Rwandan-Canadian Charles Shima is deploying technology to create immersive cultural experiences for tourists in Africa. His dream? To build a unicorn in the travel sector.



Charles Shima was a young boy when he had a gun pointed at him at the height of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Luckily, he survived and was able to leave the country, which he loved, to tell his tale.



Destiny made him cross the high seas to the greener pastures of Canada, but little did he know he would return, almost 25 years later, and instead of being faced with just horrific memories, also see new hope in the East African country he once called home.



“I saw the changes that had happened in the country at that time and also the many opportunities you notice when you are in Africa. I had an ‘aha!’ moment and the idea was tourism and travel.”



This epiphany resulted in ZaNiheza, a travel marketplace for immersive experiences connecting travelers all over the world with verified local curators in Africa and beyond.



“I have always been passionate about the cultures of the world. I started building ZaNiheza as a tour operating company in Rwanda,” says Shima to FORBES AFRICA.



Shima fell in love with Africa again. The journey back home had unearthed a new passion to rebuild Rwanda with the goal of providing opportunities for the youth as well.



“When I arrived in Canada, there was a lot of bias towards Africans. I was no longer Charles Shima but just another black man. So, you have to basically fight for any opportunity you have. The success you have as a black person in Canada is only related to sports or music. And I thought ‘if someone can build a Microsoft, why not me; if Elon Musk can go to the moon, why not me?’ That made me feel if I ever built a company, it would have to change the world.”



ZaNiheza was launched in 2019 with the vision to change how the world experienced Africa. Shima was ready to start laying the foundation to build the next African unicorn until things went sideways. By March 2020, the Covid pandemic hit and the travel industry all over the world came to a complete standstill.



“We continued building this vision that goes beyond a tour operator company and my vision is global. So, I was thinking how can we bring the culture of Africa to the world and what we did was to build a global channel creating content and original shows about travel and [by] talking to the young women and men who are making a difference in Rwanda first,” says Shima.



Shima and his team continued to build bespoke travel packages in anticipation of the world reopening again for travel.



“We are in over seven countries in Africa and… on our way building the next unicorn in the travel sector. This is something that already exists in other countries like Europe etc, but when it comes to Africa there is no company that is really doing this.”



The company also has a presence in Vancouver, Canada, where they recently qualified for a startup competition that raised over $20,000 in funding for the business.



“What sets me apart is how we want to market Africa. It’s not just about wildlife. We need to go to the grassroots and then use the technology to make an impact. In Africa, your mindset has to change. You need to build from scratch and have the patience and drive and passion when everyone is going to say you are crazy. Seeing Africa through our eyes is my focus,” says Shima.



Shima says he has invested over $50,000 of his own money into the business which has gone into building the technology as well as creating the supply. The company is currently working with local travel curators in African countries. The young man from Rwanda has come far.

Screenshot 2023-01-24 at 18.13.47

Beyond Safaris: Digitalizing Travel In Rwanda

The West African nation saw a slew of events and international acts over Christmas.



Despite Ghana’s economic woes in 2022, it ended the year as a drawcard for international tourists over the festive period.



Last year, the West African country had seen inflation rising to over 40% as well as its credit rating relegated to Junk status by Moody’s because of its inability to pay back creditors and the threat of substantial losses for private bond holders. This had consequently brought the country to the doors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout.



The tourism sector, however, seems to have maintained its momentum; it has also been a key driver for foreign direct investment ever since Ghana’s Year of the Return campaign that saw a successful run in 2019. The campaign was a call for all Africans in the diaspora to return to the motherland and reconnect with their roots; a call marking 400 years since the first recorded enslaved Africans in the United States. And the diaspora heeded that call.



Over 237,000 visitors flocked to the shores of Ghana the Christmas of 2019 with the Ministry of Tourism estimating that about $1.9 billion was pumped into the Ghanaian economy. And it seems the trend has continued into 2022.



With an endless list of festivals including Afrochella, Detty December and the Black Star Line Festival, which was created by American rappers Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper bringing international collaborations, the country was reportedly a favored spot for American celebrities and the diaspora over Christmas.



“We had over 50,000 people show up for our first-ever Black Star Line event alongside American superstars like Dave Chappelle, Erykah Badu, Jeremih, T-Pain and several top artists. This is history in the making. I think Ghana’s reputation for hospitality and the peaceful and tranquil environment is a major reason why the diaspora loves to come here,” says Mensa to FORBES AFRICA.



This has also helped the hospitality sector.



“With a large number of tourists visiting Ghana throughout the year… our global attractions present boundless opportunities for Ghanaians to display our culture, creativity and diversity within the hospitality industry,” says Nadia Takyiwaa-Mensah, a Ghanaian entrepreneur and author, to FORBES AFRICA.



Official figures from the Ministry of Tourism confirm that over 400,000 visitors flocked to the shores of Ghana in the first half of 2022.



“Innovation and originality need to remain at the forefront leading us to curate unique experiences through to opening boutique hotels. Ghana’s tourism authority aimed to drive over one million tourists to Ghana in 2022, whilst also increasing internal tourism; the latter we witnessed during and post-Covid. Investments and development within this sector are paramount,” adds Takyiwaa-Mensah.



The country is hoping the tourism and hospitality sectors will continue to grow and provide some relief for the economic crises Ghana is currently facing.



In December, the IMF reached a Staff-Level Agreement on a $3 billion, three years extended credit facility with Ghana aimed at restoring macroeconomic stability.

High Angle View Of Illuminated Buildings In City

Economic Crises Apart, Why Ghana Drew Tourists Over The Festive Period

Ghana is fast fashion’s dumping ground, and unwanted apparel is throwing up on the beaches leading to an environmental crisis.



At Oxford Circus in the heart of London, Rebecca Mossop, a store manager for George at ASDA, is getting ready to deliver October’s haul of clothing – that didn’t quite meet the exacting standards of the British consumer – to a delivery truck parked behind the store.



“The clothes are manufactured in China and sometimes some items fail quality control and that is where the store’s management decided on the idea of donating items of clothing they didn’t need to some of the poorest nations in Africa,” says Mossop.



The truck will make various stops on London’s high street retail stores before returning to its base in Lewisham, an area of southeast London. There, Michael Ofori, the Managing Director of A To Z Shippers, will ensure that the thousands of used and unused clothing piles are assembled and shipped to Tema, the largest port in Ghana, where his local team will transport it to the markets.



“We are providing a service to thousands of [informal female entrepreneurs] all over Ghana who rely on these items for their livelihoods,” says Ofori.



“But things have changed quite a bit from when we started this about 20 years ago. Back then, there was no fast fashion so the items that we had were of quality. Today, we have so many fast fashion brands and not to mention those individuals who can just set up their own stores online. The market is flooded and unfortunately it’s affecting the quality of stuff we send [off],” says Ofori.



Once loaded, the clothes get on shipping containers and are sent to the ports from where, after a month at sea, they reach the shores of Ghana.



According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), in 2020, the top exporters of Used Clothing (worn clothing and articles) were the US, China, UK, Germany and South Korea, while the top importer of Used Clothing was Ghana. With a population of over 31 million, Ghana took in over $180 million of Used Clothing, with Ukraine, Pakistan and Nigeria following suit.



Shippers like Ofori’s initially were seen as providing a vital lifeline for women in Ghana’s informal markets – until the advent of fast fashion. Today, the reality is different.



A fairly new concept, fast fashion has been popularized by high-street brands selling in-vogue trends at record speeds for affordable prices. These items are made cheaply in bulk due to their ready-to-wear, prêt-à-porter nature to cater to the frequent purchasing habits of middle-class consumers with disposable incomes.



The impact of fast fashion on the environment is dire. According to statistics published by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the fashion industry is the second-most-polluting industry after the oil industry.



Where fast fashion is creating a tidy profit for Western manufacturers, in Africa, it is stifling the garments sector.



“We have seen most ladies buy the same items multiple times simply because once they wash the items, most of them lose their quality. This is no longer an issue as some of these items only cost about $5 and so the idea is once it’s worn out, a consumer will discard it and buy more items,” says Mossop.



In Ghana, Sarah Bonsu, a trader in the country’s largest market at Kantamanto, is a regular customer of A To Z Shippers from where she frequently sources various items to sell in the market.



Kantamanto is home to over 30,000 traders with millions of items bought and sold each week. Bonsu has been making a living here for the past 10 years. She usually spends an equivalent of $150 on goods she cannot inspect until they are delivered at her stall in the market.



“There is no point inspecting these clothes. It is literally by luck. If you get quality in one batch, the next batch could be completely rubbish. That is just the way things work,” says Bonsu.



Once at her shop, Bonsu laboriously sifts through the new items and picks what she calls “the first selection”.



“First selection is for the fresh clothes that go quickly. Usually these are not worn yet or do not have any stains etc. The second selection comprises the ones that we know customers will not want and will be difficult to sell,” says Bonsu.



Heaps of unwanted clothing have now resulted in an environmental crisis in Ghana. In 2019, over 65 million tons of used clothing was sent to Ghana and of that figure, about 40% was not sold and was discarded, as per a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.



These items notoriously end up in landfills or worse – in the sea.



“Most people abroad go to bed thinking they have done something good for Africans by discarding their unwanted clothing but the truth is it is actually harming our economy. Local manufacturers cannot compete with the cheap prices and most of the clothing sent is not wanted by Africans. They end up as waste in landfills like this all over the country,” says Ernest Ijawan, a manager of the Kpone landfill in Ghana.



The negative effects are being felt in other sectors of the economy as well.



In Labadi beach, Accra, Kofi Sarpong and his team of fishermen have set sail in the hopes of netting enough fish to sell at the local market in Osu, a large township in the heart of Accra. Along the shores of the beach are groups of young boys and some of the female hawkers waiting for a signal from Sarpong and his men, who have carefully laid fishing nets from the shoreline to the open sea.



On their signal, all 20 hands on the beach begin the tedious ordeal of pulling on the fishing nets that take almost two hours to finally haul on to the beach. For their hard work, they are rewarded with one huge barracuda and entwined in the nets, heaps of clothing that have been discarded in the sea.



“This has been the trend for us for the past couple of years. We lose our nets because they get tangled up with clothing from the local markets and we don’t even get the fish that we used to. We cannot survive on just one fish,” rues Sarpong.



The Or Foundation, a human rights and environmental NGO from the United States, estimates that it takes about 200 years to decompose textile waste. When such waste makes its way to the sea, they invariably destroy marine life as well as the livelihoods of people like Sarpong.



“This means that when these clothes are not burned, they can be found everywhere because there are simply not enough landfills to deal with the waste. They go on the beach and form what we call



clothing tentacles and these trap fish and stop their growth. Fishermen all over Accra are struggling to make ends meet,” says Samuel Oteng, a volunteer at Or Foundation.



Ghana’s second-hand clothing market is second only to Pakistan with a global market share of 5.1% according to the Tony Blair Institute of Global Change. The country is in a Catch 22 situation when it comes to this issue. On the one hand, there is little it can do by way of a complete ban due to the number of consumers on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum who rely on these textiles for their livelihood. On the other hand, the inflow of textiles is exacerbating an already difficult environmental crisis ultimately killing local economies like manufacturing and fishing.



There are those who believe that maybe a partial ban might go a long way in curtailing this crisis. Others opine that this presents a great opportunity for the recycling sector in Ghana. But whichever way the country decides to go, the one thing everyone agrees on is that, something needs be done sooner than later to limit the damage of the growing textile dump in a deteriorating economic climate.

Garments factory waste dumping sites

Rags, Not Riches: Why Ghana Is Fast Fashion’s Dumping Ground

Through Naija Comm, Texas-based Eno Oduok is challenging career stigmas in the Nigerian community and educating people about professions they didn’t think existed.



Providing alternative career options to professionals, first generation Nigerian-American Eno Oduok has broken the norm herself.



She is the founder of Naija Comm, an online space catering to Nigerians in the creative industries looking for career paths other than what is considered “traditional” in their community.



“Texas has the [biggest] Nigerian community in America so I was always surrounded by people who shared the same cultural heritage as me. The only thing that was different was a lot of people were in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields and were doctors, engineers or lawyers and in Nigerian communities and the overall African community, there is always an emphasis on pursuing traditional paths,” says Oduok.



With a strong affinity for the media and creative arts such as graphic design, communication and social media, Oduok struggled to find role models or peers in her community who shared the same interests.



“They were all in pharmacy or something traditional. I’ve seen probably one or two people who did arts but it wasn’t emphasized enough… I was looking for Nigerians in communications and couldn’t see [any] but if you look up Nigerians in medicine, so many pages pull up online,” attests Oduok, a Bachelor of Arts/Science graduate from the University of Houston in Texas.



That was the catalyst to create the first platform to connect and empower Nigerian creatives and professionals in overlooked fields such as communications, business and the arts.



“Naija Comm is a community-based media platform and creative hub here to break barriers and challenge stigmas in the community. It started a few days before #EndSARs went viral online last year and has been growing since. We have had various guest speakers such as Olympian basketball player Erica Ogwumike, Bel-Air actor Olly Sholotan, and other creative entrepreneurs.”



In addition to this, Naija Comm has also partnered with global streaming platforms like HBO, spotlights the accomplishment of Nigerian celebrities like Grammy award-winner Burna Boy as well as provides virtual networking events, newsletters and more. The platform, purely social, exists on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.



“We made it on the Forbes 30 under 30 2022 list in the media category for the US which was a great moment. There are a lot of communities where STEM is heavily emphasized but we have other non-Nigerians on our platform as well. We serve a bigger purpose and are challenging career stigmas and teaching people about the careers they are not accustomed to,” says Oduok.



From collaborating with WhatsApp to highlighting the achievements of Nigerian-Greek basketball superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, Oduok wants to amplify voices and stories in the Nigerian creative sector through billboards, reels, blog posts, and more.

Eno Uduok image supplied

Beyond STEM: The Nigerian Challenging Career Stigmas

<h4 id="h-mitchell-elegbe-co-founder-and-ceo-interswitch">Mitchell Elegbe Co-founder and CEO, Interswitch</h4>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“If you know you only have one opportunity, the way you use it is quite different but if you felt you could squander this one and get another opportunity, then your approach will be different.”</blockquote>



For Mitchell Elegbe, the journey to building one of Nigeria’s most respected businesses, Interswitch, was driven by the passion to solve a social problem. He encountered the problem years ago in his youth when he tried to withdraw money from an ATM while abroad when his card was seized and he was left stranded.



“I made up my mind that one day I would conquer this problem,” recalls Elegbe.



When he returned to Nigeria, he noticed how the issue of getting money out from banks was creating a social menace. At the time, there weren’t many bank branches available and the only way one could withdraw funds was to physically go into a bank and wait to be served. This could often take up to three to four hours. The tedious wait times invariably led to clients taking out much more than they needed to avoid a repeat journey.



“This was usually on weekends, typically on Friday, when people wanted to have enough money to spend, and if you [knew] Nigeria at the time, spraying cash was the norm. What this did was create a lucrative business for robbers. So, it was normal for people to attack you on Fridays because they [knew] there was a lot of money at home,” says Elegbe.



This was Elegbe’s mountain. The next question he needed to figure out was how lucrative the solution was and at what price point people were willing to pay to have it. As a result, he developed an approach which he terms as “the Tropical Savannah method” and one that forms the bedrock of Interswitch’s success.



“You have the Silicon Valley method and then the Tropical Savannah method and there is a key difference. What you find is that people get money and they buy market shares and they don’t tell you if that market they are buying will end up paying for the services. In Africa, where you have the Tropical Savannah, you don’t give free things and take it back.



“If all I need is a sachet of water, don&#8217;t give me a bottle of coke for free. Let me pay for my sachet of water. The day you start giving coke for free then get ready to sustain it. If you tell me you can’t give me coke anymore and I need to start paying for it, people will stop because the best I can pay for is the water because that is what I can afford,” says Elegbe.



In other words, you need to design your services to meet people at their point of need in the Tropical Savannah. Otherwise, at that point where you are now ready to monetize from your customers, you will not be able to.



“This is why a lot of fintechs are suffering and that is what is happening globally and why the valuations are crashing. In the Tropical Savannah, prove your model and show that there is somebody to pay for it at a price point that will make it profitable and then you can begin to scale.”



That method allowed Interswitch to raise only $500,000 against an initial $1 million target and still turn a profit in the first year of business.



“Sometimes in life you get just one opportunity and you need to grab that one. If you know you only have one opportunity, the way you use it is quite different but if you felt you could squander this one and get another opportunity, then your approach will be different. With Interswitch, I knew there was no way we could go back to people to ask for more money. Because if they could give us $1 million, they would have. So we had to make the money; we had to work.”



And with that, Interswitch was able to disrupt the traditional cash-based payments system at a time when Nigeria’s banks were still struggling to open enough branches to meet customer demand.



“I did not think we were creating anything fantastic because the process of making cash available via ATM was already well-established in other parts of the world. The challenge we had in Nigeria was that the infrastructure was not there. Power was a big problem, telecoms was not where it should be, and when we started in 2002, the GSM license was not where it should also be,” says Elegbe.



What that meant was Elegbe had to take a bet on the future.



“So, we basically made a bet that we were going to build an online real time payment infrastructure and we were going to make a bet that we can manage and design out the challenges of power and that telecoms will improve because if people were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get a GSM license, it only makes sense that I could do a good job with those licenses. So, the bet was to attempt to create an online real-time payment infrastructure.”



That is exactly what they did and that bet has paid off significantly. From attracting a $200 million investment from Visa who took a 20% stake in the business, which pushed the company into unicorn status to the recent injection of $110 million joint investment from LeapFrog Investments and Tana Africa Capital to scale its digital payment services across the continent, Interswitch has been at the helm of democratizing cash transactions to 200 million Nigerians over the past two decades.



“The vision at that time was to leapfrog and to take Nigeria where it was at a very backward stage to a stage where it was more advanced. So, we wanted to create enough innovation to drive the penetration and adoption for electronic money and to that extent we were able to achieve that,” says Elegbe.



For Elegbe, the goal was never to become a unicorn. In fact, he did not even know what that term meant.



“I only began to know about the term unicorn when someday we got to know that Interswitch was now being described as a unicorn. In all my years running Interswitch, unicorn was never the goal for me. It was more of the ability to take one problem at a time, solve it, see the impact it was having on people and be encouraged by the problem we are solving.”



“In our case we began to hear about the unicorn thing when Visa invested in us [to] a valuation that was about a billion dollars. The objective was to just keep solving problems and getting joy when you see the problem solved. The idea of a unicorn is knowing that you are a billion-dollar valued business but for me it is just a mark and means nothing. Sooner or later everybody will get there. The real issue is what impact are you making with the technology that you have deployed,” says Elegbe.

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UNICORNS- Interswitch: Joy From Solving Problems

William Sachiti, the Zimbabwean UK-based serial entrepreneur and founder of Academy of Robotics, is finding tech solutions for the world’s needs.



William Sachiti was very young when he had an epiphany that would completely transform his outlook on life.



He would spend his summer holidays visiting his grandparents in their village in Zimbabwe and whose predominant activity was farming and herding cattle. These experiences helped ground him.



“I found out the invisible lottery of life from an early age. All of us have to play this lottery system and this lottery has a result and the result could mean life or death. We all play it; we have no choice and the system is best described as a single question and that is ‘where were you born?’ That question will decide your outcome in life,” he says in an interview with FORBES AFRICA.



Sachiti would herd cattle with his friends during summer but go back to his normal privileged life afterwards, but his friends would still be where they were, rearing cattle.



“The difference between them and me was nothing; it is just that they were unlucky to be born in that place.”



Later on, Sachiti figured that if there was anything that could be used as a tool to change the world, that would be education. But he had to find out the hard way. After relocating to England in 2000, Sachiti began doing odd jobs such as selling double-glazed windows and doors that led to a job as a stock broker when he understood the world of real money.



“Stock broking at the time was sales because you need to be able to convince people to give you some of their money to help you invest and it involved six weeks of financial training,” says Sachiti.



That understanding of money was enough to help him begin his journey as a serial entrepreneur.



By the age of 19, Sachiti had started his first business. Believing that the internet was going to disrupt the Yellow Pages, which was essentially a classified listing of all businesses in a book, Sachiti created 123 Registration.



“We started selling thousands of websites and domains where we made it automated in such a way that in three easy steps, you can create a website. It did pretty well and someone bought it and that was my first exit,” recalls Sachiti.



While knocking on doors for his first business venture, Sachiti made an interesting observation about billboards. They were highly sought-after for the attention they could garner for any company but the problem was they were sold in clusters. For example, a business could not buy a billboard right outside their store unless they bought other billboards they had no use for. Sachiti’s entrepreneurial spirit kicked in again.



“I found out that under planning law, there is a planning exemption and you can put adverts on dual surfaces such as bins or benches. So, it hit me that if you could put a bin that is absolutely stunning like the Ferrari of bins, you could put one outside Leicester Square and advertise there. I created this and took that to the BBC Dragons’ Den. The invention was called Clever Bins. The dragons thought it was the worst idea they had ever heard at the time,” says Sachiti.


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To the seasoned investors, a smart bin seemed like a dumb idea at a time when Steve Jobs had given the world the iPhone. They passed on Sachiti’s innovative bin idea but he would go on to license his idea in over 11 countries until someone finally acquired the main license for it.



After that exit came the problem of finding things to do in London.



“You come to London and you want to go to a club on a Thursday. That same club on a Friday is a rock night and the same club on a Wednesday is a gay night and it is an 80s night on a Saturday. So, you can’t go to a club all the time because what’s in the club changes all the time.”



Sachiti’s solution? Create a things-to-do-company called MyCityVenue, which grew to over 1.6 million users in the space of three years. That company was eventually acquired by a company called Secret Escapes and the data was also acquired by a big taxi business.



Cumulatively all the companies Sachiti sold made him millions of pounds. With that money, he set out on perhaps his most ambitious project yet, the idea of using robots to disrupt the world.



His first attempt at creating robots was when he enrolled in Aberystwyth University in Wales to study artificial intelligence and robotics.



Frustrated with the difficulty of finding the right locations for the books he needed, Sachiti created the first robot library where one could walk up to a robot and ask the robot for the exact location of a book and it would direct you.



After a number of hours on YouTube learning to build this interest, Sachiti decided to launch Academy of Robotics, a technology institute specializing in creating technology to perform or simplify complex tasks.



“In 2020, we built our flagship product, the Kar-go Delivery Bot which became one of the first vehicles designed for self-driving delivery to be licensed on the roads in Europe. The company’s services now include: self-driving delivery, indoor logistics robots and road defect detection and analysis,” says Sachiti.



At just 35, Sachiti is an expert on AI and autonomous navigation with regular appearances on TV and at industry and government panel discussions.



From creating a patent that will help build a super highway for drones to move from point A to B to creating a system to improve access to education and then publishing the technology as an open source allowing everyone to have access to the technology, Sachiti is an African determined to play the game of capitalism to disrupt any industry but create real value in the process.

William Sachiti

From Clever Bins To Smart Robots, A Driven African Entrepreneur

Eleven countries, 31 cities and 41 days – Nigerian adventurer and professional motorcyclist Kunle Adeyanju on the tough terrain and temperatures he had to endure, and how he almost met his maker along the way.



What does Mt Kilimanjaro, the Sahara Desert and the Spanish Coast have in common?



Nigerian-born self-proclaimed daredevil, Kunle Adeyanju. The adventurer had been pushing the boundaries of his endurance ever since he handed in his resignation from a full-time job working in the oil and gas industry for 15 years.



His exit from the 9-to-5 grind made room for his new love for adventure and travel. Adeyanju began this journey like any wannabe daredevil by ticking off the basics. First came sky-diving followed swiftly by bungee-jumping and then climbing the tallest mountain on the African continent, Mt Kilimanjaro – twice. And oh, not to mention, riding a bicycle for three days from Nigeria to Ghana.



“A lot of people have asked me why I do such risky things and my answer is always ‘why not?’ I have a very clear bucket list of things I want to do before I meet my maker and I have a plan to achieve this list,” says Adeyanju.



And he almost met his maker achieving his latest feat on the bucket list – riding a motorbike all the way from London to Lagos earlier this year.



“I wanted something that would stretch me and possibly break me. I always like pushing the limits of what we can achieve as human beings and I believe that is the only way you grow,” says Adeyanju.



To achieve this, Adeyanju started as he always does – with a plan. It took a year to plan his trip. Firstly, he had to find the perfect motorbike that would help him traverse the merciless conditions he was about to endure. He landed on a Honda as the best choice and placed his order which arrived in three months. Next came creating a riding schedule for his journey.



“When I decided on the bike, I had to check its endurance in terms of fuel capacity. The tank was 17 liters and could do 500km. I added another five liters which gave me a total distance coverage of 645km. That means I had to map out 645km from my take-off to where I would stop and ensure that it lands me somewhere that I could always get services like food and water and most importantly, a place to rest overnight. I decided never to ride at night,” says Adeyanju.



Then finally, equipment. He packed his credit card and three phones including a satellite phone which would enable him to call for help if he was stranded in any remote location, as also a good insurance policy and a navigator.



Once all the prep work was complete, Adeyanju set off from London to Dover where he crossed the English Channel to get to Calais in France. Once in France, Adeyanju hit the open road on his Honda.



“I assumed Africa would be a lot harder to ride through than Europe but I was mistaken. The first few days were tough because I had to deal with sub-zero temperatures. It was freezing cold and I had to navigate carefully across black ice where the temperatures are so cold that ice forms on the road making it very slippery and dangerous plus I had the strong cross winds from the Spanish coast blowing against my bike.”



After skillfully navigating Europe, Adeyanju finally made it to the motherland where his excitement for the warmth was short-lived after a life and death encounter in the Sahara Desert.



“The Sahara Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. It is completely unfriendly to life and everything in the desert is trying to kill you so there is literally no margin for error,” says Adeyanju.



After skillfully traversing two hair-raising sandstorms, Adeyanju thought his third one would be a breeze. But disaster struck.



“The sandstorm hit me for an hour and a half. I weigh 95kg and at that weight, the wind was lifting me off the ground.”



In a last-minute attempt to save his own life, Adeyanju lay on the ground with his bike, which weighed 190kg, on top of him to prevent the wind from carrying him away.



“But that was not the hardest part. The sand is 45-degrees hot so imagine your face on that heat and the abrasive force of the sand making holes in my jacket. In that moment, I thought I was not going to make it. I started praying to God to forgive my sins and to not let me go to hell if I died.”



Thankfully, his prayers were answered and after an hour and 40 minutes of torture, it passed.



“I took off my helmet and that was the first time I realized I was crying. I am still not sure if I was crying because of the pain and torture I had just endured or if they were actually tears of joy that I did not die,” says Adeyanju.



After 11 countries, 31 cities and 41 days, Adeyanju finally arrived in Lagos. His near-death experience has not put him off achieving his full bucket list. For now, his goal is to travel within Africa to bring awareness to the beauty and splendor of the place he calls home.

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‘I Always Like Pushing The Limits’ / From London To Lagos On A Motorbike And Nearly Dying In The Sahara

Afropolitan is aiming to create a digital nation bringing together the best of Africa.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“It doesn’t matter how much you raise, we cannot entrepreneur our way out of these problems. We actually have to do the hard work of fixing these governance issues and letting the other sectors thrive.”</blockquote>



The bitcoin blockchain has evolved into numerous applications providing multiple opportunities for entrepreneurs not afraid to chart the unknown path.



Nigerian tech entrepreneurs Echeme Emole and Chika Uwazie, raised in the diaspora, are two such coming up with an innovative idea for cryptocurrencies.



Looking to build “a new digital nation” for Africans, they have managed to convince a group of investors to back their idea to the tune of $2.1 million.



“The way to think about it is that it is a country that firstly starts off as an online community but materializes into a physical one after reaching critical mass. For us, the reason for building a new country is that we are saying, the nation-state experiment has not worked for us collectively as black people and through this [platform], we can build a country that we choose,” begins Emole.



“So, the subsequence of the old system is that we have leaders, money and institutions we can’t trust. We want to go back to first principles and build a new country, one [where] we can re-draw colonial borders without historical constraints or political baggage. This is a country where people from Africa, African-Americans, Afro-Latinos and the diaspora in total can exist&#8230;”



In order words, they opine that without addressing the issues of bad governance and broken systems at the core of the African startup ecosystem, nothing meaningful can be achieved by the remarkable talent on the continent.



As Emole succinctly puts it: “It doesn’t matter how much you raise, we cannot entrepreneur our way out of these problems. We actually have to do the hard work of fixing these governance issues and letting the other sectors thrive.”



Now the co-founder of Afropolitan, an event and community building platform, Emole had pivoted from law to fintech as an executive for Nigerian unicorn Flutterwave before helping orchestrate one of the biggest exoduses of the African diaspora into Africa through the Year of the Return initiative that saw over a million people flock to Ghana and Africa’s shores with a direct benefit of over $2 billion in economic activity.



On the other hand, Uwazie had an entrepreneurial career in recruitment and HR that culminated in her joining the prestigious ‘500 startups program’ and becoming CEO of HR tech firm Talentbase in Nigeria.



After Covid hit, both Emole and Uwazie found themselves, as many did, working remotely and using social media to continue driving engagement and making an impact.



It was Uwazie who first told Emole that Afropolitan can be more than a community-building platform.



“I had a deep respect for Chika but it wasn’t planned for us to work together. It started in December 2021 where I had this idea and ran it past Chika and we both started working on it organically,” says Emole.



The two are co-founders of Afropolitan, a community-as-a-service company with a vision to build a network that brings together the best of Africa.



“We are building the next Facebook but this time instead of an online passive community there will be a country with shared purpose and shared value and a common currency and this allows us to capture the value we create at scale in a very seamless way,” says Uwazie.



Their idea is based on what is referred to as ‘a country in the cloud’ – as in an article published by the former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, who they say also happens to be one of the investors in the new venture. His idea hinges on building a cloud ecosystem first – rather than starting with physical territory – in building a new nation.



But the question remains, is there a need to build a new digital nation based on cryptocurrency? Emole certainly believes so.



“Flutterwave gave me some insights and data as to how bad things were on the continent. It’s like $5 billion of venture capital has gone into the African tech ecosystem in the past year, but the reality is people are actually very poor so it doesn’t matter how shiny your apps are because if people cannot afford to spend money on it, then what is it for?”



Without fixing the deep-seated governance issues that have caused a lot of startups to fail in Africa, Afropolitan believes that entrepreneurship will not thrive.



“Picture a house that has a weak foundation and the owners want to fix this house but instead of fixing the foundation they say ‘we are going to fix the lights, and the fans and walls’. What eventually happens is that the foundation collapses. So, we are saying instead of fixing this weak foundation we are going to build an entirely new one. The foundation represents the governance. We now live in a time where we don’t have to go through this journey alone. The diaspora sends some $70 billion worth of remittances each year so, we are saying can we build a network that allows us to build abundance on top of it,” says Emole.

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The Nigerian Techpreneurs Wanting To Build A New Country

Funmi Adewara, the founder-CEO of Mobihealth International, is changing the narrative of Africa’s ailing healthcare sector, so critical in these times.



DR FUNMI ADEWARA VIVIDLY REMEMBERS the first time she had a near-death experience in Kaduna State in Northern Nigeria.



At the time, her mother who had five children to care for, was employed as a nurse in the state hospital. On that fateful day, Adewara, who at the time was only 10 years old, had been in and out of hospital for her ailment for some time, but things took a turn for the worse and she needed immediate medical intervention.



“I was gravely ill and I was confronted by the fact that at that time the doctors were on strike and my life hung on the line,” recalls Adewara. Luckily, her mother’s position as a nurse in the hospital meant that she was able to pull some strings and get a doctor and colleagues to come in during the strike to the hospital to save her daughter’s life. From that experience on, Adewara’s fate in the medical profession was sealed.



“I was privileged to see the very dire situation of the health system in Nigeria. I would see doctors overworked and I remember very well the smell of the hospital corridors and multiple surgeries that I had to have as a young child. Sometimes when I was in admission, I would hear the wailing and crying of mothers who lost their children, or family members and that experience challenged me and fueled my passion to study medicine because I wanted to be able to help those who were vulnerable in the community,” says Adewara in an interview with FORBES AFRICA.



Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is facing a health crisis.



“When you have the president of your country spending some 200 days in the UK for medical reasons it begs the question; if the President of our country does not trust the medical system in Nigeria, why should the citizens, let alone Nigerian doctors, also care?” asks Philip Amosu, a Nigerian neurosurgeon who currently works in the United States.



Official figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates Nigeria’s doctor-to-population ratio at 0.3 per 1,000 persons. For a population of nearly 200 million, Adewara thinks this is inadequate and unacceptable.



“I was aware that more than half of doctors in Nigeria are outside the country. Nigeria has over 35,000 Nigerian doctors spread across the world and we only have 74,000 registered doctors and half of us are outside the country. With a population of about 200 million, if you compare that to the US who have about 1.5 million registered doctors, you realize how dire the situation is. So, I was looking for a way to make a difference,” avers Adewara.



Her solution? Mobihealth, a telemedicine and digital health service provider transforming the way patients access and receive care. Adewara is one of the thousands of doctors who left Nigeria in search of greener pastures. But that decision never quite sat well with her.



“Nigeria has a huge shortage of doctors and many counterfeit medicines. When I finished my youth service, it was always my dream to leave the country in search of greener pastures and to gain international experience and expertise to help me come back and give back to Africa.”



She joined the NHS in the UK after passing her exams as a stroke physician but her reputation as a leading medical practitioner in Nigeria meant that she was still providing consultation services to people back home.



“I was aware that more than half of doctors in Nigeria are outside the country. Nigeria has over 35,000 Nigerian doctors spread across the world and we only have 74,000 registered doctors and half of us are outside the country. With a population of about 200 million, if you compare that to the US who have about 1.5 million registered doctors, you realize how dire the situation is. So, I was looking for a way to make a difference,” avers Adewara.



Her solution? Mobihealth, a telemedicine and digital health service provider transforming the way patients access and receive care. Adewara is one of the thousands of doctors who left Nigeria in search of greener pastures. But that decision never quite sat well with her.



“Nigeria has a huge shortage of doctors and many counterfeit medicines. When I finished my youth service, it was always my dream to leave the country in search of greener pastures and to gain international experience and expertise to help me come back and give back to Africa.”



She joined the NHS in the UK after passing her exams as a stroke physician but her reputation as a leading medical practitioner in Nigeria meant that she was still providing consultation services to people back home.



“People used to ask me for second opinions because they probably didn’t believe what their doctors were saying and it was coming quite often. I had a case where a child was misdiagnosed and died. Ihad an uncle who suddenly died because he was not aware he had high blood pressure and he got to the hospital, there were no doctors in sight. So, things like that is what spurred me to look for an innovative way to make an impact,” says Adewara.



“When I started, telemedicine was not popular. I remember when I was trying to mobilize the doctors and whenever I got into a room and asked if anyone knew about telemedicine, it was immediately less than one percent of the audience. It is very interesting to see where we are four years on.



“The first challenge was technology. I was looking for a solution that wasn’t just going to be a cut-and-paste from the West. We have our peculiar problems and challenges in Africa and unless you understand that, you will not be able to make an impact,” says Adewara.



She created a solution that spoke to the real challenges on the ground and addressed issues like the lack of health insurance to millions of patients in Nigeria.



“The solutions that already existed on the market were too pricey and I couldn’t find the perfect match and the viability of it in Africa. You are speaking about a continent where 95% don’t have access to health insurance and it is a problem that leads people into poverty,” says Adewara.



The challenge was that most of the solutions that already existed on the market from a telemedicine perspective did not see a compelling reason to expand their offerings to Africa. The only



According to the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigerians spent a staggering $39.66 billion on foreign education and healthcare-related services between 2010 and 2020. The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) asserts that over $1 billion was spent by Nigerians yearly on medicare abroad, leading to an adverse effect on the nation’s health system. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 24% of the global burden of disease is in Africa with only 3% access to health workers.



This makes Adewara’s Mobihealth a much-needed reprieve for those needing urgent access to quality medical professionals.



“Because I was already consulting with people on the phone, I saw this as an opportunity to use technology to make a difference. I did my research and found out that Africa is one of the fastest-growing markets in mobile technology adoption. So, why can’t we use that to create a solution where people can access these diaspora doctors and be able to get instant care and that was what led to founding Mobihealth,” says Adewara.



With a background in bioscience enterprise from Cambridge University, she had the know-how to bring scientific innovation at scale to the masses and that is what Mobihealth is all about.



But it has not been an easy journey to get the fledgling startup off the ground. solution for Adewara was to create her own solution. After its beta test, Mobihealth was launched commercially in 2019 and deployed immediately to support the Covid-19 response.



“People were scared to go to the testing centers and we used the platform to deliver contactless Covid tests. We would screen them on the



platform and provide remote consultation and we would dispatch our drivers who deliver the test contactless. We also have a video call to discuss with the client and with that intervention we reduced the turnover time for results to 24 hours instead of three to four days. And this was published in the ‘International Medical Journal’,” says Adewara.



Nigeria’s healthcare budget is less than 5%, according to Adewara. This means that more than 70% of the population have no access to healthcare and that, compounded with the critical issue of shortage of doctors, means there has to be more innovative solutions to reach those in vulnerable conditions.



Her solution has currently been deployed to seven states and in remote areas where there are no doctors, Mobihealth provides computers that enable patients to immediately see and speak to overseas doctors in their local language.



And her solution could not have come at a better time. Over the past few weeks alone, Adewara asserts that over 200 Nigerian doctors have been registered in the UK, with Nigerians topping the list of migrant NHS nurses in the UK.



Not much has changed in the Nigerian healthcare sector since Adewara left some 15 years ago and with the WHO’s estimation that it will take about 10 decades, even if all things were right to get to the doctors-to-population ratio, her work is more vital than ever.

Screenshot 2022-11-07 at 19.27.27

Doctor’s Orders: The Nigerian Changing The Narrative Of Healthcare 

Ghana’s plethora of economic battles include the depreciating cedi, the ongoing IMF negotiations, cuts in government expenditure and salaries to free up funding, and businesses closing doors.



Ghana’s economic prospects have been a mixed bag of emotions in recent years. Lauded globally for its handling of the marauding Covid-19 virus which saw fewer fatalities in contrast to the rest of the world, Ghana’s economy bounced back in a remarkable feat reaching 5.4% growth in 2021, a stark contrast from the 0.5% it recorded in 2020 at the height of the pandemic.



Not only that, the last quarter of 2021 saw a further growth of 7% and once again, President Nana Akufo-Addo’s economic management was celebrated globally amidst a background that saw decimated economies all over Africa.



But earlier this year, despite Ghana’s position as the world’s second-biggest cocoa producer, its currency was adjudicated the worst performing currency (cedi) slumping to a more than 45% loss, the worst among over 140 currencies tracked by Bloomberg. To make matters worse, inflation, which currently stands at an unbelievable 34% according to the Bank of Ghana has all but eaten away people’s incomes with millions of Ghanaians struggling to make ends meet.



“We are in a crisis, I do not exaggerate when I say so,” said the president in a televised address to the nation on Sunday, October 30, admitting to a fragile economy.



“I cannot find an example in history when so many malevolent forces have come together at the same time. But, as we have shown in other circumstances, we shall turn this crisis into an opportunity to resolve not just the short-term, urgent problems, but the long-term structural problems that have bedevilled our economy.”



The situation is so dire that calls for the country’s finance minister, Ken Ofori-Attah, to step down has intensified, inviting reactions from various political observers.



“Against all the clear public wails of the majority of your people, you continue to hold on to a job you’ve woefully failed at and leading a process you don’t believe in [going to the International Monetary Fund] after failing to properly introduce a new tax line, e-levy and borrowing us out of the international financial market,” comments Nana Aba, a leading political broadcaster in Ghana.



How bad is the crisis?



According to the president, Ghana has the highest inflation in the past 40 years, the steepest depreciation in the cedi to the US dollar over the past 30 years, the highest rise in cost of living over a generation, the fastest rise in interest rates for over 20 years, the highest rise in government borrowing in over 50 years and the greatest threat of unemployment in peace time; with over a hundred million people being pushed into extreme poverty.



And invariably, this has also had a knock-on effect on businesses in Ghana.



“With the current global and domestic economic crisis, the cost of ingredients has sky rocketed far beyond our imagination. Current food prices unfortunately no longer make sense for us to sell based on the business model under which we operate. We refuse to drop the standard of ingredients and as such on November 1, we made the difficult decision to close our doors,” says Frank Apaloo, the owner of a restaurant in Ghana.



Like him, many startups that started delivery services as a means to survive during the Covid lockdown are now shutting down due to the economic downturn.



The country’s hope for a turnaround lies in the ongoing negotiations with the IMF to seek financial support, which only began in July this year after foreign investors dumped its debt and protests erupted on the streets of Accra, according to Reuters.



President Akufo-Addo believes that talks are at advanced stage and going well and the loan facility is estimated to close by the end of the year.



In the meantime, he is hoping that addressing the nation regularly on television – what has become popularly known ‘as my fellow Ghanaians’ – along with a 30% cut in discretionary expenditure and 30% cut in the salaries of the President, Vice President, Ministers, Deputy Ministers and political office holders, will be enough to stem the growing unrest reportedly slowly bubbling under the surface of the country’s deteriorating economy.

Ghanaian Cedi Banknotes

Ghana’s Woeful Economic Crisis: The Challenges Ahead

Onyinye Anyaegbu, the London-based co-founder and CEO of African art trading platform ARTSPLIT, sees art as an alternative investment.



The global art market is estimated to be worth a staggering $65.1 billion according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 and Nigerian artists are finally gaining praise. With paintings of renowned artists like the late Ben Enwonwu, considered by most collectors to be the father of Nigerian modernism, fetching over $1.4 million at Sotheby’s and another going for $1.5 million at Bonhams, Nigerian art is in high demand globally and collectors and investors are actively acquiring works with the view of cashing in on the increasing demand.



According to figures from Bonhams, about 90% of the value of their auction sales in 2017 came from Nigerian artists. And poised to disrupt this new art economy is ARTSPLIT, a trading and social app providing users with an interactive space to participate in live auctions, bids, trades, portfolio management as well as access to invest and lease African artworks. According to the London-based co-founder and CEO of the platform, Onyinye Anyaegbu, this solution is a timely answer to an issue most collectors face.



“My brother came to me with this idea about Art. He just started his art journey and got introduced to being a collector and he was really enjoying it and he started collecting art as a great investment. And I was really fascinated by the whole African art space because of him. He told me the problem he had was that right now, as a collector even though you may have about $300,000 worth of art sitting at home, when you take it to the bank, you cannot leverage the art for anything financial,” says Anyaegbu.



“If you ever wanted liquidity you have to sell it out completely. As we spoke we realized that this is such a big collector problem and as Nigerian collectors are probably a bit more sophisticated and really that’s where it started from. As a collector, you collect all this amazing work and you don’t even have enough space for it and you cannot leverage the art for any financial instrument.”



The art trading platform for African art is providing collectors a way to get more out of their work by providing the opportunity to own shares also known as splits of prestigious African artworks that can be traded by collectors in real time.



“So, we figured what if you create a platform where you don’t lose your work but you get other people to invest in your platform and ARTSPLIT was born. The first milestone was the beta testing and seeing all our thoughts come to life in terms of the app technology. We spent a lot of time talking and mapping processes and experiences of how it should feel for a user. How do you trade, where do you trade from, and having a tech partner come in and take that and flip it into an app was amazing and that was a huge milestone for us,” avers Anyaegbu.



The app offers the community of collectors the flexibility of either co-ownership or full ownership with further opportunities for actual tangible ownership of these art works for a period of time.



“It does not end there. ARTSPLIT also provides opportunities for owners of investment grade African art to list their works, have them evaluated and sold to members of our community. You can decide to sell your work in full, or in splits (minimum of 10%) which will enable you to keep the ownership of your work and still benefit from trade of your work,” says Anyaegbu.



Five Nigerian artists took part in ARTSPLIT MOCONA, their split-and-lease online contemporary arts auction in July with bids amounting to $57,000 and with an average growth value of 14%. The auction profiled prominent Nigerian artists paving their way in the contemporary art scene including the likes of Abiodun Olaku, Duke Asidere, Edosa Ogiugo, El-Dragg Okwoju and Oliver Enwonwu.



Anyaegbu and her team are already on their fourth round of funding raising $2.5 million against a $5 million benchmark. ARTSPLIT with its team of art lovers is on a mission to raise the global profile of African art by building a community of collectors and investors as well as providing advisory and management services for art collection.

Screenshot 2022-11-01 at 07.59.31

App For Art’s Sake: Building A Community Of Collectors And Investors In Nigeria

Ekene Ngige discovered art in a cup of cappuccino and then used coffee as a medium to tell important African stories.



For as long as Ekene Ngige can remember, he has never allowed his limitations to dictate how successful he would be in life. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Ngige experienced what he calls “a medical error” that left him paralyzed by the age of one. Faced with a disability that meant he could not walk, Ngige got his confidence from his parents who helped him stand tall in any room he was in and perhaps most importantly, taught him the power of self-belief.


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“They gave me that confidence. I have four elder brothers and one younger sister. I was able to join them in playing soccer on the streets or join them in dance competition and do crazy stuff like climbing trees etc. I couldn’t walk with my legs and I had scoliosis, but I didn’t feel like I had a disability, only except when kids were mocking me in school or my neighborhood. I always saw myself as normal and that is why I never separated myself from what other normal kids were doing. Even if I couldn’t do it as well as them, the way I would deliver it would be as good as I feel it should be,” says Ngige.



By the age of three that self-belief was already evident in Ngige’s ability to draw. From lesson boards to chalk boards or even in his textbooks, Ngige began to create remarkable portraits that started getting the attention of his art teachers and invariably led to him winning several awards at secondary school.



“My teacher actually gave me the nickname ‘Kene da Vinci’ like Leonardo da Vinci because I was his favorite arts student and I always won awards for the school. By the time I graduated from secondary school I knew I was going to be an artist,” says Ngige.



But the journey to becoming one of Nigeria’s top up and coming visual artists would take him on an interesting journey. First, came the love for animation. Ngige began exploring with several illustrations which led to him creating comic book characters. By the time he entered the Yaba College of Technology, that initial love for animation had evolved into the fine arts.



“I fell in love with oil painting, acrylic painting and water colors and from there, I had to choose which one to make a priority. It was difficult but I remember when I was in college, we had companies come to the art school to buy some of the art from us because it was cheaper, so the idea that I could actually sell my art in college and I could use that money to support my school fees and art materials encouraged me to be an artist professionally.”



A brief stint working with a television network in Nigeria after graduation followed where, Ngige would use the money he earned from his 9 to 5 to fund his real passion. Very soon he started getting noticed in the art community and was invited by an agent to take part in a joint exhibition to help him get more exposure for his art.


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“I had an agent that came to me to say they want some of my artwork to exhibit in joint exhibitions. So, by the time we had a series of exhibitions and I saw that my water color painting always stood out, I realized this is actually it, ‘Nigeria is beginning to appreciate art’ and so I decided to do more of that until I could do my own solo exhibition,” recalls Ngige.



In 2016 he realized his dream as his first solo exhibition sold out. But his real breakthrough happened when he discovered art in a cup of cappuccino.



“I was working with a new coffee brand that was launching in Nigeria and I was working on creating their logo so we were having meetings and having coffee. In the process of one of these meetings, [coffee spilled] on my notepad and I saw a different texture that I had never been able to achieve before. So, it came to my mind that maybe I should try and achieve this. So, I went back to my studio and tried it out and it was amazing and I could perceive coffee all over my art work and I loved it, says Ngige.



Since then his growing fanbase cannot simply get enough of his coffee-infused paintings. Ngige has sold several paintings to international clients who buy his coffee paintings anywhere from $5,000.



“I have been able to give greater value to coffee than just a beverage. I am now using a medium made in Africa to paint and the only foreign material about my artwork is my canvas and brush but the rest is African. So, I try to portray deep African stories with my coffee paintings.”



From highlighting the plight of impoverished children, to depicting vivid drawings of female empowerment as well as putting a spotlight on the series of violent attacks taking place across Nigeria, Ngige sees his art as more than just paintings to be enjoyed but rather a way of telling important African stories and creating awareness as a form of activism promoting peace and unity in Nigeria.

Ekene Ngige’s work using coffee2

Coffee With A Purpose: The Nigerian Artist Blending It Well

Foluso Ogunwale, the Founder and CEO of I-Fitness, wants to make sure Africa’s most populous country is also a healthy one.



ANY FAST- paced city with an urban populace comes with its share of lifestyle diseases and the need for a well-defined fitness and wellness culture.



Lagos is no different, yet in Africa’s biggest economy, there is room for more.



“If you look at the US, the fitness adoption is somewhere around 18% but in Nigeria and most African states you have about less than 1%. So, there is a huge gap,” says Foluso Ogunwale, Founder and CEO of I-Fitness, one of the fastest-growing fitness chains in Nigeria, going by his ambitious expansion plans.



Currently in 16 locations across Nigeria, I-Fitness aims to close in on four more spots bringing the total number to 20 by the fourth quarter of this year. After this, the brand is still looking to open in another 20 locations in 30 months. Ogunwale is a man on a mission to get Nigeria and the rest of Africa fit and healthy again.



“When you look at health and wellness and life expectancy, Nigeria and most African countries rank very low, I think Nigeria was in the 163rd position the last time I checked.”



Ogunwale is serious about being able to contribute meaningfully to the lives of Nigerians.



He stumbled on the idea of a fitness chain a couple of years ago when due to his stressful lifestyle in the cosmopolitan city of Lagos, he wanted a healthy way to unwind. At the time, the loss of a friend to diabetes at a very young age made Ogunwale even more health-conscious.



“I actually thought it would be nice to join a gym and so I walked into a gym that was close to my office in 2007 and when I got to the reception I was told the fee was around N700,000, which was about $4,000 at that time. And I thought it was ridiculous and they didn’t give me an option to pay in instalments. It had to be a one-off fee paying everything upfront.”



That experience cemented the idea to create a much more competitive fitness offering for Nigerians. The goal was to not make fitness a luxury product but rather one that was easily accessible to anyone with a decent job. Having already started and sold his first business, a mobile electronics business specializing in the sale of laptops, mobile phones and gadgets, which at its peak was turning over about $20 million a year, Ogunwale was no stranger to taking risks.



He had pivoted from a career in banking before starting his foray into electronics and after the acquisition of the business decided it was time to disrupt the fitness sector in Lagos.



“The fitness industry in Nigeria at the time did not exist. There were probably only one or two gyms in the whole of Lagos that were fairly decent. In a city of 22 million people, I wanted to find out how can we make this common, how can we retail luxury and how can we make fitness affordable, enjoyable and useful and make it fun at the same time,” says Ogunwale.



The next couple of months would prove to be his most challenging.



“Even the bank did not understand what it meant to be in the fitness industry. They knew me from my previous business that got acquired and they were even surprised with this new business idea. They asked me ‘why will you leave a very successful business to go and open a chain business?’ It was very tough to get off the ground but I was resilient.”



He sourced his first equipment from the old gym he used to be a member of, which, as luck would have it, was remodeling.



“I needed to push on and I needed to show proof of concept so I took on some very expensive loans just to show proof of concept that the fitness chain could work in Nigeria and potentially even move in other cities within West Africa and thankfully that paid off.”



He started the chain in 2015 and has a loyal clientele in different parts of the city.



“I joined I-Fitness because the location is right next to my work so I can pop in after work to de-stress before I go back home,” attests patron Blessing Kuti, a 25-year-old bank teller working in Lagos.



Driven by the need to create something of value that could potentially touch a lot of lives and be meaningful to so many people, Ogunwale and his fitness chain have plans to expand the message of health and wellness beyond the borders of Nigeria.



“The lives people live in Lagos is very strenuous and you are not thinking about things that lean towards luxury. You are more thinking about survival and coping with day-to-day stress. So, this for me was a wakeup call to say how can we touch a lot more lives and create an enabling environment to get people in the gym,” says Ogunwale.



Beyond the 40 locations, Ogunwale is looking at building a digital platform that will help a vast majority of Nigerians and Africans also access fitness online.

Screenshot 2022-10-17 at 20.56.46

The Nigerian Business That’s Working Out and Making Sure That Africa’s Most Populous Country is Also a Healthy One

AFRICAN STARTUPS ARE RAISING UNPRECEDENTED AMOUNTS AT RECORD SPEED. FOR NOW, THE CONTINENT IS THE ONLY REGION IN THE WORLD SEEING A RISE IN VENTURE CAPITAL FLOWS. PERSPECTIVES FROM WEST AFRICA.



AS FUNDING FOR STARTUPS FALLS ACROSS the globe, Africa it seems is undergoing a renaissance in this regard.



“We are seeing a time where funding for African startups rose to a massive $3.14 billion in the first six months of this year alone,” says Eric Idiahi, Co-Founder and Partner at Verod Capital, a leading West African private equity investor. “That is unprecedented and it really shows the interest in the continent!”



African entrepreneurs are raising money to solve pertinent socio-economic problems on the continent ranging from financial inclusion, providing access to healthcare for the underserved and vulnerable, and bridging the education gap.


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“Africa investment firms and angel networks have started putting money into African companies,” says Dr Akintoye Akindele, yet another West African entrepreneur, who is the Founder of investment vehicle Platform Capital in Nigeria.



“It took African entrepreneurs almost 10 months to raise $1 billion in 2019. It took the same group eight months to raise $1 billion in 2020. It took them four months to raise $1 billion in 2021 and it has taken them less than six weeks to raise $1 billion in 2022. That means capital is coming in faster into deals and last year for the first time in our history, African investors invested more than European investors. This is a major milestone.”



Akindele is himself focused on inviting investors “to see Africa the right way”.



“This is because we know the narrative that exists about Africa and the negative questions we get asked.”



The thesis of Platform Capital is that it deploys long-term capital to startups whose center of gravity is Africa.



“Africans need long-term, nurturing and patient capital. Four to five years is too short in Nigeria for a business to turn capital around and grow and deliver profit to capital providers. I believe from my experience that five to six years does not create enough alignment,” says Akindele.



Based on their extensive research and experience investing in over 100 portfolio companies with a valuation north of $1.5 billion, Platform Capital invests in businesses that will become top in their sectors in 15 years. Akindele also believes his investments should be sector-agnostic.



“I believe in Africa, we should not be choosing what we cannot invest in&#8230; whether it’s energy, telecom, agriculture, infrastructure or value-added services like gaming, I believe consumers need their basic needs met and then on the back of that we can evolve.”



Akindele’s primary focus is those sectors fundamental to the development of Africa.



“We invest in key areas that Africa needs to catch up on&#8230;so things like technology infrastructure, agriculture or food value chains. They form our anchor sectors and that represents about 60% of our portfolio. Then, when you have people who have electricity, food and water, they then go into the next sector like finance as well as education or healthcare&#8230;Then our final sector is robotics, artificial intelligence, such as one of our companies that do smell cyborgs,” says Akindele.



The company he is referring to is Koniku, a synthetic biotech company that creates ‘smell cyborgs’ that can detect a range of compounds in the air in real-time, and which recently partnered with Airbus to launch biotech solutions for aviation.



The company has so far reportedly raised $49.2 million in four rounds and is part of a long line of African startups bucking the trend of venture capital (VC) investment worldwide.



According to Yaa Agyare-Dwomoh, a consultant with growth strategy consulting and research firm Frost &amp; Sullivan, African VCs reached $1.8 billion, up 150% compared to $730 million in the same period in 2021 and was subsequently, also the only region in the world to record three-digit growth in the first quarter of 2022.



As the biggest catch-up market, Africa’s advantage lies in its need for innovative solutions to leapfrog years of underdevelopment. For some pioneers like Oshiorenoya Agabi, the Nigerian-born scientist based in Silicon Valley and Founder and CEO of Koniku, that need for innovation has brought the continent to the age of biotech solutions.



The company, which was founded in 2017, is using technology to combine traditional computer cells with living biological neurons.



“We are creating a device capable of thinking in the biological sense like a human by creating neurons that are sensitive to particles and are able detect smell. By this method, the solution can be used for particle detection for aviation, military or agricultural application,”says Agabi.



Apart from biotech, the figures show that it is fintech that attracted the largest funding by sector by far, mostly spurred by the need to extend banking and financial services to millions of unbanked and underbanked Africans across the continent. “Fintech is now the most popular sector for investments in Africa. In 2021, fintech funding broke the $1 billion funding barrier and continued to receive the largest amount of funding on the continent, representing 54% of all venture funding deals. In 2022, the fintech sector was responsible for the biggest deals securing two-thirds of the total funding for Africa’s technology firms,” says Dwomoh.



And this trend looks set to continue.



“Despite the global trend of tech companies struggling to raise money, African VCs are still raising money at record speed,” adds Akindele.



An unexpected side effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been the need for inclusive development in areas that fundamentally impacts society. This new trend known as impact investment has also consequently been on the rise in the African VC space.



Impact investing is based on the notion that when money is managed effectively, it has the added benefit of positively impacting the lives of people as well as creating a return on investment.



Africa is home to the youngest population in the world, with a median age of less than 20 years, and 70% of the population under the age of 30. According to the Global Impact Investing Network 2020 survey, almost half of global impact investment capital goes to the African continent.



Raised to appreciate poverty and wealth at the same time, Akindele is also a firm advocate of his investments positively making an impact on his portfolio companies. Platform Capital writes cheques anywhere from $10,000 to $10 million with most of the companies in the portfolio growing by 500% in terms of money raised, according to Akindele. As an African advocate, each investment the firm makes has to have an impact that



is transformational to the continent and its people and most importantly, makes a profit.



The new influx of money into Africa is just an attestation of everything entrepreneurs like him have consistently been working towards.

Smiling colleagues in conference room at workplace

VENTURE CAPITAL IN WEST AFRICA: The Funding Surge

<figure class="wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-center"><blockquote>“Do I need to start speaking in my local dialect before I can get business?”</blockquote></figure>



A new directive by the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria bans the use of foreign models and voice-over artists in local advertising campaigns from October 1.



According to the council, all local advertisements, advertising and marketing communications material targeted or exposed on the Nigerian advertising space are to use only Nigerian models and voice-over artists.



“This is in line with the federal government&#8217;s policy of developing local talent, inclusive economic growth, and the need to take necessary steps and actions aimed at growing the Nigerian advertising industry,” says the regulatory body.



The move has sparked controversial debate within the global advertising space with some foreign media reportedly interpreting the ban on foreign models and accents as an attempt to cut ties with colonial mindsets in the country.



However, Segun Arinze, President of the Association of Voice-Over Artists in Nigeria, defends the move as a necessary measure to protect and grow local talent in Nigeria.



“When you travel to the West, you do not hear foreign accents being used in local advertising campaigns. In France, you hear French accents as voice-over artists, not an English one. For years, local professionals in our industry have lost business to brands looking for foreign accents and this has really harmed the earning potential of Nigerian models and artists. I believe this is a step in the right direction to help protect the industry and give local artists the opportunity to earn money from their craft,” says Arinze.



What is not clear about the new ban is how it affects Nigerians with foreign accents. The country has a number of professional voice-over artists who have relocated home from the diaspora or who have acquired foreign accents by watching Hollywood films and are in high demand on local radio stations that cater to the middle class.



“I am born and bred in Nigeria but I left the country when I was about 10 years old to the UK. I returned home in 2019 after living and working in London and decided to launch my media company where we create audio podcasts as well as radio jingles and advertisements for brands. I clearly have a British accent so how does this affect me? Do I need to start speaking in my local dialect before I can get business?” asks Temi Osagie, a media entrepreneur based in Lagos.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“I believe this is a step in the right direction to help protect the industry and give local artists the opportunity to earn money from their craft.</blockquote>



Similar bans in Nigeria, like the prohibition of foreign rice, led to a boost in the local production of rice as well as an influx of young agricultural entrepreneurs in the country, however, there is still a wide demand for foreign rice which is now reportedly being smuggled into the country.



As to whether this recent ban will have a similar outcome remains to be seen.

Author: Peace Hyde

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA