Olushola Medupin wanted to stay away from the food business but now has a growing array of upscale restaurants selling West African cuisine in some of the world’s most dazzling cities.



For Olushola Medupin, his passion for food was a gift passed down generations, like a prized heir- loom. His mother ran one of the most successful restaurants in Kwara State in Western Nigeria, and before her, his grandparents too ran their own local outlets selling inexpensive, pre-cooked food to hungry customers.



Cooking, literally, is in his blood. “My mother was in the restaurant, cooking, when she had to rush to the hospital to give birth to me,” says Medupin. “The only life I knew from a young age was to go to school and from there, the driver would bring me to the restaurant because there was nobody at home. I was forced to stay in the restaurant all day.” That was his world growing up.



Food was such an integral part of the family dynamics that all five children competed as cooks and Medupin always won. From the tender age of five, he knew his way around the kitchen, mastering local dishes such as jollof rice, eba (made from dried cassava flakes) and pounded yam.



In addition to his natural affinity for the culinary arts, Medupin also discovered he had a passion for making money. In 1991, when his father traveled to India for six months and forgot to leave his cheque book at home, Medupin’s mother struggled to make ends meet. He helped by climbing orange trees and selling the fruit in the market. By the time he was 14, he was already a serial entrepreneur, renting out his BMX bicycle for transportation in the local markets, managing a rub- bish collection business, an internet business, a supermarket and a phone repair business.



His final venture before he left Nigeria for the United Kingdom (U.K.) was a car wash business which he sold in two months for three times the capital he invested. Medupin used the proceeds to fund his education in the U.K. where he stud- ied investment banking and securities. But he didn’t land the right opportunities.



“I wasn’t getting any major jobs apart from kitchen jobs in the U.K. In 2009, I said to myself ‘I am not working in the kitchen anymore’ and started a security job in Cardiff.”



But very soon, Medupin resigned and started looking every- where else for inspiration. He didn’t want to return into the restaurant business as he had done it all his life.



“It is a very hard industry to be in. You go through a lot of emotional trauma because you must put your heart and soul in the business. If people are not happy with the food, they tell you off straight away and when they do that, it gets to you. So, I didn’t want to do it again,” says Medupin.



The National Restaurant Association in the United States (U.S.) estimates a 20% success rate for all restaurants; but about 60% of all restaurants fail in their first year of operation, and 80% within five years of opening. As much as Medupin fought the idea of starting a restaurant, that was the only viable option before him. He finally decided to give in. He moved back to London, found a place for rent in Lewisham and started his first outlet. It was tough.



“In my first year, I wanted to sell the business. The guy who wanted to buy it from me offered me £300,000 ($375,400) and at the last minute, offered me £150,000 ($188,000) to still run it. It was a struggle initially, but we decided to push through,” says Medupin.



And he made it work. Along with his wife Eniola, also his co-founder, Medupin is today a certified restaurateur with 13 fine dining restaurants, branded Enish, spread across London, the U.S. and Dubai.



West African cuisine has its loyal patrons in London, evidenced by the popularity of Nigerian restaurants such as 



Akoko and Chishuru that earned Michelin stars recently. “Not only are African restaurants abroad scarce but also finding the ingredients to cook the food you grew up with can be very challenging in London and America. That is why Enish has such a strong fanbase. They are bringing quality Nigerian food to immigrants abroad,” says Michael Amusan, a financial analyst in London and frequent visitor at Enish Covent Garden.



Concurs London food critic Tola Ogun: “This shows you that West African food, especially Nigerian, is here to stay. Michelin stars were typically awarded to white-skewing restaurants and so for Nigerian restaurants to receive the highest honor in the food business is testament to how popular our food is.”



“For someone like me who is based in the U.K., this is amaz- ing. Nigerian cuisine is growing in popularity all over the world and I am definitely a big fan of Enish,” attests Florence Otedola, popularly known as DJ Cuppy.



Serving everything from pounded yam to egusi soup (made from ground melon seeds) with a side of lobster, Enish has managed to carve out a place for itself in the U.K.’s fine dining scene, and now also in Dubai, where there are multiple outlets.



“The management already knew our brand, so it made it easy to sell our concept. It cost us $4 million to open our first branch and during that year of building the restaurant, we still had to pay a monthly rent of $50,000,” says Medupin. He has invested a lot in each of these projects, such as spending £25,000 ($31,200) a month to rent the dining space on Oxford Street and £20,000 ($25,000) a month for the Knightsbridge location in London, he adds.



In Dubai, known as The Dwntwn By Enish and located near the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, Medupin’s outlet is a swanky 40,000sqft nightclub featuring two bars and several VIP lounge areas.



All the way from Africa to the Middle East, Medupin says he imports about 80% of all his ingredients, which presents its own unique challenges.



“You cannot buy egusi for six months at a time and there is an issue with the consistency of the products. Every time you order egusi or palm oil, it has a different taste. So, it’s up to you to use your experience to keep the taste consistent. So, it’s a big challenge,” says Medupin. But he is powering on with his vision to put Nigerian cui- sine firmly on the world map, one dish and one restaurant at a time.

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The Reluctant Restaurateur Serving West African Cuisine Abroad

Born in the United Kingdom, Nigeria-based Matopeda King, who has been at the forefront of fashion for 14 years, is using her atelier to empower women.



Matopeda Abiola King is currently experiencing &#8220;a full circle moment&#8221; with her fashion brand. As Creative Director for Matopeda Atelier, an international custom wedding dress design company, King has styled several high-profile celebrities in Nigeria and the United States (U.S.), establishing her brand as one of Nigeria’s notable fashion houses.



She says it is her care and attention to clients that have become her signature.



“I knew by [the age of] 30 or 31 that my calling was to work with women. A lot of the people I meet, our conversation isn’t just about the dresses, what I do is to build women up, I empower women. When a woman wears my dresses, they get the dream job, they feel confident, they feel like they can achieve anything,” says King.



When singer and actor Fantasia Barrino had the honor of paying homage to the late Tina Turner at the recently-concluded 66th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in the U.S., she did so in a customized Matopeda dress. The hand-beaded corseted body suit for her performance was reportedly created in just 48 hours. Beyoncé also sported a Matopeda floral dress while celebrating her fifth wedding anniversary in Hawaii.



Her penchant for “empowering” her clients actually came from overcoming her own personal struggles, including a difficult childhood and a bad relationship. Born in the United Kingdom in 1983, her family had to move to Nigeria where they lived for three years, and then return to London when King was 10 or 11, where they began life as immigrants seeking asylum.



“We couldn’t afford rent so we had to move about 20 times [when I was between] 12 to 27 because we couldn’t find accommodation. We had to go to the council. Always moving houses was consistent. I don’t have pictures from my childhood because we were always moving. We didn’t even have a fridge at some point,” recalls King.



She picked up the essence of style from her mom but her real “eureka moment” happened when a bad relationship left her looking like a shell of her former self.



“I was really slim and I realized I was really sad. I wasn’t aware I hadn’t been eating properly and my eyes had gone in. I remember crying a lot, but I just didn’t realize how bad things were. I said I had to do something else,” says King.



That was when the brand, Frock it, Rock it, was born.



“Before that, I was the one who always styled my friends and the one that everybody called for birthdays, interviews etc. If somebody got a job, they would give me their card to say ‘go shopping for me and build a workwear wardrobe for me’. I knew I was creative with clothes, but I just didn’t know what to do. I thought it was styling at first,” says King.



Over the years, her brand has evolved from making outfits that provide the perfect silhouette for black women to breaking the mould when it comes to wedding gowns.



“Matopeda is fast becoming one of the most important Nigerian fashion brands simply because of the level of attention her creations get. Nigeria has a lot of talented designers but very few can boast the calibre of clientele Matopeda has, and that is testament to how unique her outfits are,” says Amanoshi Dania, a Lagos-based designer.



“I used to turn them (customers) down because wedding dresses were always covered up, no neckline, no shoulders, no beading, no crystals. I didn’t want to do that; I always want my customers to be the best-dressed and that is what we stand for,” adds King.



“So, we started custom-making our fabrics and started [embellishing] our dresses with crystals and beads. We started to show shoulders, [a] lower neckline and crystals, and a lot of clients in America started to pay attention because no one was doing that in America.”



That was the beginning of the rebirth of her brand, which then became Matopeda Atelier.



King is at peace with herself and her calling. Her experience of navigating depression and overcoming emotional trauma, coupled with her strong faith, has birthed an intuitive designer who pays attention to every aspect of the process, including the wellbeing of the women wearing her clothes.

Matopeda King; image suppliedz

From Designing For Beyoncé To Brides In Lagos, This Fashionista Is On A Mission

Ghanaian photographer Emmanuel Mensah Agbeble, who arrived in New York with just $50 in his pocket, is now weaving the Afrobeats genre into the global narrative with his creativity.



Emmanuel Mensah Agbeble was barely three years old when his&nbsp; father, who owned a photo studio in Ghana, handed him his first camera.



That would have been the obvious choice of career for a young Agbeble, but his sights were set on the basketball court. After his parents relocated from Nima, a slum community in Ghana, to the United States for greener pastures and a better life, Agbeble hoped his dreams of making it to the National Basketball Association (NBA) would materialize.



But destiny had other plans.



“I was playing basketball and Ghana is a football-[loving] country, so I wanted to go to America to try and be in the NBA. That was my dream. I had a full scholarship to come to America but unfortunately, I didn’t get the visa, so I could not leave. This shattered my dream, I was heartbroken,” recalls Agbeble.



But as the saying goes, when one door closes, a window of opportunity opens. He simply leaned on his innate skill-set.



“I would always shoot pictures of my friends and myself playing basketball and it looked really good. My best friend at the time said ‘why don’t you do this full-time’ and that is when I started taking photography seriously. I was always working with my dad in the studios, developing films, so I saw how the whole process worked. I learned from the ground up, because we didn’t have any photoshop or any editing tools like we have now, so we were always in the red room or dark room developing film,” says Agbeble.



Little did he know a flourishing career as a New York-based photographer awaited him. But Agbeble didn’t just want to emulate his father, his ambitions for photography went much further.



“My dad wasn’t doing gallery shows… I learned through other people and that has helped me grow. The vision is to be worldwide. I want to build a legacy. I want to tell stories the right way and inspire the world; spark somebody’s brain to be able to do what they love so much. Everything I do has to inspire the world,” says Agbeble.



When he started his journey as a photographer in New York, he only had a capital of $600.



Through his company APMWorld, Agbeble has now led campaigns for global superstars such as Africa’s very own Burna Boy, Davido and Wizkid, in turn, making his own contributions to the surge in global popularity of the Afrobeats genre.



“Photography has become increasingly popular in Ghana as a way for young people to start earning extra income but very few have actually been trained from the ground up from when they were able to walk. That is what makes Emmanuel unique. He is a true creative and one of the few Ghanaian photographers whose work is celebrated globally,” says Barnard Ashiadey, a journalist in Ghana.



Agbeble also attended the 2024 Grammy Awards, where he says he had a life-changing moment.



“When Burna Boy was about to perform, they put my cover on the screen and that was a wow moment for me because I am a boy from Nima, who had big dreams and got his NBA dreams shattered and came to America with only $50 in his pocket and is now sitting at the Grammys, a show he used to watch on TV. That was bigger than a dream. I don’t know how to explain that feeling.” This year, Agbeble is planning on expanding his story-telling skills by launching two books that will further seek to inspire the world.

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The Boy From Nima With The World On His Camera

British-Ghanaian radio and television presenter DJ Abrantee always knew the value and authenticity of Africa’s music scene. But how and when did this journey start? He shares his story – one filled with adversity and triumph.



Over the past decade, African culture and diversity has been celebrated, globally, through the musical genre of Afrobeats, a sound characterized by the infusion of infectious African rhythms, melodies and cultural nuances.



So notable is the meteoric rise of this genre that, for the first time in the history of music and pop culture, superstars like Burna Boy, Wizkid, Tems and many more are not only winning coveted Grammys but are consistently selling out global arenas and prestigious venues like Madison Square Garden in New York City, in the United States.



An unsung hero in this genre is British-Ghanaian radio and television presenter, Abrantee Boateng, known by the moniker, DJ Abrantee. Before global audiences had truly heard the unique African sound, Boateng, while in the United Kingdom (UK), persistently encouraged radio stations and executives to pay attention to African artists.



At 14, he already knew he was going to become a DJ, and was inspired by his uncle Henry, who was a DJ and hosted several house parties in the East London neighborhood where Boateng grew up with his father.



“I dabbled in so many things, but I always had a love for music. I joined [a] crew, which was made up of five members. We met in the 80s and carried on doing Ghanaian-based events in London. The idea was to support the Ghanaian community. We started doing the Ghana Independence [Day] events, but I stood out because I had a good voice and I wanted to do TV and radio,” says Boateng, on the phone with FORBES AFRICA for this interview.



He got his lucky break on the radio when he was called in to cover the graveyard shift – between 12AM and 6AM in the morning – on the UK’s Choice FM, now Capital XTRA.



“After the cover, I started the process of introducing African music to the station for consideration. But the radio station did not like the idea. They said UK audiences were not ready for a foreign sound like this, so it will not work,” he adds.



But Boateng was not dissuaded. He began doing bigger parties and events which showcased African artists who, at this point, had little to no exposure to the UK market. He spent his own money to fund local talent and conclude deals with them in Africa, so he could bring them over to the UK to expose their talent to mainstream media. Soon, his events started gaining traction in big venues like The O2 Arena and, slowly but surely, the executives at the radio station began to take notice.



“I saw this as an opportunity to help African mainstream artists get exposure on UK radio. Nigerians were calling their music Naija Beats and Ghanaians were calling theirs Hiplife. I knew it would be easier to market and promote the genre if we grouped everything under one umbrella, and that is where Afrobeats came in,” says Boateng.



His mixtapes started trending and became popular among the younger demographics.



“The radio station started taking note and finally said they would like the idea of trialing Afrobeats. I played it during the overnight shows and they monitored the responses. In 2011, they put on the very first Afrobeats-titled show in the world on Choice FM, anchored by me.”



“The reaction was massive and it trended everywhere. It was the first time that everyone could hear African music playing on a UK radio station and made the artists overnight success stories in the UK. Everything I sold to the artist was proven right. I knew that African music could be one of the biggest in the world and I decided that this was the genre of music I was going to sell to the world,” says Boateng.



This vision has become a reality. According to Spotify, about 43% of all music streamed on the platform is Afrobeats and the genre was streamed more than 13 billion times in 2022 alone. On Audiomack, Afrobeats averages 2.5 billion streams a month.



Boateng says he had a hand in artists at the time, like D’banj for his Oliver Twist hit, to gain international exposure. He believed in the power of this genre so much that he immediately began to trademark the words Afrobeats, Afrobeat Charts, Afrobeats Awards, etc with the goal of turning it into a global multi-billion dollar business by Africans for Africans.



“I remember when DJ Abrantee spoke to me about promoting my music in the UK on his Afrobeats mix tape and it was exactly the right push I needed at the time, because I wanted to be more than just a Nigerian artist in Nigeria. He gave my music exposure, and I secured a new fanbase for the first time in the UK,” says D’banj.



After securing Afrobeats on the UK charts, Boateng was asked by both Nigerian and Ghanaian governments in 2017 to use his brand to facilitate UK artists to come to Ghana and Nigeria in a bid to encourage the diaspora to return to Africa.



Then, tragedy struck.



“We were about to launch it properly with contracts signed and everything ready to go. I also had my TV show about to launch in July 2017 but, by August 2017, I had a massive stroke. I didn’t have any health issues prior to this. I went to bed after DJ-ing and didn’t wake up in the morning as myself and that’s when things changed for me.”



He was confined to a wheelchair and told by the hospital he would never be able to walk or talk again, effectively removing the prospect of becoming a DJ.



“I was told I would never be able to recover the right side of my body, arm and leg and I had significant injury to the brain. The prognosis was the worst-case scenario and they gave me and my family a choice of whether I should live and be in that vegetative state or we can turn the machine off and give me a peaceful death,” recalls Boateng.



Everyone had, collectively, decided he would be kept alive and since then, Boateng has undergone several life-threatening operations to repair and recover. He was able to open his eyes and slowly regain the use of one of his legs. He recovered some of the things they told him he would not be able to do, including the ability to speak.



Similar to how he overcame the naysayers and brought Afrobeats to global audiences, he is determined to continue his recovery and says he is “doing better everyday”. And if his determination in the past is anything to go by, Boateng is in poll position to overcome this experience and get back to his love of spreading Afrobeats to the world.

DJ Abrante Boateng; image supplied

‘I Knew African Music Could Be One Of The Biggest In The World’: How This DJ Played His Part In Promoting The Afrobeats Genre From A Decade Ago

Diverse photography can help challenge perceptions and fight stereotypes. When Amanda Esther Akokhia started her photo studio some five years ago in the United Kingdom (UK), where she grew up, she was not aware just how important this was. At the time, photography was a hobby but it soon began to give her life purpose and meaning.



“When I started working, I would leave work during lunch, take pictures and return to work, and that was how I started photography. I wasn’t really fulfilled doing my job, but photography made me really happy. I knew in my heart that this is what I wanted to do [for] a living. That led me to open my first studio at 24,” says Akokhia, born in the UK but whose parents are Nigerian.



She’s the owner of Green Studio and now has over a decade of experience in the industry. Through education and the consistent drive for representation, she hopes to use her photography platform, Amanda Akokhia Photography, to bring about much-needed change.



The British Journal of Photography found that, globally, about 70% &#8211; 80% of photography students are women but they only account for 13% &#8211; 15% of professional photographers. Furthermore, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics also reportedly estimated that, although women account for half of all working photographers, they still struggle to get opportunities.



When Akokhia started cutting her teeth in the industry, she had already noticed the disparity.



“I knew I wanted to do photography, but I could not find any successful role models that looked like me in the industry to emulate,” she recalls.



This was before the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite this, she decided to fully commit – she quit her legal profession and opened her studio with £10,000 ($12,400), which she secured through a combination of savings and investment from her business partner.



“They believed in my vision and were eager to contribute,” says Akokhia.



In those days the vision for the brand was simple.



“I didn’t know what the industry was like, I just knew my dream was to shoot for big magazines and to see my pictures on billboards. I was really interested in beauty and fashion and my vision was to be a commercial photographer who shot for the big brands that I admired so much growing up. I didn’t know how I was going to get there but I knew that was what I wanted to see myself doing,” Akokhia adds.



Within two years of opening her business, Akokhia had already fulfilled her goals in photography, working with brands like BBC, Warner Brothers, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Disney and Pantene, among others.



“I started thinking [about] what the new vision for me at this stage of my life is. And I started to imagine a world where everyone would feel seen and can be seen through my work and encouraging other photographers to capture everyone. Sometimes, when you look at magazines in the UK, you only see photographers of a certain type and color. I shoot everyone as I would shoot a model for a campaign shoot,” she says.



Akokhia has steadily grown her business from one that generated a monthly revenue of £5,000 ($6,200) to one that has secured individual commercial campaigns worth £15,000 ($18,600) by elevating her business and building relationships with prominent commercial brands. An important focus for her is representation in her work, both behind the lens and in front of it.



And, as a rising creative in the sector, Akokhia hopes to achieve her new vision for creating inclusivity through training and mentorship, where she teaches future photographers and creatives how to turn their passion into a business.

Amanda Esther Akokhia started her first photo studio at the age of 24; image supplied

The UK-Based Nigerian Photographer Using A Different Lens To Challenge Norms

Following the COP28 United Nations Conference in Dubai in December, the race is on to find tech-centered solutions to assist in achieving global sustainability goals, say experts.



Each year, world leaders and governments meet to have a series of high-level conversations about how to manage the growing impact of climate change under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). Late last year, COP28, the name given to this gathering, took place in Dubai and, like previous years, the discussion was around figuring out innovative solutions to help tackle the effects of climate change and take stock of the progress that has been made so far.



“For a long time, people were unsure or maybe not aware of the devastating action of the climate issue we have now. COP each year reminds people that there is an issue and to really understand the actual impact of climate change and how it is affecting your lives now and COP centralizes a lot of this information and allows it to be further disseminated afterwards,” says Adiam Gafoo, founder and COO of Arts Help, a global non-profit that uses art as a vehicle for social change.



With over 21 million followers, Arts Help is one of the world’s largest digital art publishers. They utilize their social platforms to convey different messages about social change, like climate action under the framework of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.


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The next wave of climate action plans is due in 2025. Organizations like Arts Help consider themselves non-traditional climate activists who aim to create a means of understanding the jargon around this through all art forms.



“One of the missions of Arts Help is to establish a digital climate library with the United Nations, which they are building over a period of five to six years. The Web3 component of this is for me to basically find innovative ways of how Web3 can build the infrastructure that is going to support it in various ways,” says Del Titus Bawuah, Founder of Web3 Accra and board member of Arts Help.



“The current state of climate change action is at a critical juncture. It&#8217;s evident that more aggressive and collaborative efforts are needed globally. The focus should be on implementing actionable strategies that go beyond discussions and lead to tangible results. It&#8217;s imperative that we see a shift from pledges to action, with a stronger emphasis on accountability and measurable outcomes,” says Eche Emole, co-founder of Afropolitan, a movement towards creating a digital nation aimed at enabling all Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, to live abundant lives.



“We are dealing with just the basic understanding and many people simply don’t understand the gravity of climate change because they do not see it in their day-to-day lives. So, it is very easy to dismiss this as something that is somewhere else. I think just the basic lack of understanding is the biggest issue facing climate change, so they leave it up to the policy-makers and government because it is seen as their job,” says Gafoo.



Bawuah has a different take on the issue.



“There is a lot of bureaucracy in my opinion with climate change and there needs to be a startup approach to climate change where people have an environment where innovation is the driving force. There is too much red tape and there is also a situation where it is seen as a ‘buzz word’ as opposed to a real-life problem. So, each day, things are not moving quickly enough to get better,” he says.



“I think one of the main challenges is the gap between commitment and implementation. Many nations and organizations pledge to reduce emissions, but actual progress is often slow. Another challenge is the equitable distribution of resources and technology, especially in developing countries that are most affected by climate change. Additionally, there&#8217;s a need for more public awareness and education to drive collective action at all levels,” says Emole.



These reasons have led many to look at innovative solutions like blockchain, for example. Its use is seen by many as revolutionary in tech and has been largely lauded as a tool to bring about change in archaic financial and supply chain management systems. The main proponent of blockchain that makes it unique is its decentralized record of transactions.



“How we approach the future in terms of digital infrastructure is key. In this case you think of the COP approach of understanding that climate change policies can no longer be held in physical documentation, especially if you are promoting things that are positive for the environment. It will be unwise not to consider technology when you are building the new infrastructure,” says Bawuah.



“Also, when you think of this kind of initiative through the lens of Web3, it is highly efficient to have things on blockchain because it is more transparent and it also holds leaders accountable. More importantly, it allows us to consolidate data about the environment in a much more efficient way than has ever been done before.”



So how can blockchain help combat climate change?



“Blockchain can play a pivotal role in combating climate change by enhancing transparency and traceability in carbon emissions tracking. It can facilitate the creation of a more reliable and efficient carbon credit market, ensuring that emission reductions are accurately recorded and traded. Blockchain&#8217;s decentralized nature also allows for more democratic and inclusive participation in climate action initiatives,” says Emole.



“Blockchain is the kind of infrastructure that can consolidate information transparently and distribute it efficiently. I think some institutions have made good strides but how do you access the data? How is data shared between one another and is that transparent? I think that blockchain as an infrastructure, supporting the data and the way we form [an] agreement between one another, is going to be central to changing the future in how we tackle climate change. Digital infrastructure is the way forward and that is going to reduce most carbon emissions,” says Bawuah.



There is still a long way to go in the fight against climate change and while blockchain has potential, it&#8217;s not without challenges. The energy consumption of certain blockchain networks is a concern.



“However, these challenges can be managed by adopting more energy-efficient consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-stake. Additionally, integrating blockchain with renewable energy sources can further reduce the carbon footprint associated with its operations,” says Emole.

The pollution hand and effective management with netzero symbols – renewable energy, reduced CO2 emissions, green production, and waste recycling in business, net zero carbon.

‘Need A Startup Approach’: Views From West Africa On Using The Blockchain And Even Digital Art To Combat Climate Change

Affinity Africa founder Tarek Mouganie is addressing the challenges of the unbanked in his country through digital finance.



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“As a result of having been excluded from financial services, small business don’t get created.&#8221;
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After dropping out of high school, Ibrahim Musa, a small business owner based in Ghana, has become somewhat of a serial entrepreneur. With stints in everything from cold stores, car sales and, most recently, selling electronic goods in Makola Market, the country’s busiest local market, his biggest challenge is actually in the digital sphere.



For years, Musa has faced a major snag when it comes to opening a bank account for his small business due to the many regulations involved.



“Every time I try and open a bank account, I am asked for so many documents that I simply do not have. After being rejected several times, I just decided to use mobile money for my banking needs but that is very limited because you cannot have access to the full range of services traditional banks offer and that is a real problem for entrepreneurs like me,” says Musa.



He is not wrong. The problem he speaks of affects over 500 million people across sub-Saharan Africa who do not have, amongst other things, proof of official identity documents. This is according to a 2017 article by the World Economic Forum. The knock-on effect of this problem is that it has led to over 350 million adults being financially excluded and expected to live on cash without the use of financial facilities, cited in a report by AfricaNenda.



For Ghanaian entrepreneur, Tarek Mouganie, the only way to tackle a problem like this is through the development of digital financial services. His solution, Affinity Africa, is a digital bank.



Mouganie holds an engineering degree from Imperial College London and PhD from the University of Cambridge. After working in the United Kingdom (UK) for a number of years, he decided to relocate back to Ghana to help solve the problems of the country’s unbanked and underbanked. It took Mouganie four and a half years to build the company and it finally launched in 2022.



“With no marketing spend, we have acquired 30,000 accounts just by word of mouth and, for 90% of our customers, we are their first-ever bank account. We have helped our customers save $23 million to date and have provided $13 million worth of loans as well. The average revenue of our borrowers has gone up by 500% and their employment base has gone by 3.5 times, so we are seeing growth,” says Mouganie.



The implementation of mobile money certainly is a silver lining for the future of the unbanked but according to Mouganie, it simply provides access. There is a deeper need to be addressed for small business holders.



“Our bank accounts are free, we don’t have any monthly charges and we provide interest across all accounts and that is a unique proposition. Our lending specifically focuses on small businesses which is what traditional banks don’t typically do,” says Mouganie.



He believes the problem is endemic to how African governments run their economies.



“If you look at OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, the tax to GDP ratio is 33%. If you look at Africa, it is 16%. So, we are the lowest tax-paying continent in the world and for this reason, governments typically don’t have money which causes a huge amount of issues. But what is even worse is that a majority of our taxation is indirect –VAT, E-levy and other solutions that are quite regressive.”



“The reason that exists is because we have a huge informal sector and as a result of having been excluded from financial services, small business don’t get created,” Mouganie adds.



According to Mouganie, the reason why small businesses are important is because in developed countries, they employ about 60% of the population and drive about 50% of government revenue.



“In our part of the world, that is just not the case. So, to create employment and build resilient economies, we need to support small businesses, nurture them and encourage those new businesses to be registered, so that we can drive employment and socio-economic development,” says Mouganie.



This is, perhaps, what makes Affinity’s growth noteworthy.



The journey has been far from easy. The stringent process of obtaining a banking license has proven to be a challenge for many fintech entrepreneurs in the past. But Mouganie was so confident in his vision that he sold his house in London to invest in Affinity and set out to conquer the hurdle of regulatory approvals.



“Regulators exist because they are there to protect the consumer and who is the consumer? In our case, it is our customer and the regulator in Ghana wanted to support economic growth and support small businesses. We came up with a proposition of increasing financial inclusion in the true term and not just giving accessibility, which is what mobile money and digital money has done, but very much focus on affordability as well,” says Mouganie.



He founded Affinity with the aim to solve the problem of financial inclusion through digital finance and based on the growth Mouganie has achieved so far, the digital bank is ready to transform Ghana’s unbanked sector, one customer at a time.

Tarek Mouganie; image supplied1

The Ghanaian Entrepreneur Who Sold His House In London To Build The Dreams Of SMEs  

Ghanaian entrepreneur Alima Bello, the founder of Bello Edu, would have been toiling away in a greasy oil seed factory had she not chosen to ignite her passion for contemporary fashion design.



Fashion and art are often synonymous. Just ask Ghanaian fashion entrepreneur Alima Bello, who in 2014 launched a contemporary womenswear brand named Bello Edu.



“We describe the clothes we are making as canvases for women,” says Bello on her body of work.



And as with every canvas, this dream too started on a blank sheet of paper.



As creative director of the brand, humble beginnings preceded international acclaim, such as showcasing her work on prestigious platforms like the Portugal Fashion Week as well as being stocked in retail outlets across Africa.



The challenges included facing an industry that makes it difficult to raise capital to fund entrepreneurial dreams.



“Fashion is such a seasonal business, and a lot of traditional finance institutions don’t understand how it works. It takes time,” says Bello, reiterating the words of most startup founders in the fashion sector.



“The way the fashion cycle works; you get a loan, you do your samples, you start taking your photographs, start doing your campaign, start getting your pieces into retailers and that takes about three months before you start seeing any income from your designs.”



Bello had to bootstrap her dream by creating capital working several odd jobs. Her career also did not take a linear path.



Growing up in her hometown in Kumasi, Bello was expected to graduate with a degree in business management from the University of Ghana and promptly join the family business.



“As a first-born child to a Yoruba man, my father expected me to finish school and join him in the family business and he designed my life that way – go to school to study business management and then finish and come back and work in an oil seed factory where we were processing soya bean oil, palm kernel oil and refining as well.”



That would have been a slippery slope, but thankfully, serendipity came calling.



Bello was privileged enough to have her father fund her travels abroad during school breaks when she would indulge in her love of fashion. But after graduation and once she started working for him, he told her she must buy her own tickets to London because he was no longer paying for them. It meant she couldn’t shop abroad and had to relegate her fashion choices to the boutiques of Kumasi.



“[But] if I found stuff I liked, they wouldn’t have the color or size I wanted,” recalls Bello. 



The only alternative was to start making her own clothes. That interest transformed into a calling and with that, Bello managed to convince her father to let her follow her dreams to pursue fashion.



“It took me two to three years to convince him that I wanted to move to Accra to start my business. But when I moved, I couldn’t find a fashion job with any established designer or brand. So, I found a job with a furniture company that had an interior design unit.”



Bello’s thinking was if she could find a job and see how brands interacted with customers, it would give her a better understanding of what customers were looking for and see how the customer-facing side of the business worked. But that did not pan out well and she found a part-time job in an ad agency doing administrative work and spent her spare time “pattern-drafting”.



Although she was garnering interest with her designs and being invited to showcase her work on some platforms like other designers, Bello decided to take some time out and focus on building her brand.



“It took some time to define who the Bello Edu target is; who am I designing for and what my brand story is. I took my time to answer these questions; trying to flesh out the ‘why I want to do this’ and ‘for whom am I doing this’.”



After some soul-searching, she finally understood.



“The Bello Edu woman is 33 to 35. She is a hard-working woman and confident of who she is. She likes to splurge every now and then but is very conscious about where her money goes. She can buy a luxury bag and a t-shirt from Zara and pants from Bello Edu. She doesn’t take herself way too seriously and she takes life as it comes.”



And with that, came the biggest turning point in Bello’s career. She rented her first brick and mortar store in 2017 and that is when it became “real”. Then came the challenges. By 2018, Bello had depleted her entire life savings trying to keep the business afloat. Although the brand was attracting some sales, the money was not enough to sustain the business.



“I would get so stressed that my jaws would lock up. I had dried up everything and I had workers depending on me. We were not making enough to [even] pay for our overheads,” says Bello.



Then 2020 came and Covid-19 hit. What should have spelled the end of her business brought unexpected respite. “When the lockdown happened, along with the Black Lives Matter movement, there was a boost in sales for black-owned businesses. We got featured on certain platforms and there were more eyes on the brand and that is what helped to boost sales and keep as alive. We didn’t have a marketing budget and everything we have done today has been based on word-of-mouth.”



Today, the brand is in a much more comfortable space and the vision has evolved, she admits. “African fashion had become so popular, and the prints were so bold and in your face. My personal taste is very minimal when it comes to the choice of colors and prints. I wanted to create a brand that would serve as a canvas,” says Bello of her minimalist designs but maximum dreams.

Alima Bello; image supplied

What It Takes To Build A Fashion Brand In Ghana

The importance of agriculture to Africa’s economic output cannot be emphasized enough. Desmond Koney’s Complete Farmer is doing close to $10 million in revenue, and have just closed a funding round of $10.4 million. 



Agriculture has been lauded by many governments as the key to reducing poverty due to the sheer number of people that it employs. According to figures from the World Bank, agriculture contributes to about 65%-70% of Africa’s labor force as well as 30%-40% of GDP.



Furthermore, it estimates that agriculture is the most significant economic activity for about 70% of people on the continent who live in rural areas.



The Ghanaian agriculture sector, in particular, is characterized by smallholder farmers who farm on less than two hectares of land, according to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana.



“Agriculture has been the principal sector for the development and growth of Ghana’s economy for decades and it still is a major contributor. It contributes somewhere in the region of about 30% to the GDP of Ghana. The main challenge is how we industrialize the process in order to scale and reap the fruits of the sector,” says Kwame Nkum, senior consultant at Nkum Associates.



This is a challenge Ghanaian entrepreneurs in the sector have been grappling with for years. On the one hand, the agriculture value chain is perhaps one of the longest in any industry. Also, there are interdependencies between one stage of the value chain and the next but, often, there is a lack of data between the two, which creates significant infrastructure challenges for the sector.



For mechanical engineer cum farmer, Desmond Koney, these challenges represent an opportunity to innovate and find solutions that help improve the sector. As the CEO and Founder of Complete Farmer, a crowd farming platform that facilitates easy sourcing of quality farm produce through an African online market, Koney is embarking on an ambitious journey to digitalize agriculture in Ghana.



“It is an exciting time to be in the industry and an exciting time to solve the problem the way we are solving it. Africa is producing close to $90 billion worth of produce and if you were able to build the infrastructure that captures that value, we can create a lot of wealth for local farmers,” says Koney.



The problem is that the farmers producing this are not able to sell their products to the people who need it and this is where Koney is hoping his innovative solution will make a difference.



“This presents an interesting opportunity to build global supply chains and ecommerce platforms. Once we can build this infrastructure, the opportunity of that $90 billion a year is something that should excite anyone,” says Koney.



Currently Complete Farmer is doing close to $10 million in revenue, according to Koney, and they have just closed a funding round of $10.4 million. That has led to the expansion of the Complete Farmer solution to Togo. The platform allows buyers from all over the world to order produce under the care of Complete Farmer.



“When a company makes an order, they put it up on the platform and make it possible for anyone who wants to be a supplier of the product to get on board by way of investment,” he says.



Like many great success stories, Koney’s journey was born out of adversity. Although his father was a pineapple farmer, Koney had opted for a life in the sciences with dreams of becoming an engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Then tragedy struck.



“My father passed away suddenly when I was just about to write my exams in school, and it was a really difficult moment for me. One of my lecturers said this was going to be a defining moment for me and looking back now, I can see how it was. Suddenly, I had a little brother to take care of and I had to support my mother. I remember after my father’s funeral I had only GHC [Ghanaian Cedi] 10 in my pocket,” recalls Koney.



He decided to continue his father’s legacy as a farmer but first, he had to understand the challenges he went through. After working on his father’s farm, Koney realized the challenges were glaring.



“We realized that the agriculture industry has middlemen who purchase goods at a low price from the farmers to sell at much higher prices. This means farmers had no access to the market they were producing for,” says Koney.



With these invaluable lessons, Koney decided to utilize his engineering skills to build farms like factories.



“The initial vision was ‘how do we make agriculture like what China has done with manufacturing?’ In China, you will see people using their garages to set up factories… So, for me it was like ‘how can I bring that same energy and that same approach to farming?’ So, the vision was to really figure out how to build a farm like a factory and try and emulate how China has become a superpower in manufacturing,” says Koney.



The company designed an end-to-end process to solve the value chain issue by digitizing it. By doing so, Complete Farmer has become a bridge between both the demand side and the supply side which increases efficiencies in the entire value chain.



“It took us six years and we have had about three or four pivots to really figure out how we can create that factory to get there. Trying to raise funds, trying to figure out business model implications and trying to figure out the legal implications, and that is what we have been doing for the past six years to try and build this vision,” says Koney.



He is a firm believer in Africa’s ability to be the breadbasket of the world and, now, with Complete Farmer, it has become his mission is to make the rest of the world believe in Africa’s ability to feed everyone too.

Desmond Koney; image supplied1

‘Completing The Chain’: How This Ghanaian Is Bridging Gaps Through Agritech

Former legal professional Kemi Lewis stepped into the unknown with a belief in herself and her vision. She tells FORBES AFRICA about her journey to becoming a beauty entrepreneur.



It’s been around a decade since Kemi Lewis traded a thriving career in law to live out her childhood dream of making natural hair a norm for Lagosians, and she has never looked back. The success of her business, and the strength of her determination, has seen her go from two members of staff to 30 in three locations.



As she speaks from her first location in Dolphin Estate in the wealthy suburb of Ikoyi in Lagos, Lewis is still amazed at how far her dream has come. Growing up as the first and only girl out of four children, Lewis felt she had a responsibility to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather, who was a judge at the time.



“Law was intense in terms of the sheer amount of stuff you needed to learn to understand the cases. I did not absolutely love all aspects of the law but being the first-born child and a girl, you just get on with it and I thought I was going to give it my best. So, I studied it at the University of Lagos and went to law school in Abuja, and then got a Masters in International Business at the University of Dundee (in the United Kingdom),” says Lewis.



She was determined to take her legal career as far as she could but after securing a role with a public-private partnership company in Lagos as a legal advisor, she began to have second thoughts about her future.



“Back in 2013, I had a glowing feeling in my heart and I knew that I wanted to do something for myself. My heart kept saying something in the beauty and health sector but I was not sure what I wanted to do. A good friend of mine had opened a salon so I asked her for advice.”



“We had gone to college together so I’ve known her since I was 10 years old and she said to me, ‘you have always known how to do hair and right now, I’ve opened a salon and a lot of girls want to go with their natural hair’, so she said if you open a salon specializing in natural hair, it will do well. And it ignited something in me and the feeling in me was this is it, this is what I want to do,” says Lewis.



Her initial vision was to create a safe space where people who had natural hair would come and take care of their tresses. And this is how KLS Natural Beauty Bar was born.



“I wanted to create a space where when you come with your natural hair, you would be welcomed and your hair would be treated with the necessary care and respect, and you won’t be told to go and relax your hair. You would have the right products for your hair and, most importantly, you will have your hair styled according to your specific needs,” she says.



Until her eureka moment, natural hair in Nigeria was a hugely underserved demographic in the beauty industry which meant that Lewis had to overcome several obstacles to ensure her success.



“The initial reaction when I told immediate family was shock, horror and dismay. The question was, ‘what are you going to do with your law degree?’ Hair dressing was seen as a derogatory profession and for people who did not go to school. So, it did not have the prestige that my legal degree had and a lot of people thought I was making the wrong decision.”



The next challenge was getting the right space and, most importantly, convincing her stylists about her vision of working with natural hair. This is also why education and training is a big focus for her.



Lewis believed so much in her vision that she liquidated her life insurance policy and scraped together enough money to make her dream the success it is today. Ten years on and her lesson for entrepreneurs is rooted in what she learned in the early days of her business.



“Even if there are no laid-down steps to follow, if you want to do something, you just need to create your own steps and create your own market. Secondly, not everybody will believe in you and even if they don’t, as long as you have conviction in what you want to do and you believe in yourself, just give it 150%,” says Lewis.

Kemi Lewis image supplied

The Tress Test: How This Nigerian Entrepreneur Went From Law To Labor Of Love

Founder and creative director, Daniel Diyepriye has a goal in mind – to build a brand that will stand out amongst the rest. And while his start in the designer clothing business wasn’t conventional, he knows exactly where his journey is going to take him next.



The African luxury fashion segment is expected to reach $1 billion in 2023, according to market research company Statista. Jeremy Nel, Managing Director of South African-based luxury marketing firm, Luxury Brands, reportedly estimates that there are over 160,000 millionaires in Africa with a combined spending power of about $700 billion. These millionaires want the very best and are willing to spend top dollar when it comes to fashion.



“Louis Vuitton just got a market cap of $500 billion and Shell’s market cap is nowhere near that. Imagine a world where African luxury becomes a lot more lucrative than oil? That would completely transform the African continent and that is why I want to be a big player in this space,” says Daniel Diyepriye, founder and creative director of what he hopes to be Africa’s first luxury fashion house, Daniel Diyepriye.



Diyepriye is not wrong. With the over-reliance on oil and gas by most African countries, especially Nigeria, its largest economy, he may actually be on to something.



The eponymous brand, which launched just before Covid-19 wreaked havoc all over the world, pays homage to the legacy of his late father who epitomized elegance and class. He passed away during the pandemic following complications from a stroke he suffered when Diyepriye was just 14 years old.



Back then, the dream was not fashion but simply, finding a way to support his mother, who was now the primary caretaker of her paralyzed husband and their three children.



“I dropped out of university in my first year. I had to make money for the family and I felt that I had to take the responsibility to provide. I thought it was going to be five or six years before I made money from what they were teaching me in university and I could not wait that long,” recalls Diyepriye.



That is when he became a serial entrepreneur. At first, he took over a modelling agency called Lethal Model Management when he was 21 years old. He then moved on to buying and selling sneakers before transitioning into a car rental business, which he still manages today. The business focuses on renting smart cars for under a pound an hour.



“The name of the company is called SmartMove Car [Hire]. We took some investment, and we run a membership model. Sainsbury’s backed us and allowed us to put our cars in their parking lots so customers can take the car from one Sainsbury’s [store] to the other. But I needed to make a business that could scale because the problem with car rental companies is that when all your cars are rented out, you stop making money,” says Diyepriye.



After the death of his father in 2019, Diyepriye and his brother – who, sadly, also passed away last year due to a heart condition – decided that a luxury fashion business would be the best way to honor him.



“I got my flair from my dad. He used to always wear nice suits. The heritage is to honor my father and it means everything we do has to honor who he was, from the quality of our products and everything we say as a brand,” says Diyepriye.



His eureka moment for his signature brand, coincidentally, also came from his father.



“Me and my dad used to play with jigsaw [puzzles] and he always used to tell me that the jigsaw relates to patience, attention to detail and trying to see the bigger picture. I had an epiphany one day that it would be really cool to put a jigsaw on a bag. And that is what has become our signature look.”



Diyepriye taught himself design and learned how to use all the software applications he needed to make his creations come to life, in order to bootstrap the company and grow it organically.



With the help of influencers to get the word out, the brand was launched with £10,000 ($12,000) he made from his car rental business. Soon after launching, Diyepriye made the decision to focus on the United States (US) market due to the volume of orders they received from there.



“Till date, we have done about $500,000 in revenue and a lot of that money has gone back into the brand. The first tackle for us was validating luxury to say that this bag is luxury regardless of who it is made by. We use materials that fast fashion brands won’t and can’t use,” he says.



As far as Diyepriye is concerned, most of the founders spearheading European luxury fashion houses are men but when it comes to Africa, there is no one male fashion mogul dominating the luxury fashion scene. His goal is to take advantage of this first-mover position and evolve his brand into the Daniel Diyepriye Group, where similar to the LVMH family, he will also be able to launch and acquire other ancillary brands to become a billion-dollar fashion house.



Like many sectors in Africa, technology is providing a platform for the luxury fashion industry to leapfrog archaic infrastructure and scale rapidly. As a result, online stores and social media have provided a platform for the Diyepriye brand to carve out its presence in the industry in the space of only three years. With that in mind, who knows what the future might hold?

Daniel Diyepriye; image supplied

The Mission To Become Africa’s Luxury Fashion House

The Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented change to many lives around the world but for a group of daredevils in Ghana, it sparked a passion to explore the world by road.



The group of friends with wide-ranging interests and careers ranging from banking, education, technology and real estate, and also travel enthusiasts, saw an opportunity to use the lockdown to ignite their expedition.



“We started traveling in Ghana because of Covid. We couldn’t get out of Ghana and one funeral to Tamale, in Northern Ghana, inspired the passion for traveling. We began to travel sometimes for funerals, other times for weddings and for work,” says Richard Osei-Anim, an education technology entrepreneur who is part of the group.



Osei-Anim works to deploy smart labs and technology for schools in rural areas. Some of the hard-to-reach areas he works in – such as in Northern Ghana – requires travel by road, and that is what birthed his love for travel. On one of these trips with the group, initially consisting of five team members, one of them suggested going on a 10,000km journey to the United Kingdom (UK).


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“We have this saying we use that ‘what’s the worst that could happen’. So, when the idea was suggested, we were all up for it. Later on, some other members joined which brought our group to about 10 people in all,” recalls Osei-Anim.



This was in 2019 before the Covid pandemic.



“Kwabena Peprah, who is the OCD one amongst us, is our lead planner. He pulled the Excel spreadsheets and put in all the components from the type of car we would use, the spark plugs, windows, the tyres we will need, the cans for petrol and everything in between. We had a whole spreadsheet of data that had been acquired over the years. We postponed it to 2023 but it [meant] about six to nine months of planning and speaking to different people,” says Osei-Anim.



In 2022, the group had also attempted to climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.



“We didn’t make it all the way to the top. I got to 4,000 meters and Kwabena and the other guys got to 5,000 meters. So, we couldn’t make it, but it was a useful experience and we ended up in Zanzibar for about three days just to chill.”



With friendships in the group going back more than 30 years, there is true camaraderie here. After almost a year of planning, the group set off this year for their planned journey to the UK, from their starting point in Oyarifa, Ghana with a convoy of five cars.



“It took us 14 days to get from Accra to London. We started off from Oyarifa in Aburi, then crossed over to Ivory Coast, then Bamako, then Kayes, then Senegal, then Mauritania to Morocco and some of us left in Morocco to go to Johannesburg to work. The rest of the group crossed over by ferry to Spain, then went to France, then Calais to Dover and ended up in Kent,” says Osei-Anim.



Planning for the trip had to be airtight to ensure they covered the 14-day journey in good time.



“We aimed for departure at 4AM and always considered all scenarios that could potentially delay us unnecessarily. For example, we usually settle all bills the night before so when we wake up, we check out without any drama – like someone’s card not working or no forex to change into local currencies,” says Osei-Anim.



The trip led to the creation of Wanderlust Ghana, a travel blog to chronicle the adventures across some 10 countries. One of the travelers, Kwabena Ayirebi, also Director, Banking Operations at African Export-Import Bank, used the attention from the epic journey to London to raise funds to help connect communities across Ghana and Kenya to digital learning with a platform called EduSpots.



“I first went to London from Accra through a British Chevening Scholarship and that gave me the chance to have a global career. I saw the journey to London as an opportunity to celebrate my birthday, raise funds for a good cause and experience the amazing continent of Africa,” says Ayirebi.



The group stayed at hotels in each destination and the entire trip cost an average of $10,000 per person. The main challenges were mechanical issues ranging from changing car tyres to spark plugs and everything in between.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="768" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-road-trip-that-led-to-the-creation-of-a-travel-blog-image-supplied.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-60173" style="aspect-ratio:1.3333333333333333;width:646px;height:auto" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-road-trip-that-led-to-the-creation-of-a-travel-blog-image-supplied.jpeg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-road-trip-that-led-to-the-creation-of-a-travel-blog-image-supplied-300x225.jpeg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-road-trip-that-led-to-the-creation-of-a-travel-blog-image-supplied-768x576.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">A road-trip that led to the creation of a travel blog, image supplied</figcaption></figure></div>


“I would advise that if you want to take on this journey, make sure you are using very reliable cars. Our cars were quite old with some of them having about 500,000km already and even though we regularly service them, they gave us some issues,” says Osei-Anim.



Another advice is to be mindful of the local rules in various countries. For example, Mauritania has a policy against using tinted windows on cars which the group was not aware of.



“This was the worst experience on the trip as the policemen extorted us and kept us for about eight hours in Mauritania. They threatened to impound us for 48 hours and after illegally taking our money we were finally allowed to pass through,” says Osei-Anim.



After two weeks, the group arrived in Kent to a rousing welcome from the Ghana High Commission in London and along the way, had garnered enough media attention for their epic journey.



With the success of this trip, the group already have their eyes set on their next set of adventures which includes a road trip from Accra to Cape Town next year, then an eight-day expedition in Australia from Perth to Brisbane, then a Dubai via Egypt to Accra expedition and finally hitting all the football stadiums across North America to Alaska in the World Cup year of 2026.

A road-trip that led to the creation of a travel blog; image supplied

From Accra To London By Road: What The Trip Taught This Group Of Friends and Professionals From Africa

Eco-luxury brand RAW Beauty draws its inspiration from the transitional nature of the African Sahel. Founder Ruqayya Tofa-Basheer says her own personal skin challenges led her to this line of work.   



Clean beauty is on the rise. According to researchandmarkets.com, the worldwide clean beauty industry is expected to reach $14.36 billion by 2028. Defined as beauty products that are non-toxic and free of harmful ingredients, clean beauty has gained popularity, especially with Gen Z and millennials. A January 2023 article by The New York Times stated that ‘clean beauty’ had “5.6 million hashtag views on Instagram and 1.2 billion on TikTok”.



For beauty entrepreneur Ruqayya Tofa-Basheer, clean beauty offered a lifesaving solution for her and her daughter’s skin problems, and that led to the creation of one of her luxury botanical, clean beauty brands. RAW Beauty Africa focuses on sourcing and using African ingredients as its base for products.



“We use plants like moringa, baobab, hibiscus, and we use water melon seed oil, pumpkin seed oil and extracts from different plants in Africa that have high anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. We started with body products but now, we deal with face products for acne, and hyperpigmentation also came into play where a lot of people had scars from eczema that they couldn’t get rid of easily,” says Tofa-Basheer.



Her original career dream was architecture. After studying at the University of East London’s School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering, Tofa-Basheer worked with Barron and Smith Architects in Islington, London, from 2005 to 2007, before returning to Nigeria.



Over the years, she had been plagued with a skin condition which proved too difficult to handle.



“Going into beauty was really about my own personal journey with my skin. Having suffered from eczema as a baby, I had a very bad skin condition. I remember in boarding school, I was really not confident at all. During summertime, we were all going for a swim and I wanted to get out of that because I used to have a lot of boils on my body, especially during the rainy season,” Tofa-Basheer recalls.



“I remember my parents taking me to different dermatologists and I never really got a product that worked for me. When I was 19, I came across an aesthetician and she prescribed something that was way too harsh because I had sensitive skin as well, and it ended up really drying up my skin. That is really when I started trying to educate myself about clean ingredients and clean beauty.”



During her first pregnancy, Tofa-Basheer decided to take a beauty and skincare course in hopes of creating her own solution for her skin. However, it was after her pregnancy that her eureka moment happened.



“When I gave birth to my daughter, I found out she had the same skin condition as me. And I sought out companies in the US to help… I was like with all the courses I have done, I need to just order products and get to work. And that is when I created my skin butter and literally, within a week, her skin cleared,” she adds.



And Tofa-Basheer has never looked back. She started researching about the healing properties of local plants as well as different oils and began mixing clean concoctions in her kitchen before expanding to a factory in Kano and, most recently, another location in Abuja.



The brand has experienced organic growth for the past two years with its unique luxury packaging as well as brand proposition which seeks to also educate its customers about the negative impact of skin bleaching, amongst others.



For African beauty entrepreneurs that would like to tap into this billion-dollar clean beauty industry, Tofa-Basheer believes the focus should be on looking inwards first.



“Try to spread out and delve more into our natural plant resources and don’t get pigeonholed into just using shea oil and coconut oil but rather spread out and use research to process and manufacture ingredients, rather than just making products,” she says.



“Look locally for your solutions and try to solve a problem that is personal to you and your community.”

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The Nigerian Beauty Entrepreneur With A Clean Business Idea

Deborah Okenla, founder of Your Startup, Your Story, has made it her mission to build and guide a diverse range of entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom. That has transformed to over 17,000 members in six years and she has helped raise over £5 million.



Your Startup, Your Story (YSYS) founder and CEO, Deborah Okenla and her team provide access and opportunities for founders and investors. But, in truth, Okenla’s transition to becoming an advocate for black founders in tech was triggered by four life-changing experiences.



Like many African families, Okenla’s parents wanted her to study law and that is exactly what she did. After graduating, she landed a job in Manchester with Ernst &amp; Young.



“They had this thing called Entrepreneur of the Year Awards and the guy that won it that year had a fitness space – I was a member and said ‘I can’t believe this man built this amazing business’. I think that is when I began to understand that there are people behind these businesses and the things we use every day,” says Okenla. At the time, she was also beginning to feel like she might be outgrowing her organization. That was when she had her first triggering experience.



“We were working on process that was long and tedious and I wanted to improve it. I was credited for it but was told I should not waste my time doing things that made the work better. I did it on non-billable hours and on the weekends. That’s when I got this massive shock. I realized if you are an intrapreneur or an entrepreneur, make sure you have an environment that nourishes it and supports it rather than stifling it,” says Okenla.



The next experience was when her hiring manager, who had worked for the company for 25 years, was laid off, and Okenla’s third experience was when she lost a close friend to suicide.



With the combination of these experiences, Okenla felt as though she was just sitting in the office mourning and absentmindedly watching her time go.



That is until she stumbled on a platform called Eventbrite. She registered for a hackathon event and in three days was able to learn how to build a business from ideation to execution. With no



experience in tech before the event, Okenla immediately fell in love with the ecosystem.



“I just loved the environment those event organizers were able to create and the engagement from people all over the world was incredible. I felt empowered. Afterwards, I went to the event organizers and said ‘I would love to be a volunteer and help’ and they literally laughed at me. I said ‘If you are not going to let me do this, then I would create my own ecosystem’, ” recalls Okenla.



She quit her job and joined an accelerator program where she specialized in designing programs that would recruit startups and introduce them to investors. The only problem was there was an increasingly disproportionate number of black founders receiving investment compared to their white counterparts. Okenla made the decision to harness her own skills and create her own community.



That was when YSYS was conceived. Her initial group consisted of people she connected with on Twitter and soon, through word- of-mouth, the business grew to host restaurant meetings and a large community on Slack.



“We have had individuals join our community and go ahead to raise a Series A round and we have also had individuals who have not worked for a long time land their first role and those are the stories that have kept us going.”



In the past six years, she says YSYS has raised over £5 million ($6.2 million) and supported over 3,000 diverse founders in the UK. Some of their partners include the Mayor of London, Financial Times, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify and many others. But there are still hurdles and barriers to overcome.



In addition to designing education initiatives and programs, Okenla also knocks on doors that would encourage the UK ecosystem to pay attention to people from diverse backgrounds.



“I wrote an open letter [to the government] and that led to a meeting with British Business Bank and they said they will track the diversity data to see who is applying for the fund and if it’s not as diverse as possible, ‘We will see more of what we can do’.”



Okenla’s mission is to help over 100,000 people excel in tech by the end of this year and the organization is well on its way to achieving it. When she looks back, it still amazes her that a simple WhatsApp group – starting with 30 people – is now an organization with over 17,000 members in six years, and one that has completely changed the course of her own life.

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Diverse Pursuits: Guiding Entrepreneurs In The UK

Growing up poor in Ghana, Kwaku Boateng Brommon had to sell water to make ends meet. The handmade bespoke suits he now designs for the country’s affluent and powerful tell a tale of hardship and tenacity.



Not many can go from selling sachets of water in a remote village in Ghana at the age of nine to having a private audience with the president of their country in the same lifetime. But that is exactly what happened to Kwaku Boateng Brommon.



He vividly remembers the day he walked into what is essentially Ghana’s Oval Office at the presidential residence in Accra, with a handful of bespoke suits made specifically for President Nana Akufo-Addo.



The moment, forever etched in his memory, was a turning point for the young entrepreneur whose trajectory to the top of the Ghanaian fashion industry has been all but conventional.



“Sitting in his office I had a flashback to when I was a kid standing in the market selling my pure water and I was like ‘How did I get here?’ A village boy sitting in the office of the president was impossible and the story played like a movie in my mind,” recalls Brommon.



And like all great dreams, Brommon faced impossible odds. The first roadblock he had to overcome was poverty.



“I grew up with my grandparents and as far as I can remember, I never met my mum until I was in my teens because she had left for London. My dad was a teacher in Nigeria and he came back to Ghana when I was nine. Growing up was tough because I was poor and I had to fend for anything I needed. After school, I would go home, go to the fridge, pack my water and travel to the markets to sell.



“I would do two trips before I [returned] home in the evening and the cash I got selling water is what I would use as pocket money at school. I did that for six years and I also went to the farm with my dad to plant crops and we would harvest the food and take it to the local market to sell. It was tough and I felt like living in Ghana was torture,” says Brommon.



The first chance he got to beat poverty came when he moved to London, United Kingdom (UK), at the age of 14 to live with his mother; and the whole world opened up to Brommon.



Wanting to put to good use the hard work and tenacity he had learned in Ghana, he decided to drop out of college and pursue his passion – fashion.



“From an early age, I always liked to look good and keep my clothes clean. I remember asking myself ‘What is the closest area of work [that would] pull me into this passion of mine?’ I thought I should find a job in a clothing store, which I did.”



By 18, he was working for a retail shop in London, staying on in the industry for about 12 years. 



Every time he would get a break from work, he would roam the West End in London, a popular cultural hub with retail stores, restaurants and a theater district, for hours, window-shopping and studying the impeccable materials used for crafting high-end wear. After stints with luxury brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Hackett London, Paul Smith and Alexander McQueen, Brommon realized that he had reached a glass ceiling in the UK and needed a change.



“I had become a father and had two kids to take care of so just looking at them and looking at where I was at the time, I knew there was more to me than what I was doing; I had to find my purpose. I didn’t want a hand-to-mouth lifestyle anymore and seeing my kids running around in the tiny



apartment we lived in at the time – I was married – and I just thought this can’t be it,” says Brommon.



He decided to forge a new path for his future and returned to Ghana.



The Ghana that he found torturous was gone and here was this buzzing, upwardly-mobile and cosmopolitan city Accra firmly asserting itself as the latest destination for those brave enough to follow their dreams.



That is exactly what Brommon needed.



“Accra was new to me because I had lived in a village. The place was buzzing with new ideas and people were starting new businesses. I met a friend who was into finance and every time I visited Ghana, I would see him and we would hang out. This was a well-to-do individual and he used to advise that whatever I do, I must make sure Ghana is part of the plan, and 



I could see it myself,” says Brommon.



The trips to Accra became more frequent and on those times, he received consistent orders from professionals in Ghana for quality suits and clothing from London, primarily because they couldn’t find top brands in Accra in keeping with their aspirations.



“They said that if they [could find] one supplier who had great quality [brands], they would buy it locally but it just didn’t exist,” recalls Brommon. That was all he needed to hear.



“I said ‘They want quality and easy access, so what if I am able to start my own brand.’ I was done with the UK. I told my wife that I needed to move back alone and have that freedom to move around and hustle and so, I asked her to take care of the kids whilst I managed. I felt I needed to follow this vision.” Even when people discouraged his ideas, Brommon believed differently. The desire to create a luxury bespoke suit line in Ghana had been birthed and there was no turning back.



His research took him to Italy, Amsterdam and Spain in search of the best manufacturers of suits and he struck deals with them. It felt good to start a journey on his own.



“I said if it doesn’t work, at least I would have tried. I remember the factory [I had approached] told me I needed about £20,000 and I didn’t have a penny. So, I said to [them], ‘Sign me up and agree to the terms



and give me six months and if I don’t pay that money back to you, we can cancel’, ” says Brommon.



His pitch worked and with the necessary tools that he needed and £50 to his name, he returned to Accra and started knocking on every door he could find to tell people about his bespoke suits.



His biggest hurdle was trying to convince professional,



well-heeled Ghanaians to fork out $1,200-$1,400-a-piece for an unknown designer. But Brommon was convinced all he needed was one client and the rest would be history.



“This was 2014 and everyone [asked] ‘Why should I buy from you when I can spend the same amount of money on a Gucci or Tom Ford suit?’ I was on the street pitching for business for three months before one person known to be a fashionable lawyer decided to give my brand a try,” says Brommon.



After four weeks, the suit was delivered from Italy and the feedback was a resounding success. One order turned to multiple requests and Brommon was able to repay his manufacturer in three months.



As he helped the President of Ghana try on his sleek, sharp suit, it was clear to Brommon that his vision was slowly taking shape. As a recognizable force in the luxury suit and menswear market in West Africa and as founder of Brommon and Laxiri with a flagship store in Accra, he now has his eyes set on the rest of the continent.

Author: Peace Hyde

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA