeka-the-the-Ambassador-of-Rwanda-to-the-UAE-pic-supplied-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 461px) 100vw, 461px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Emmanuel Hategeka, the the Ambassador of Rwanda to the UAE, photo supplied</figcaption></figure></div>


“The UAE is currently Rwanda’s leading trade partner,” said RDB CEO Clare Akamanzi in her opening address in Sharjah on February 22 (interview on next page).



“Over the last ten years, trade has grown ten-fold to reach $1.09 billion in 2022 from $100.4 million in 2012. In 2022, exports accounted for 53% and investments have equally grown at a tune of $248 million and more are in the pipeline.”



What is in the pipeline for the hilly East African country with a population of 13 million (about 65% under the age of 30) and as the sixth fastest-growing economy on the continent, is a vision to transform itself into a globally-competitive knowledge-based economy. The UAE is a strategic market. Emmanuel Hategeka, the Ambassador of Rwanda to the UAE, tells FORBES AFRICA the objective of the forum was to provide “a match-making platform” for business partnerships between Rwandan and UAE business executives in various sectors.



The key areas of investment, business and trade between the two regions include agriculture, mineral processing, hospitality, logistics, financial services as well as energy.



As for commodities, major exported goods and merchandise from Rwanda include precious or semi-precious stones and precious metals through Dubai as a hub, horticulture products, and products of the milling industry. Rwanda imports from the UAE mainly include petroleum oils, motor vehicles including used cars, machines, wires, telephone sets, recording machines, furniture and other equipment.



The February forum witnessed the signing of five key MoUs including the establishment of the UAE-Rwanda Joint Business Council and a collaboration between the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Private Sector Federation – Rwanda (PSF).



“The value of such MoUs is beyond mathematical calculation… These MoUs are significant instruments that have created a conducive business environment for the two countries,” says Hategeka. The five-day event culminated on February 25 with a tourismdriven golf tournament connecting both communities socially.



There are over a 1,000 Rwandans resident in the UAE, mainly in the global trade hub of Dubai. Attracting high-end tourists from the UAE to Rwanda is also a top priority.



“In 2022, RwandAir operated its maiden cargo flight to UAE and currently operates two flights weekly carrying mainly fresh produce inbound and electronics on the outbound leg. DP World’s (the Emirati logistics company) inland port in Kigali and the regular RwandAir Kigali-Dubai flights provide flexible maritime and air transport means.



“The daily Kigali-Dubai flights by RwandAir provide a convenient mode of transport for travelers from the UAE and GCC,” adds Hategeka.



Reuben Mbonye, the airline’s Country Manager in the UAE, concurs: “We are now looking at upgrading the route with wide-body aircraft and also increasing the cargo flights out of the UAE… The airline plays a very central role, there is no way you can discuss development without it.”



The road ahead also includes collaboration in new areas including sustainability, space, the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence.



This is something the UAE, home to more than 200 nationalities and one of the safest and most investor-friendly countries in the world, is equally looking forward to. Abdul Aziz Shattaf, the Assistant Director-General for the Communications and Business Sector at the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry, affirms to FORBES AFRICA: “We are very excited and hope our bilateral trade will increase!”



<h2 class="has-text-align-center wp-block-heading" id="h-shared-ambition-and-vision">‘Shared Ambition And Vision’</h2>



WHERE DO YOU SEE BILATERAL TRADE IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS?



It will be accelerated by working together. I think with these kind of meetings, people come and we hope to do even better. And as I said, if we could do 10 times growth over the last 10 years, why not have the ambition to do 10 times more in the next 10 years?


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RDB-CEO-Clare-Akamanzi-pic-supplied-1-985x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-57915" width="362" height="376" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RDB-CEO-Clare-Akamanzi-pic-supplied-1-985x1024.png 985w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RDB-CEO-Clare-Akamanzi-pic-supplied-1-288x300.png 288w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RDB-CEO-Clare-Akamanzi-pic-supplied-1-768x799.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RDB-CEO-Clare-Akamanzi-pic-supplied-1-1477x1536.png 1477w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/RDB-CEO-Clare-Akamanzi-pic-supplied-1-1969x2048.png 1969w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 362px) 100vw, 362px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">RDB CEO Clare Akamanzi, pic supplied </figcaption></figure></div>


THE OTHER COMMONALITY YOU HAVE IS THE GENDER AGENDA. PSF RWANDA AND THE EMIRATES BUSINESSWOMEN COUNCIL HAVE SIGNED A PACT. DO ELABORATE.



There&#8217;s no way you can prosper without fully including 52% of the population that women constitute in Rwanda. For us, that has been the logic of bringing them to the forefront, and politically, we have done so well in terms of number of women in Parliament (61.4%) and cabinet (52%). 



Businesses are also catching up. The more women do business, the more inclusive society becomes and the more prosperous because they have a lot to contribute.



WHAT ARE THE NEW OPPORTUNITIES THE SIGNING OF THESE DEALS WILL ACTUALLY BRING FOR BOTH REGIONS?



I am very pleased that the Private Sector Federation Rwanda and Sharjah Chamber of Commerce are going to collaborate even more. It&#8217;s really important for us because Dubai and the UAE in general are important partners… Every country grows because of trade and being able to source products from reliable markets, but also to sell products is really what helps countries prosper. Dubai has a lot of experience; it trades in billions and billions of dollars, is one of the top five export markets in the world… But we want them to do more than trading. We also want them to invest… We share a lot in common, values really, the first is clean governance and clean processes. And I think the second is this whole concept of ambition, vision, excellence and the commitment to those things. The third is the commitment to innovate, and do things in new ways. And also digital infrastructure supporting businesses. So I think innovation, excellence, ambition, vision, as well as governance are what make it easy for businesses to do what they do here in the UAE, but also in Rwanda. Put all that together and we&#8217;re committed to making our people more prosperous, and making businesses thrive. Let&#8217;s work together because we share those values… we&#8217;re investing a lot of resources to build relations with the Middle East.



WHAT’S YOUR MOST FAVORITE PART OF THE UAE?



You know, that&#8217;s a very tough question. I just enjoy seeing the real estate and housing. The innovation and digitalization here are out of this world. And also the entertainment and the restaurants.

Renuka Methil

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA