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

Neoplants’ super-plants can help clear indoor air of formaldehyde and other pollutants 30 times better than regular houseplants.



By Amy Feldman 



In a lab in Paris, Lionel Mora and Patrick Torbey have been designing a houseplant that can remove pollutants from indoor air, where volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde are a danger to human health. After four years of work, their company, Neoplants, is emerging from stealth Thursday with its first bioengineered houseplant, the Neo P1, which it says can remove 30 times more pollutants than a typical houseplant. Future versions, they believe, could be designed to get rid of even more.



“We call them plants with a purpose,” Mora, the company’s CEO, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;in an interview in New York. “I don’t see anything more important than building a more sustainable future.”



Over the past decade, scores of synthetic biology companies have cropped up with the goal of designing better, more sustainable products thanks to biology, a trend that the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/09/12/executive-order-on-advancing-biotechnology-and-biomanufacturing-innovation-for-a-sustainable-safe-and-secure-american-bioeconomy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Biden Administration’s recent biomanufacturing initiative</a>&nbsp;hopes to accelerate. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic has made indoor air quality more important for consumers and businesses. Companies like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2022/08/19/this-startup-wants-to-bring-disinfecting-uv-light-into-every-physical-space/?sh=4d767f0b5556">R-Zero</a>, which&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;profiled in August, are using disinfecting light to clean inside air and have made progress selling their technology to schools and offices.



Since its 2018 founding, Neoplants has raised $20 million in venture funding from firms that include True Ventures and Collaborative Fund, as well as from entrepreneurs&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2018/08/14/clothes-from-a-petri-dish-700-million-bolt-threads-may-have-cracked-the-code-on-spider-silk/?sh=77df146cbda1">Dan Widmaier (Bolt Threads),</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncumbers/2020/08/26/how-has-this-synthetic-biology-unicorn-responded-to-the-pandemic-an-interview-with-the-ceo-and-cso-of-twist-biopharma/?sh=17209ac321ab">Emily Leproust (Twist Bioscience)</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/niklas-zennstrom/?sh=3fb837f0375c">Niklas Zennstrom (Skype)</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2020/08/18/why-one-entrepreneur-thinks-millions-of-americans-will-spend-25-on-his-personalized-shampoo/?sh=4aef64ac2961">Arnaud Plas (Prose).</a>&nbsp;The company, which is currently pre-revenue, expects to begin taking orders in early-2023 to ship plants to buyers later next year. It plans to target the U.S. as its first market and to sell to the enterprise market, including real estate developers and hotel owners.



“This is visionary and it’s straightforward. It ticks a box,” says Widmaier, who first met Mora and Torbey at a conference in London before the pandemic. “Plants are interesting because once you get the one that works you are just breeding plants. The nursery down the street does that all the time. I think that’s incredibly elegant and powerful in a world that needs to see new technologies from synthetic biology.”



While the spotlight recently has been on air filtration for Covid, the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that Neoplants is targeting—formaldehyde, benzene, toluene and xylene—have long been a huge problem indoors. Formaldehyde, used in manufactured wood and many common household products, can cause burning eyes, coughing, headaches and skin irritation&nbsp;<a href="https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/formaldehyde/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">even at low levels.</a>&nbsp;The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that levels of VOCs indoors, where we spend the majority of our time, are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/volatile-organic-compounds-impact-indoor-air-quality" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">generally two to five times what they are outdoors.</a>&nbsp;Neoplants is not targeting viruses, and Torbey says that “mechanical filters will always be better to filter viruses than plants.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“The most powerful function we could give a houseplant would be to make it clean the air.”</blockquote>



Mora, 32, was born in Austria and grew up in the south of France, where his parents were both schoolteachers. Even as a kid, he had an entrepreneurial streak. As a teenager he sold business cards to hairdressers. After business school at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France, he worked at Google<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/google" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">GOOG</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/google">+0.7%</a>&nbsp;as a product marketing manager for more than four years. He says he got itchy to do something that had a bigger societal impact. “It’s a typical Millennial syndrome, but I’m fine with it,” he says.



Torbey, 33, grew up on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, where his dad was a pediatrician and his mom was a schoolteacher. He received his Ph.D. in genome editing from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. “When I was doing my Ph.D., I gave courses in how to create your dragon. How can you use these genetic tools to create something magical?” he says.



Despite their different backgrounds, they clicked when they met at the Station F startup incubator in Paris. Soon, Torbey broached the idea of building an organism that had a function. “We’re surrounded by beautiful houseplants, and we thought, ‘Well, this is a very simple iconic organism,’” says Mora, noting that 80% of households already have plants in their homes. “The most powerful function we could give it would be to make it clean the air.”



In 2018, they launched Neoplants. They settled on the pothos plant, commonly called Devil’s Ivy, a basic houseplant that’s extremely hardy and does well in a range of environments. Its big waxy leaves and high growth rate allow it to absorb a lot of pollutants. Those are big advantages for creating a commercial product. But they also faced a disadvantage. There wasn’t any significant research on the pothos. Another drawback: Ingesting pothos is poisonous, making it a bad option for those with pets. “We work on plants that no one has studied before,” Mora says. “This is one of the things that was probably the biggest challenge. You’re starting in the dark.”



In Neoplants’ lab, Torbey and his team sequenced the genome of the pothos and then developed dozens of prototype plants that refined the capabilities of the one found in nature. They enhanced the plant by engineering its molecular metabolism, allowing it to convert VOCs into plant matter rather than storing them as pollutants. They also worked on the plant’s microbiome, essentially supercharging the community of beneficial fungi and bacteria that live within the plant in order to more efficiently metabolize these VOCs. They also customized the soil of the new plant using biochar, a charcoal-like substance, to improve its efficiency in getting rid of pollutants. The process of modifying a plant like this is both conceptually straightforward and technically difficult.



During the interview, Mora pulls a small plant out of his bag that’s in an enclosed container. It looks like a common houseplant, similar to a philodendron. “This one is a golden pothos,” he says. “It’s very cute and very beautiful.”



The actual plants will be far larger once they’re ready for sale. The Neo P1 sits on a custom-designed tall stand that both maximizes its air-cleaning properties and allows it to be watered far less often. Initial testing, conducted in partnership with Ecole Mines-Telecom of Lille University, showed the new plant was up to 30 times more effective at removing VOCs from the air than the most efficient plants found in nature. “Our first product is equivalent to 30 regular houseplants,” Mora says. “We’re very proud of that.”



Though based in Paris, Neoplants has set up a U.S. company, and Mora says he’s now finalizing a deal with a major houseplant grower in Florida to turn the lab-researched plants into a commercial product. The new plant, which needs to receive approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture under its regulations for genetically modified ornamental plants, will sell for $179, including the self-watering stand and three months of drops to enhance the microbiome.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“Plants are interesting because once you get the one that works you are just breeding plants.”</blockquote>



After that, Mora figures on regularly launching new products and adding new features to its existing plants. To do future research, the company is currently building an advanced 12,000-square-foot research lab in the Paris suburb of Saint-Ouen-Sur-Seine that’s expected to open in November.



How much more efficient could their bioengineered plant ultimately be remains an open question. “I don’t want to feel stupid in 10 years,” Torbey says. “I really don’t know what’s the limit. Technology when it comes to plants is so much in its infancy.”



Over the long term, the duo hope to develop bioengineered plants that can fight climate change outdoors through carbon capture, a far more complex undertaking than designing houseplants. The technology they’ve developed might also be usable for soil decontamination, Mora says. As he says: “Our strategy is to start working on a use case where we can release a product to market as fast as possible, and allow us to move into carbon capture with scientific credibility.”

Woman planting.

Meet The Entrepreneurs Who Designed Pollution-Killing Plants

A persistent acne problem led Botswana’s Didintle Moreki to look for indigenous solutions in her backyard, and grow her skincare range into a successful business.



Didintle Moreki’s entrepreneurial story literally took root in her past.



In Botswana’s vast semi-arid shrub, grass and tree landscape, Mowana, Morula and Moringa grow naturally in the wild. The image of her grandmother and mother tending to them – as they knew the plants’ true benefits – and using them for the family is well-etched in her mind.



This is the imagery Moreki has carried forward as the founder of Organic Naturals Skincare, a Botswana-based beauty brand she launched in 2019 using ingredients indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.



The ingredients are widely available but not many know their health benefits, and that is what 26-year-old Moreki wants to spread as ubiquitously as the plants.



There is also a key staple in her products – the will to work with local businesses to sustain families. The company works with women-led cooperatives who farm and supply or simply collect the plants from the wild.



“I found out about the potency of Morula, and then the potency of Moringa; it is in every single household in Botswana, and I never understood why. It’s [called] the tree of life for a reason. Its properties are your vitamin C and vitamin A,” says Moreki to FORBES AFRICA.



Mowana, high in omega-3 fatty acids with anti-inflammatory properties, is considered a treatment for acne. Marula, often used as a moisturizer, is high on vitamin C that can reduce hyperpigmentation caused by acne.



Once picked, the plants are processed into oils – and they are all chemical-free. The supply chain creates economic opportunities in local economies such as Maun, Botswana’s fifth-largest town.



According to Moreki’s website, three out of five women in Maun are breadwinners for their families, so her work is imperative.



“I was always an early bloomer,” smiles Moreki, who started school at the age of three and entered university to study accounting at the age of 16.



Recalling her early years, Moreki speaks of how she struggled with acne, and used western medicine to little avail and often adverse physical reactions.



“Nobody knows you, but everyone feels the right to talk about your situation,” she explains, remembering the one time someone suggested toothpaste and lemon juice as remedy for a breakout.



While everyone had an unsolicited comment about something she had little control over, Moreki’s confidence dropped. Then, her grandmother introduced her to the virtues of the local plants while she was on a break from university. And her skin improved.



From 2015, the idea was born; a face care range using locally-sourced and easily-available plants, which could in turn, help financially empower families.



“I was intrigued by why Moringa was in every single home, especially in my village, Kanye. When we were young, if you had back pain, or period pains, we would drink these leaves in tea.”



Kanye is a town in the southeast region of Botswana, 83 kilometers from the capital Gaborone, near the border with South Africa.



Marula grows in the south and north of Botswana. At the beginning of the year, it blooms in the south.



Organic Naturals Skincare works with a cooperative, BLG, comprising 1,800 women and men who go out and pick the Morula. They get paid for every bag.



“Before, we would just go out and gather Moringa in the wild. But instead, we have decided that unlike Marula…Moringa can actually be farmed,” says Moreki.



Organic Naturals Skincare faced a number of challenges.



“The first was finding a distribution partner, showing the legitimacy of what we’re doing, gathering the funds for testing, and most importantly ensuring the sustainability of our products on the shelves. So, going into retail was not easy… it required us to build a strong distribution.”



She adds that building the team was also a challenge.



Found in 17 stores across Botswana, Organic Naturals Skincare boasts 12 products including bar soaps, facial toners, clay masks, a facial serum, body butter, body oil and hand sanitizers.



The brand launched another product in October, a Niacinamide serum, which is a form of Vitamin B3 that helps protect cells from pollution and sunlight.



2022 has been significant as Moreki expanded to three more countries – South Africa, Zambia, and Lesotho. It has widened the scope of her work.



“Expansion means a lot of things for us, particularly in the sense that it gives us more local opportunities in terms of employment, and it also gives us the opportunity to accelerate or catalyse support in regards to our suppliers, and lastly, it means more of a footprint, it means vocalizing the power of indigenous plants on the skin and how they help people.”



Moreki is set to expand to other markets disseminating the fact that it’s time the rest of the world understood the benefits of indigenous knowledge systems.

Screenshot 2023-01-02 at 16.40.53

Business-Savvy In Botswana: From Plants To Profits

As co-founders of South Africa’s favorite load shedding app, Dan Southwood-Wells and Herman Maritz alert people about rampant power cuts so they can better plan their lives.



THE PHONE GOES PING! AND THEN THE customary alert, that the country is going in to Stage 3 or Stage 4 or even Stage 6 ‘load shedding’ – the infamous word to describe rotating power cuts in South Africa.



Every South African, every single South African, can relate to the train of thoughts and tidal wave of emotions – anger, frustration, helplessness, even depression – that succeed the moment they know they will be hit by load shedding.



The subscribers of load shedding app, EskomSePush, are perhaps better informed, and prepared, for the scheduled power cuts – or the hours that they will be plunged in darkness – thanks to the notifications on the app.



It was “just another day in the office” when Dan Southwood-Wells and Herman Maritz, the founders of EskomSePush, called “the best load shedding app”, had their epiphany for it.



“Dan and I were working together at a banking company building apps for banks,” Maritz opens. “We were building push notifications (automated messages sent by an application to a user when the application is not open) and this was in 2014.



“Then the power just went off! We were unsure if we should just stay or go home because we did not know if this was load shedding, and what stage it was,” Maritz laughs.



Adds Southwood-Wells: “In 2014, or the beginning of 2015, there was that saying going around that was like ‘is there an app for [load shedding]?’ And we thought, ‘hey, there isn’t an app for it’, and we know a little bit about app development.”



This soon became a “side hustle” for the two gentlemen who officially launched it in 2015, and garnered about 250,000 users.



“I think it was also the time,” Southwood-Wells says. “Everyone was getting over the hangover of Blackberry, and 



slowly getting into iPhones and Android was like a thing. So back then, we were like, ‘oh, this is so cool’. And [the app] did really well in 2015.”



However, soon after that, the duo had to put it to bed for a while.



“All the users went away,” says Southwood-Wells. “There was no load shedding,” Maritz completes.



But the duo returned with the app in 2018 as load shedding once again began to rear its ugly head in South Africa.



The power crisis in South Africa dates back to 2007, when load shedding was introduced.



The current period of widespread national staged rolling blackouts – as electricity supply falls behind demand – that threatens to destabilize the national power grid, has been attributed by the South African government and Eskom, the government-owned entity and primary power generator, to insufficient power generation capacity.



So far, according to business news website BusinessTech, 2022 has been South Africa’s most intensive year of power cuts to 



date, as Eskom’s coal fleet continues to deteriorate. FORBES AFRICA reported in July that South African businesses



were struggling to cope with the numerous power cuts, the worst since 2007. With some areas sustaining six-hour long outages for several days, the currency has also been negatively impacted, with local businesses sounding the alarm.



“[This] is a serious blow to an economy that is already struggling with low growth and a lack of decisive action,” said small business advocacy group Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) in a statement.



President Cyril Ramaphosa wrote in his weekly newsletter in September that the country’s “widespread public anger is wholly justified”.



“With Eskom forced to once more implement load shedding to protect the national grid, individuals, households and businesses have had to contend with power interruptions for up to four hours at a time,” Ramaphosa added.



According to the Council of Scientific &amp; Industrial Research, the outlook for next year shows that Eskom will face a shortage of 2,001MW or higher for 49 out of the 52 weeks.



Despite this bleak sequence of events and the downfall of many businesses, for EskomSePush, the outcome has been the opposite.



“We are now at 6.7 million users,” Maritz testifies about the company’s growth. “It has gone up quite a lot in the last month or two.”



The duo say it has never been about how many users they gain, but about solving a problem for themselves and wanting to help others.



The “side hustle” became a full-time job for both this year as load shedding became incessantly worse.



“It was kind of good timing in a way, because we didn’t know that this year would be specifically bad for load shedding. But yeah, it’s quite fun to see your side project becoming your main project.&#8221; Maritz admits.



“And we have a lot of fun with this,” adds Southwood-Wells, adopting an upbeat tone to address what is a serious issue. Their whole brand identity is built and centered around keeping the conversation of scheduled load shedding light. For instance, when load shedding is suspended, the user is either greeted with emojis on the notification bar of their phone or opening the app,they find a fun ‘gif’ of Will Smith.



Says Southwood-Wells: “We don’t like load shedding as much as any other South African. But if we can make it just a little bit light-hearted whilst people are finding the information they need to go about their day, then that’s a win; if we can make them smile or sing when the power is going to be turned off, that’s a win.”



“One of the biggest issues at least for me, that I would really like to solve is a lot of what is on South African minds as soon as the power goes off; [they say] ‘it’s load shedding, right?’ But that’s not always the case. It could be maintenance [issues], it could be a planned or unplanned outage where something like cable theft has happened or something has blown up,” says Maritz.



For now, the two are happy to continue building the app, especially since a permanent solution for South Africa’s uphill battle with electricity seems far-fetched.



“We’ve learned with EskomSePush that information is power. We all want to know what’s going on around us. Accurate and timely information gives us peace of mind, providing a sense of assurance in an increasingly chaotic world,” Maritz concludes grandly, even as the power goes off, signaling the end of our conversation on Zoom, and the irony of the times we are in.

Blue and Pink Gradient Motivational Quote Twitter Post

When Information Is Power: Behind The Load Shedding App In South Africa

South African design collective Always Welcome on bringing beautiful local ideas to life.



Garreth van Niekerk and Alan Hayward, co-founders and directors of the South African design store, Always Welcome, are partners in life and business.



Van Niekerk was a design journalist for a decade, while Hayward has a musical background and began an interior design business in soft furnishings five years ago. They realized the two worlds could meet – design and design storytelling.



“We’ve spent so much of our lives working apart that it’s really been a dream since we started dating to work together. So much as it’s a business, it’s our little love project as well,” says van Niekerk to FORBES AFRICA.



During Covid, the design industry was hit hard, and designers needed a way to access new markets. There was so much uncertainty, and the risk was too high for people to start their own retail stores, van Niekerk explains.



A few designers approached them about starting a collective retail store, taking the risk off individual studios, but also allowing them to step away from aspects of the business they didn’t want to do.



“Our rule at Always Welcome is everybody has to be a designer manufacturer, so they have to design and make their own stuff. And so for them, that’s their focus – retail is a whole other beast.”



They came up with a cost-splitting model, starting with eight people, for a store at Hyde Park Corner, a shopping center in an upmarket suburb in Sandton. At that stage, the mall was full of empty shops, so they proposed using collective resources to market the store – and it worked.



While they operated the Hyde Park store, they met a fan of South African design, Maurice van Heerden, the owner of Planetworld, a provider of bespoke home and auto audio solutions. Planetworld wanted to connect their products; home tech, such as smart home automation, speakers, audio and TVs for South African clients.



With this partnership, they moved to Viewing Rooms in Kramerville. With a client base that is very similar, but also dissimilar, they managed to cross-pollinate and bring the two worlds together in 2022, with over 30 designers in-store.



“The power of this collective is that it’s designed for designers, by designers. So the model has been facilitated by designers to make sure that it works for their businesses. That’s why it has been received so well – everybody has a vested interest in making it work.”



Designers can come to one place instead of many and he adds that the industry needs it just as much as the designers do.



“It’s become like its own little world, almost, where you can kind of get a sense of what the temperature is of design.”



The demand from Cape Town became overwhelming – with moving products to the Mother City and managing sales, they knew they had to begin a store there. The search for a suitable spot took months.



By chance they met an entrepreneur and philanthropist who had spent two years restoring a 300-year-old building and provincial heritage site in Cape Town.



The building is founded by Victoria Engelhorn, Tim Harris and Brad Armitage – and the store is one of the Habitus ‘lighthouse’ initiatives intended to restore the inner-city’s social, commercial, creative and integrated work environments to pre-pandemic days.



The Always Welcome Heritage House launched in November in Cape Town, spanning two floors of the building and encompassing 40 of southern Africa’s designers-manufacturers.



The launch has been a marked success.



Van Niekerk says it’s a different vibe to Johannesburg’s Viewing Rooms; an old building with abundant walls, there’s space for a lot more art, and it feels more like a house.



“It’s a completely different customer; people seem to be looking for bigger things, pieces must be bigger, the design must be more outlandish than the things we presented. It’s been interesting…to open up to completely different markets.”



In terms of the foundation of temporary South African design, the big names in the store include Dokter and Missus, Houtlander, and Haldane as a few examples. Van Niekerk says there’s also newer studios that are coming up like MashT Studio – one of the founders’ designs has just been acquired by the Louvre Museum. The Urbanative is another black female designer who is changing the game, he adds.



Always Welcome’s approach is to make sure that the manufacturers have the capacity to supply a 100 chairs if a customer orders it.



“Organizationally, we are too small of a business to be able to facilitate the growth of another company while we’re trying to build our own. So we’ve tried to stay away from development up until now, until we’ve got a partner who can help us do that.”



On November 24, they launched a partnership with the clothing brand H&amp;M.



He says that it’s been great to work with such a big corporate company, and get exposure to a wider audience.



Photographer Trevor Stuurman was putting up his photography prints in their Hyde Park store. In the Viewing Rooms in Kramerville, they worked with him on two listening pods, where he designed textiles and wallpapers, an immersive visual and musical experience of diametrical opposites – one room is warm colors and the other is cool.



Stuurman collaborated with Dokter and Missus on two pieces of furniture, and his first rug with MONN Carpets. It’s evolved from pictures on a wall to working with other designers in the collective – a modus operandi with Always Welcome.



Usually people would be in competition with each other, but in this collective, designers get to share information about manufacturing or work together on ideas to bring them to life.



Big brands are coming to Always Welcome to collaborate – one of them is the American Hardwood Export Council, a state-funded organization. American Hardwood is one of the most sustainable hardwoods in the world, and van Niekerk says when they arrive in South Africa, they are carbon negative.



After they approached Always Welcome, the collective made a project called Future Heirlooms. It involved seven local designers who had never worked with this wood before, giving them an open brief responding to sustainability and heritage. Houtlander manufactured the pieces. With the combination of design, a corporation and curation, seven spectacular pieces were realized, van Niekerk says.



They are setting up partnerships to expand opportunities for designers from across the continent, and for designers in southern Africa to start working with their counterparts across Africa and the diaspora.



When van Niekerk and Hayward have time, they walk their Pomeranians named Hercules and Leonardo down the promenade at sunset. Johannesburg has their hearts though, so you can expect to



see them back in the city of gold soon. But wherever they are, they’ll be getting designers together, highlighting the best of local creations.



Editor’s Note: Updated 30 December 2022-This article has been slightly modified from the original to correct certain factual inaccuracies. We regret the error.

Alan Hayward and Garreth van Niekerk outside Always Welcome Heritage House by Paula Young

South African Entrepreneurs On The Power Of The Designers Collective

Seven years ago, FORBES AFRICA interviewed Letty Ngobeni on her rise to successful entrepreneurship despite her disadvantaged background. Now, she is running not one, but multiple businesses that survived the onslaught of Covid-19.



This is a story of how South Africa has had its share of survivors and thrivers during the pandemic.



Take the case of Letty Ngobeni, from a small village called Nkuri in South Africa’s Limpopo province. As a child, her family was unable to afford school fees or uniforms, and she would often go to bed hungry.



It’s irony that she went on to become a teacher for 19 years. And thereafter, an entrepreneur.



Her maintenance company, Integrico, has catered to big clients in the country such as City Power, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and MTN.



Not only that, after running a successful catering business, Mndhavazi Caterers, she now runs OBC Vosloorus, a butchery and grocery store in Midrand, Johannesburg, marking her expansion into retail.



She has even opened up a guesthouse in the West Rand of Johannesburg called RNB Boutique Guesthouse. And there’s more to come.



“We are also adding a culinary school, which is called RNB culinary school, accredited by SETA. So we are fully fledged to operate a school, which we plan to open next year. So, we have been expanding in terms of our scope,” Ngobeni says to FORBES AFRICA.



A differentiating factor with the school is that they don’t only train the chefs, but employ them after, absorbing them into the corporate canteens.



Currently, they have 18 corporate canteens.



“I think what I&#8217;ve learned during the past six years, and especially during the time of Covid is that it is important to balance your finances. I went for training, an incubation program with Property Point, where they have taught us the importance of cash flow. You need to have cash flow at least for a period of six months, just to cater for unforeseen expenses.”



“I know people say ‘use other people&#8217;s money to make money,’ but I beg to differ. I don&#8217;t like using other people&#8217;s money to make money. Because when Covid hit, and you are owing the bank, or any other company that financed you, then how are you going to pay that back? Instead, the interest rates keep on piling, you end up owing a lot, and then you are unable to pay back the money that you owe.”



Ngobeni says when Covid-19 came, they didn’t owe anyone anything, a saving grace during the pandemic.



She says while her husband and her were “extremely sick” with Covid, they had to rely on and trust their managers, who were given an opportunity to showcase what they were capable of and managed to impress Ngobeni.



“I have learned to appreciate the value of life. And I have also learned that material things are just vanity.”



She says that she has realized that no matter how much money you have, money cannot buy life.



When Ngobeni’s husband was first ill with Covid, she took him to the hospital, but there were no beds available in the ICU. They had to wait, and the doctor asked her what she wanted to do.



She asked them to get a bed for her husband. Around midnight, she pretended to be strong so they would allow her to drive home, despite her breathing issues.



Before leaving the hospital, however, she asked her son to bring her laptop to the hospital, and contacted their financial advisor. She could not speak because of the state of her lungs, so she sent WhatsApp messages, asking the financial advisor to make changes to their finances to allow their children access to their funds.



When Ngobeni woke up the next morning, around 6AM, she was surprised and thankful to be alive. Her husband spent two weeks in hospital, but also pulled through.



She says another thing she has learned through Covid-19 is that a life of tenders is not a sustainable way of doing business. As the MTN canteens had closed during the hard lockdown, there would have been no other sustainable form of income. Luckily, their retail business kept them afloat.



“People always need to eat,” she explains.



Rolling black outs, or ‘load shedding’, as it’s known in South Africa, has affected Ngobeni’s retail store. They had to buy a generator, and the price of diesel has increased, which has affected their profits.



“Load shedding is especially killing small businesses. I think that it does affect big businesses, but not at the scale at which it affects medium enterprises, like us.”



During the pandemic, as people lost jobs, she also increased her Corporate Social Investment efforts, buying sanitary pads and soccer kits for schools and supplying food every month to places they thought were in need.



“We can afford to share with other people who had nothing during that time, a practice that we are still continuing even now. Because for me, personally, when I give, I derive a certain joy that I cannot explain, so giving has become part of me.”



And the most important thing she realized running businesses?



“If you don&#8217;t have a team, it&#8217;s nothing. The most important and critical assets are your people, your employees, your team.”

Screenshot 2022-12-13 at 20.59.50

The Joys Of Profit And Purpose For This South African Entrepreneur

Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) Africa, a free Machine Learning conference, makes it possible for anyone in Africa to learn about AI and interact with world-class speakers and entities.



In 2020, AMLD Africa was founded to #DemocratizeMachineLearning in Africa. Two years later, AMLD Africa presented the African continent their second edition: an opportunity to learn, be inspired, and network with experts from multinationals (IBM, Google, Oracle, AWS), giant Moroccan companies (OCP), diplomatic and governmental entities (Ministry of the Digital Transition and administration reform) and even Turing Award Recipient (Nobel’s price in Computer Science) Yoshua Bengio.



A machine learning conference can cost up to $1000 per person per day. Conferences allow participants to not only learn state-of-the-art technologies but also connect and network with both the scientific and corporate communities.



“My hard work and my place of privilege allowed me to study in a world-renowned university, and therefore, interact with world-renowned experts. I am glad to have access to such opportunities, but is it fair to those who deserve it but can’t afford it?” questions Ines Bahej, a head organizer of AMLD Africa. That is why a group of the African Diaspora in Switzerland founded Machine Learning for Africa (MLA) to bring closer what they have to those who don’t.



What exactly is AMLD Africa?



Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) is a conference founded by Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2017. The conference expanded its reach to Africa – specifically, Ben Guerir, Morocco. From the 3rd to the 5th of November 2022, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) hosted the second edition of AMLD Africa: an impact-oriented, interdisciplinary and inclusive initiative. Despite the fact AMLD Africa literally contains the word “Machine Learning”, it is not about “Machine Learning”. It’s an invitation to discuss and assess the impact that comes with this fascinating tool and learn from applied implementations in the African continent. In fact, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is sector-agnostic, and that is why talks were divided into different relevant tracks that impact the continent and the world. Here’s the interview of Guillaume Scheurer, the Swiss ambassador in Morocco on the importance of AI for the growth of business in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTz_k1Pmrh8



During a climate change crisis, AMLD Africa shed a light on Africa&#8217;s research on water resource management. In a post-pandemic era, the conference broadcasted how we can use AI in healthcare, such as in breast cancer’s detection. However, AI is not a magical wand that can transform challenges into magical solutions. We have been reminded not only of its limitations but also the need to use it ethically because “with great power, comes great responsibility.”



AMLD Africa aims to share this power and inform the responsibilities that come with it to all data enthusiasts. The impact of the conference goes beyond the walls of the venue and has reached almost 3000 participants from more than 70 countries (including 35 African Countries). Participants all over the continent not only watched the conference through their screens but even gathered in physical broadcasts organized by local ambassadors in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, Tunisia, DRC, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, South Africa, and Algeria.



AMLD Africa is not only inclusive to participants but also to speakers. The conference has invited speakers from public and private sectors (the Minister of Digital Transformation and the Vice President of Oracle), from the academic and corporate environment (a lecturer from a Kenyan University and the Chief Transformation Officer of OCP) but also from the scientific, business, and even diplomatic sector as even the AI director of the European Commission was able to share her thoughts on Europe’s AI strategy. The conference was a strong reminder that democratizing Machine Learning is neither a private nor a public sector but will only be achieved through a global and comprehensive strategy.



What’s next?



Every ending is a new beginning, and the closing of the conference announced the beginning of an initiative that unites and inspires a continent. In a local interview, Nour Ghalia Abassi, a head organizer of AMLD Africa, gave a glance at the future steps of Machine Learning for Africa.



AMLD Africa is an African initiative, therefore the impact of the conference should not be geographically limited to a country. The association has launched several discussions about what country should host this initiative.



She strongly believes that #DemocratizingMachineLearning will not only be achieved throughout a three-day conference. We will therefore organize other initiatives that will target African researchers and job seekers. These initiatives will aim to create bridges between the public, private, and academic sectors.



Artificial Intelligence presents ethical, social, and economic challenges, but these challenges come with an undeniable opportunity to leapfrog the technological infrastructure associated with the Third Industrial Revolution. The more passionate talents benefit from easy access to technology, the more initiatives will leverage data, and the more AI could benefit our daily life. If you are wondering how that can be done, then AMLD Africa is the conference to follow.


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How Applied Machine Learning Days Impacted Africa

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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<figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Kar-go-Delivery-Bot-1-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-56947" width="646" height="431" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Kar-go-Delivery-Bot-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Kar-go-Delivery-Bot-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Kar-go-Delivery-Bot-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Kar-go-Delivery-Bot-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Kar-go-Delivery-Bot-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 646px) 100vw, 646px" /></figure></div>


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

Wall Street billionaires Carl Icahn, Ken Griffin, Israel Englander and Daniel Loeb can thank Elon Musk for what might be 2022’s easiest money trade.



For many hedge funds,&nbsp;Elon Musk’s $44 billion “forced” purchase of Twitter represented an easy money trade.



“You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that he was going to finish that deal,” said Carl Icahn at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2022/11/03/carl-icahn-would-have-waged-a-proxy-fight-for-twitter-if-musk-deal-fell-through/?sh=684d42f74623">Forbes Iconoclast Summit</a>&nbsp;on November 3, adding that he would have&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2022/11/03/carl-icahn-would-have-waged-a-proxy-fight-for-twitter-if-musk-deal-fell-through/?sh=5928e07d4623">considered waging a proxy fight</a>&nbsp;if the deal fell through.



Icahn told the audience at New York’s Historical Society that he made a profit of around $250 million by investing in Twitter this summer. But he was far from the only one to benefit. Regulatory filings show that billionaire-led hedge funds including Citadel Advisors, Millennium Management, D.E. Shaw and Third Point built large positions in Twitter in the second and third quarters, as well as other firms like Pentwater Capital and Farallon Capital.



Musk signed a merger agreement to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share in April, but the stock was trading as low as $32.65 by July when he tried to terminate the deal. That created an arbitrage opportunity for as much as a 66% return for investors who doubted Musk had much of a chance in the Delaware Court of Chancery to back out.



Icahn’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/921669/000153949722001801/xslForm13F_X01/infotable.xml" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">third-quarter 13-F filing</a>&nbsp;with the SEC shows that he owned 12.5 million Twitter shares as of September 30. He said at the&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;summit he bought in the mid-$30s–if he bought at an average price of $35 per share and made a $19.20 profit on each one when the deal closed at the original price of $54.20 per share on October 28, he would have netted a $240 million profit.



The only fund that made a bigger bet than Icahn was Naples, Florida-based Pentwater Capital Management, founded by Matthew Halbower in 2007. It bought 18.1 million shares during the second quarter and added another 5.3 million shares as of the end of the third quarter. If it bought those 24 million shares at Twitter stock’s median closing price of $40.16 in the first quarter and $41.05 in the second quarter and held them through the completion of the acquisition in October, it would have made $324 million in profit, though its 13-F filing shows it hedged some of those gains by buying put options as well. Pentwater didn’t respond to a request for comment.



In all,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;found 13 hedge funds that spent upwards of $100 million adding to their Twitter stakes between the end of the first quarter and the end of the third quarter this year. We reached out to each fund to ask for average purchase prices, and estimated that they bought at Twitter’s median closing price in each quarter if more precise information wasn’t available. These funds cumulatively purchased more than 10% of the company in the six months leading up to September 30 and likely made well over $1 billion in profits on the deal.



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<h4 id="h-twitter-winners">TWITTER WINNERS</h4>



<h4 id="h-these-hedge-funds-added-the-most-to-their-twitter-positions-this-spring-and-summer-and-likely-minted-profits-if-they-held-on-through-elon-musk-s-purchase">These hedge funds added the most to their Twitter positions this spring and summer and likely minted profits if they held on through Elon Musk&#8217;s purchase.</h4>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="800" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-1024x800.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56886" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-1024x800.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-300x234.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49-768x600.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-21-at-15.52.49.png 1480w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption>Source: SEC 13-F Filings</figcaption></figure>



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These numbers don’t include any additional shares the firms may have purchased in October, when the margins were slimmer while Musk finalized the acquisition, and don’t include possible trading that took place within each quarter. 13-F filings show a simple snapshot of each firm’s long stock holdings on the last day of each quarter and don’t provide enough information to pin down exact gains and losses, but often represent the most thorough picture of what funds are buying and selling.



The biggest winners included Hong Kong-based Segantii Capital Management, founded by British investor Simon Sadler, and Farallon Capital, the San Francisco-based firm founded by Thomas Steyer in 1986 and now run by Andrew Spokes.



David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital initiated a position of 4.3 million shares in the third quarter, his 13-F filing shows, and he wrote in a letter to investors viewed by&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;that the average purchase price was $37.24 per share. He expected that the Delaware Court of Chancery would be wary of inviting future buyer’s remorse suits if it let Musk walk away.



“The case law on this is quite clear. If it were anyone other than Musk, we would handicap the odds of the buyer wiggling out of the deal to be much less than 5%,” Einhorn wrote in the letter prior to the completion of the deal. “At this price there is $17 per share of upside if TWTR prevails in court and we believe about $17 per share of downside, if the deal breaks. So, we are getting 50-50 odds on something that should happen 95%+ of the time.”



Musk saw the writing on the wall and reversed course in October, agreeing to pay the full price as these investors expected. His first weeks as Twitter’s owner have been marked by confusion and complaints after he opened verification to anyone willing to pay $8 per month, causing a wave of “verified” parody accounts, and laid off 3,700 employees, almost half of its staff. He has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/10/musk-tells-staff-twitter-could-go-bankrupt-without-financial-turnaround-reports-say/?sh=5cc89ccc7257">warned Twitter’s staff</a>&nbsp;that “bankruptcy is not out of the question,” but if his $44 billion equity investment goes up in smoke, the hedge funds he paid that cash to will be laughing all the way to the bank.



By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff

Twitter Losing Its Most Active Users

Elon Musk’s Twitter Buyout Was A Billion Dollar Windfall For These 13 Hedge Funds

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Survivors and Thrivers: The Women Fronting Some Of South Africa’s Coolest Startups

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 

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

Recruiters, leadership experts and board directors say the path to the top job, and the skills needed to succeed in it, has changed.



The mission of a CEO used to be fairly straightforward. Set the vision and strategy of your company and make sure the right people are in the right roles. Be sensitive to the needs of employees, customers, suppliers and others in your orbit but make shareholders your top priority. Above all else, grow as fast and as big as you can.&nbsp;



But as the world has changed, so have the demands of the CEO job— and the skills needed to succeed in it. Between the pandemic and polarization, climate change and cancel culture, the role has evolved in ways that few would have imagined a few years ago. CEO contenders lack a clear grasp on how the jobs they’re pursuing will change while those at the helm can offer only limited guidance.&nbsp;



What many CEOs increasingly realize is that the change has to start from within. Dick Patton, who co-leads the global CEO practice for recruitment firm Egon Zehnder, detected a mood of deep reflection among the 972 global CEOs they&nbsp;<a href="https://www.egonzehnder.com/it-starts-with-the-ceo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">surveyed in a study</a>last year. Nearly 80% of CEO participants said they needed to transform themselves as well as their organizations, and be more adaptive and self-aware.



Part of what’s fueling a new mindset is the recognition that trust and transparency have become vital to business success. Stephen Miles, an executive coach and founder of the Miles Group, argues that the CEO has gone from being the leader who runs the company to the person who must also promote the company’s purpose, impact and credentials as an employer of choice. In short, they must defend the company’s license to operate. That requires “more influence-building, team-building, people-related skills,” says Miles, not to mention the courage to initiate change on weak signals and be open about their own struggles to connect with people.&nbsp;



Emotional intelligence becomes more critical as the demands for CEOs to engage in political hot-button topics mount. “You have to anticipate whether someone will have the instincts and the intestinal fortitude,” says Jane Stevenson, a vice chair at Korn Ferry who leads its global CEO succession practice. “The expectation of CEOs to take a stand—and to know when to take the stand and when to be quiet—is huge. It&#8217;s always been about who the person is. Now it’s who the person is, squared.”&nbsp;



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<h3 id="h-a-need-for-bolder-boards">A Need For Bolder Boards&nbsp;</h3>



Boards are starting—slowly—to think more broadly about the skills and profile needed to succeed as a CEO in this environment. Experience in operating and running a business is still essential—but a wider range of resumes and roles is under consideration. Diversity candidates are in higher demand, as are traits such as agility, resilience and political judgment.&nbsp;



“Boards are bucking conventional wisdom a bit more,” says Tim Conti, managing partner of executive search firm ON Partners. “The best boards recognize a CEO is just one member of an executive team, and if complemented properly, can come from a lot of new backgrounds.”&nbsp;



That doesn’t mean directors are rushing to take risks. CEO turnover dropped during the pandemic, as many boards put a premium on stability and familiarity to get through the crisis. While CEO openings among Fortune 500 and S&amp;P 500 companies have picked up, most of those slots are filled through internal promotions, according to the latest Crist Kolder Volatility Report of America’s Leading Companies. Only 18.9% of new CEO hires through July were external candidates, versus 30.7% in 2019.&nbsp;That could indicate more robust succession planning and leadership development—or a lack of imagination at a time when companies need it most.



Jim Citrin, who leads Spencer Stuart’s CEO practice, argues that many boards are being too conservative at a time when they need the courage to make bold choices. “Some of the best-performing CEOs were not the obvious choices,” says Citrin. “Boards basically define success as an internal promotion; failure as having to go outside. In this moment of change and dramatic stakes, all of us need to be creative and courageous.”



While the usual route to the CEO’s office is through the president’s or COO’s job, that is not always the best path. A recent report from Spencer Stuart found that over the past 20 years, 85 percent of S&amp;P 500 CEOs have come from one of four “last mile” roles: chief operating officer, a division-level CEO role, chief financial officer and “leapfrog” leaders who held executive jobs another rung or two from the top. The most successful CEOs were those promoted from a few levels down; the least were CEOs who came from the CFO function. While the latter group knew how to turn a profit, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/the-cfos-last-mile-building-towards-success-as-ceo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">study</a>&nbsp;found they weren’t as strong at driving top-line growth.&nbsp;



<h3 id="h-"></h3>



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“Some of the best-performing CEOs were not the obvious choices &#8230; In this moment of change and dramatic stakes, all of us need to be creative and courageous.”Jim Citrin, Spencer Stuart



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The message is not to discount the value of leading the finance function but rather to supplement it with other responsibilities and C-suite roles. Bonnie Gwin, co-managing partner of the global CEO and board practice at Heidrick &amp; Struggles, says there is demand “for CFOs who are strategic and have played really strategic thought partner roles with their CEO.”&nbsp;



There’s a growing appreciation for experience in other C-suite roles, too. A stint as a chief marketing officer or chief customer officer can be essential for running consumer-facing companies. The chief product officer is also gaining ground as a stepping stone to the CEO job, according to Mark Oppenheimer, CEO of Modern Executive Solutions, as it often “brings together sales, product, strategy and operational responsibilities.” Jeff Christian, who leads the search firm Christian &amp; Timbers, agrees, adding that “product people are becoming the next generation CEOs.”&nbsp;



Perhaps the most common resume builder that indicates a CEO could be destined for the corner office is experience on a high-profile public board of directors. “Getting on some of these major boards is a very interesting corollary to someone getting CEO calls,” says Jana Rich, founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based Rich Talent Group. “You’re networked in a different way. You’re getting incredible exposure to people in the boardroom.”&nbsp;



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<h3 id="h-a-premium-but-limited-progress-on-diversity">A Premium—But Limited Progress—On Diversity</h3>



Whatever their background, one promising sign is that new CEOs are more likely to be women or people of color. Of the 682 CEOs tracked in the Crist Kolder report, 7.3% were women as of July 31 – up from 6.9% last year and 1.9% in 2010. Heidrick &amp; Struggles took an even broader look at 1,095 CEOs in 24 countries and found women accounted for 13% of new CEOs during the first half of last year, about double from six months earlier. Racial diversity is a slower climb, although Indian-born leaders continue to ascend to CEO roles, most recently at companies like Starbucks and FedEx.&nbsp;



When it comes to the skills in demand for CEOs, some measures of potential remain constant. After studying data from thousands of CEO assessments, Elena Botelho, a partner at leadership advisory ghSMART, distilled the core behaviors for success to the acronym DARE – decisive, adaptable, reliable and engaging for impact. While the framework is unchanged, Botelho says “adaptability became really paramount” amid the pandemic, which is less about the ability to spot a shift than to immediately respond to it.



Resilience is critical. For current CEOs, the exhaustion of the last two years is real, despite it being a job where the median pay was a record-high $14.5 million last year for S&amp;P 500 CEOs, according to an Equilar/Associated Press study. The rinse-and-repeat series of crises and the dizzying rate of technological change is shifting how CEOs lead, how quickly they’re ready to pass the baton, and what their ambitions may be.&nbsp;



While the current generation of CEO-ready leaders has arguably lived through more booms, busts and industry-shattering innovations than the people who came before them, many still feel unprepared. Faced with the prospect of added stress and scrutiny, some recruiters say a lot of candidates also want the job less and less. They can earn millions through other C-suite roles without the constant scrutiny and stress.



Still, for as long as there have been ambitious people, there have been people ambitious to lead. Increasingly, the brass ring is likely to go to those who are ambitious to learn. As Matthew Smith, an executive coach and former chief learning officer at McKinsey puts it: “Leaders who adapt and pivot with speed in the face of opportunities will outperform those who are over-reliant on the skills and habits that got them to the top.”



By Diane Brady and Jena McGregor, Forbes Staff

Black businessman working in new office

The CEO’s Role Is Changing. What It Takes To Get The Top Job Now

<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“We challenged the legality of the levy. LHRC supports the payment of tax but imposing a levy on top of [regular] taxes is not fair.”</blockquote></figure>



By Inaara Gangji



The government of Tanzania removed levies on electronic money transactions up to Tsh30,000 through banks and is once again reducing mobile money transaction levies up to 50% starting October 1, after public outcry. The decision was announced by the Minister of Finance and Planning, Dr Mwigulu Nchemba, in Parliament on Tuesday.



“We discussed and reviewed a number of issues including reducing tax and levies’ burden on the people, encouraging the use of cash transactions, simplifying tax collection, and avoiding double taxation for both parties – that’s the sender and receiver,” he said.



The decision seeks to reduce the financial burden on low-income consumers, especially small businesses, women, and working-class people in rural areas who extensively use mobile money, and is a step towards better financial inclusion.



Mobile money is a key driver of socio-economic growth, and formalizes the economy, according to research by the GSMA.



Mobile money transaction levies were introduced in July 2021 by the government to reportedly finance social development projects, followed by the new electronic bank transaction levies from August 15 last year.



Following the introduction of the mobile money levy in 2021, the average transaction fee reportedly increased to three times the average fee for East Africa in July 2021. Cash out values reduced and many users and businesses as a result, as per reports, faced losses and moved away from using mobile money.



The levies were met with criticism from certain quarters, with stakeholders saying they were in fact increasing the burden on consumers. In August 2021, the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) filed a lawsuit against the government.



“We challenged the legality of the levy. LHRC supports the payment of tax but imposing a levy on top of [regular] taxes is not fair,” says Anna Henga, Executive Director of LHRC in Tanzania, to FORBES AFRICA.



This is the third time levies have been amended to assist consumers with rising living costs.



Dr Nchemba said that the government will instead now reduce its expenditure. “Let’s cut tea, snacks, domestic, and foreign trips for the officials of our ministries as the President (Samia Suluhu Hassan) has instructed. Let’s cut training, seminars, concerts, workshops.”



Tanzania’s mobile money market reached a value of $54.5 billion in 2021 and had 33.2 million mobile money accounts, making the country the leader in the East African market with 44% of adults having access to banking through these services.



“We appeal to the government to completely remove the mobile money levy. Doing so will support economic growth and allow citizens to fully benefit from the huge benefits of mobile connectivity in Tanzania,” says Angela Wamola, the GSMA’s Head of Sub-Saharan Africa, to FORBES AFRICA.

Mobile/Contactless Payment – showing to older man how it works

Tanzania Amends Controversial Levies On Electronic Money Transactions

Kobina Ackon, popularly known as Wode Maya, is Ghana’s first YouTuber to hit over a million subscribers. His channel creating positive African content has won him followers and a fortune.



AT JUST 23 YEARS OLD, AMERICAN YOUTUBE megastar Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has reportedly amassed over 10 billion views on his YouTube channel, and taken home a staggering $54 million in 2021 by posting hilarious and philanthropic content.



In 2019, CNBC reported that a survey done by Danish toy-maker Lego found that about a third of children aged between eight and 12 dream of becoming vloggers or YouTubers; the survey polled kids in the United States, China and the United Kingdom.



But that trend has now slowly also made its way into Africa. And young content creators on the continent are glued to their monitors and screens to catch up on all the social media action and monetize it, just like their global counterparts.



KobinaAckon, popularly known by the moniker Wode Maya,is one such African sensation – he is Ghana’s first YouTuber to hit over a million subscribers.



But Ackon never aspired to be a digital star. He had wanted to become an aeronautical engineer. He and his family had humble beginnings in the Western Region of Ghana, where they lived five siblings to one room and used rice bags as school bags. Ackon was taught from an early age the value of humility. After completing his secondary school education in Ghana, Ackon relocated to China to further his studies as an aeronautical engineer.



But contrary to what most people believe, success on YouTube did not come overnight for him. In fact, it was a slow and steady rise filled with trial and error tracking analytics that would guide him to the right blend of content to identify a niche that would give him six-figure success.



That said, the genesis of his YouTube channel was quite an by accident.



“I never wanted to be a YouTuber. During vacation, I couldn’t travel because I didn’t have money to go back to Ghana and so we spent our time in our dorms. So, a friend came to me and said ‘let’s go out and shoot a video’. I was the main character in that video.



“Afterwards, they gave me the video and I realized I didn’t have a pen drive or anywhere to save this video so I decided to save it on the internet and that is when I saved it on YouTube,” recalls Ackon. That video became a sensation amongst his friends and based on the positive feedback, Ackon decided to do another video detailing how he met his Chinese girlfriend. He got a 1,000 followers but unfortunately his subsequent efforts didn’t fare too well.



“I did more comedic videos and people said you are not funny and they stopped watching them. But I had a passion for it so I kept doing it and started doing more research on the platform. That is when I started consuming a lot of content on YouTube and realized I can actually be a millionaire on YouTube.”



But his Eureka moment would come after convincing his father to let him try content creation rather than engineering.



“So, I kept on pushing for two years and trying to make it work until my dad found one of my videos and got extremely mad at me and that is when my mum came in and said I can do whatever I want and she will take care of my dad. Two weeks later, my dad gave me his blessing and told me one thing that changed the game for me. He said you speak Chinese, so why don’t you use the Chinese language to bridge the gap between Africans and Chinese people and that was my breakthrough,” avers Ackon. He took his father’s advice and his channel grew to 8,000 subscribers. Ackon had found his niche and things began to slowly take off. He began making videos to help the Chinese better understand Africa and Africans and before long, he had peaked at about 100,000 subscribers.



But even then, something wasn’t adding up for Ackon.



“I felt like the videos I was doing was attracting Africans to China but China was not my country and I am trying to change the narrative of Africans living in China but it was still not working. So, I said to myself ‘let me come to Africa and preach about Africa to Chinese people’.”



That’s when he discovered that even Africansdidn’t know much about other countries on the continent. In 2018, he made the decision to start profiling the continent of Africa to not only the Chinese but to Africans both at home and in the diaspora. He received a loan from a Chinese friend who booked him on a pan-African tour of five countries.



“When I did that, within a month, I had 50,000 people following my channel. And it had taken me four years to get to 100,000 people. It showed me that a lot of people were yearning for African content,” says Ackon.



Today, with over 1.1 million subscribers, Ackonsays he is raking in anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 a month from his YouTube channel. Most of his revenue comes from YouTube advertisements as well as from charging up to $10,000 a pop to profile Africa’s brightest entrepreneurs.Along the way, he has also picked up some invaluable pearls of wisdom from them.



“The youth of Africa don’t really have mentors and during Covid is when I had the chance to spend time with African entrepreneurs and they changed my life in the way of investment and I actually started investing in 2021. I had money but it was sitting in a bank and I didn’t know what to do with it because our parents taught us that if you have money, keep it in the bank, get married buy a house and buy a car and that is what I was doing. Until I met entrepreneurs and that is when I decided to invest in land, buy real estate and hired a team of about 10 people who work for me to expand the brand,” says Ackon.



His next milestone is to interview Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, on how he built his wealth. He also wants his channel to only push out positive African narratives to the world.For now, he certainly has the world’s attention.

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CHANNELING FAME: Meet Ghana’s first YouTuber to hit over a million subscribers

The word ‘multi’ comes up many times in a conversation with 28-year-old Dubai-based Nigerian businesswoman Gbemi Giwa.



“I am a multi-passionate entrepreneur with a knack for turning ideas into creative impactful brands…. I am a multi-hyphenated person…” she says in a Zoom interview on a hot summer day in August from her abode in the sunny city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.



Although Giwa started out as an influencer and launched several businesses in the glistening Middle Eastern emirate by the time she turned 26, she is wary of calling herself ‘a serial entrepreneur’.



Now making a conscious effort to focus solely on her core competence – the food business – she says her passion project remains Catfish, an online restaurant serving “a healthy twist on African dishes” that she launched in Dubai in 2018.



The realization to hone in on one serious endeavor came after a few “bold moves” and the twists and turns that the Covid-19 pandemic brought when Giwa was forced to close down Gbemi’s Kitchen, the physical restaurant she started in 2019 at the Jumeirah Lake Towers in Dubai serving authentic Nigerian food.



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“In 2020, Covid hit and for the first time, I navigated a big loss with the shutting of my restaurant concepts, forcing me to start afresh with a larger focus on building a Covid-proof business with a deeper focus on digital,” she says of those tough months.



She started by launching a consulting company called Digiboss to help women in business build their online profiles to establish themselves as thought leaders, whilst consistently attracting profitable partnership opportunities.



“I help millennial women build an impactful personal brand and commit to taking action by teaching them profitable action steps to validate their creative ideas, craft them into polished concepts and launch them into the real world,” says Giwa.



“Using the same method I teach my clients, I was able to secure funding to relaunch my restaurant Catfish just at the end of the pandemic. I’m currently navigating our redirection into the e-commerce space and retail by taking a piece of the growing ready-to-eat industry.”



The food business is not new for her. It was while at design school in 2014 that she launched Dubai Fit Foodie, a wellness blog she calls her “longest-paying side hustle”. Her growing years shaped her early love for African food and she wanted to give it the respect it deserved.



A year later, she turned her love for dancing by launching dance classes in Dubai, teaching Afrofit, which she calls her “second longest-paying side hustle”.



In 2016, she specialized in creating impactful digital campaigns for local and international brands in the Middle East. A year later, yet again foraying into the business world, she launched a boutique agency specializing in branding and content creation for F&amp;B concepts.



‘A good idea is nothing without action’. 



Even when she was 16, on a plane to Dubai from Lagos to enrol at the American University of Sharjah, she was already harboring ideas of creating content and an impactful career. Even if at times, this meant going against the norm and using the word ‘no’ multiple times to her now-late father, also a businessman, who took a keen interest in her professional journey.



“I am from a classic African family that says ‘either you become a doctor or a lawyer, or you are nobody’.



“But ever since I went to design school, I’ve been obsessed with ideas. I believe good ideas come when you explore and exhaust several bad ideas, but a good idea is nothing without action.”



Luckily, she was glad to find herself in Dubai.



“It’s one of the easiest places to do business in, especially if you know the right people and have the money… I always tell youngsters it’s better to partner with the right mentor, as they have the experience and you can keep learning from them.”



Where there’s hustle, there’s also heart.



“My passion will always be around creating content, product, and brands that reflect my African roots and help people embrace wellness in order to feel like their happier healthiest selves,” says Giwa.



Currently catering for events and working towards moving Catfish into the e-commerce space, she will also be seen at The Ripe Market, a farmers’ market in Dubai, from October.

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Hustle And Heart: The Nigerian Entrepreneur Promoting African Food In Dubai

Producing and retailing mead, Ernst Thompson and Robert Bernatzeder aim to establish it as a mainstream alcoholic beverage in African society and tell its story on the continent.



By Nick Said



MEAD IS THE FIRST ALCOHOLIC DRINK connected to humans and is thought to have originated in Africa some 20,000 years ago, but along with the Vikings and other medieval marauders has largely been surpassed by modern equivalents. That is until now.



Made from fermented honey, mead is growing in popularity again thanks in a large part to the television series Game of Thrones and the throngs of its followers who lap up every detail of the show to replicate in their daily lives.



“Many people in South Africa don’t know what mead is, despite the fact it is a real African drink,” Dr Ernst Thompson, owner of Cape Town Meadery, tells FORBES AFRICA.



“It is massive in the United States. Popular culture has commercialized it there over the last 10 or 12 years and it is the fastest-growing alcoholic sector.”



In South Africa, mead was a way for the Khoisan people to ‘speak to the Gods’ and is known as iQhilika in the country’s Eastern Cape province, where it remains a popular drink with cultural significance.



But it is a tiny market in what is a huge beverage industry in the country, something Thompson is hoping to change having partnered with brother-in-law and fellow entrepreneur Robert Bernatzeder.



Their meadery, the only one of its kind in South Africa, bottles traditional products, as well as mead-based sparkling wines and beers.



“The beauty of the technology we use is that it was developed in South Africa and based on indigenous knowledge,” Thompson says.



He admits it can be a tough sell to get people to switch from traditional wines to mead products, especially if there are preconceived ideas that it is too sweet, but says those who taste it are very pleasantly surprised.



“Liquid on lips is key to get people to try the product and it is great to see the reaction we get at tastings, which are key for us in educating the market about mead. The only real difference is that the alcohol is not produced from the sugar in grapes, but rather sugar in honey.”



Their champagne-style product is “proper bubbles” according to Thompson, and a variety of it is exported under licence to the United Kingdom and Germany as the Van Hunks brand.



“We are the only people in the world who really do this [create mead-based sparkling wine] and we are able to do it because of the technology we have developed,” he says.



“I have got a PhD in Nutritional Physiology, I love biotech and fermentation. My previous business, Beonics, was based on creating natural antibiotics from propolis, which is also from bees.”



To produce one bottle of an ordinary grape-based champagne takes about 500 liters of water.



With mead, that is cut down to as little as 25 liters.



It is a significant advantage and with climate change already a factor, is a more sustainable product than traditional wines.



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“A lot of areas where wine is currently being produced will struggle, because it is just getting too warm due to climate change,” Thompson predicts.



Like many businesses, a changing environment around the Covid-19 pandemic has meant he has had to be agile and he has recently switched focus to tackling the local market.



“The cost of exporting has gone from R3,500 ($207) per pallet to R14,000 ($830),” he says.



“That was when I started creating the quick turnover products, not something that takes two years to produce [like a sparkling wine], but rather a product that takes a month.”



Those are more traditional mead products that have started to become available in local retail outlets. But as Thompson explains, it is not as simple as putting bottles in store.



“The biggest problem is, where do they [retailers] put it on the shelf? Do they put it with the champagne? You can’t. You have to open a mead section, but that is a big ask, especially if it is only me producing.



“In this case it would actually be better to have competition, which would create a larger market.”



Thompson recently brought on board Bernatzeder to turn the Cape Town Meadery into a family business and help develop the marketing and sales side.



“Being alone in the business is very hard, especially coming from a scientific background.



I have learned a lot, but it has been expensive lessons. Now I can focus on what I am good at,” Thompson says.



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Bernatzeder has vast experience in entrepreneurship having started his first business at the age of 19, and currently has interests in tourism, software development, an accounting company, food production, distribution and IT.



“The meadery got to the point where it was starting to take off and that is the stage where most businesses run out of money and resources. It was a critical point to get involved and add expertise,” Bernatzeder says.



“Educating the market is the biggest hurdle we face. We need to tell the story of mead in Africa. The ability to scale production is also something we need to figure out.”



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright size-full is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-31-at-10.50.55.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56136" width="301" height="489" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-31-at-10.50.55.png 366w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-31-at-10.50.55-185x300.png 185w" sizes="(max-width: 301px) 100vw, 301px" /></figure></div>



They are assessing the viability of opening a meadery in Zambia, one of the biggest producers of honey in the world and from where they source their raw materials.



But they want to do it in a sustainable manner that uplifts communities and gives individual beekeepers in the country the opportunity to earn more for their honey.



“A huge opportunity is to set up meaderies in other countries and to build communities around that. Incentivize beekeeping to create jobs, make mead and sell it into the tourism sector,” Bernatzeder says.



Thompson firmly believes that mead has a place as a mainstream beverage in African society, especially as it originated on this continent.



“If you come to Africa, you should have mead, this is our culture, our drink,” he says.



“Mead is also one of things that gets better over time. If you buy a bottle and leave it for 20 years, it will be much nicer.”

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Mead We Say More: The Entrepreneurs Promoting The Real African Drink

From South Africa to South Korea, restaurateur Roddy Bancroft offers the true taste of home at his three successful braai-based eateries in Seoul.



IN THE HILLY SUBURBS OF ITAEWON, SEOUL, dozens of restaurants dot multi-story buildings, bringing flavors from all over the world to one of the trendiest districts of South Korea’s capital. On one particular street drifts a nostalgic yet distinct scent for native South Africans – the smell of a braai, meat grilling on a fire, at Braai Republic.



The restaurant’s co-owner Roddy Bancroft laughs at hearing a familiar accent on the phone when I reach out to him, and I feel an odd sense of comfort being almost 13,000km from home and hearing a fellow South African voice.



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The South African entrepreneur had his start in Seoul in the way that many of his fellows do, filling the burgeoning market of English Foreign Language teachers who can be found across the country’s peninsula.



“We were never permanent staff,” says Bancroft to FORBES AFRICA. “Teaching is a one-year contract, and every year we said it’s our last year – eventually we realized we’d been saying that for almost 20 years,” he laughs.



South Korea is renowned for its culinary culture, particularly with street food,but after so many years there Bancroft was 



craving tastes from home, and over a few drinks with a colleague decided that he would start making droëwors, a dried meat snack South Africa is famed for, at home.



Fellow South African immigrants in Seoul soon were asking for packages, and they were overwhelmed with orders. “I just started offering the packages to friends in the South



African community here&#8230; One day we realized we were posting 30 packages a day,” says Bancroft.



From there, they experimented with a stand at local street food festivals, and the success of those small stands began germinating the idea of a fully-fledged restaurant.



“We had no restaurant experience,” says Bancroft, shaking his head as he remembers the founding of Braai Republic. “We initially just wanted to open a deli, but we found a place that was far too large for what we wanted. So, we decided to open a restaurant instead,” he laughs. “The language barrier a decade ago was more difficult, but we didn’t know how to open a business, or even what paperwork we needed to do.”



<h2 id="h-but-they-did-it">But They Did It.</h2>



“In the beginning, it was the ex-pat community that carried us,” says Bancroft gratefully. “On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, South Africans from all over [the country] would book a cheap hotel nearby just to come here and have a familiar drink.”



But Koreans are adventurous with food, and soon the market expanded to not just immigrants but locals looking for something different.



One such is 21-year- old Lee Hanseok, studying literature at a Seoul university. “I love South African culture,” he says to FORBES AFRICA, demonstrating a surprising level of knowledge about the country’s economic, political and social history.



Indeed, reading Steve Biko and university is what catalyzed his interest in seeking out South African food, and Braai Republic met that need.



“The food is great,” he says, “It’s so different from what we normally eat here at home.”



Hanseok’s lunch consisted of lamb chops grilled over an open fire, which he eats in an environment that could be easily mistaken for a restaurant in any town in South Africa.



Rugby jerseys hang alongside hunting trophies on wooden paneled walls, and a photograph of Nelson Mandela is framed alongside famed South African musicians and sportspeople, while old Afrikaans music hums from behind a bar stocked with Windhoek beers.



Sourcing the foodstuffs that can be made to authentic South African flavors was half of the challenge. While Bancroft and his partners know how to cook the South African manner, bringing those flavors into a restaurant space is its own challenge. Most of the meats are imported, with all of the portioning being performed from purchased whole meats to ensure that the cuts match the style of South African cooking. Bancroft and his partners went so far as to hire a promising young South African chef and send him to culinary school for over a year, before bringing him and his expertise to South Korea to ensure the kitchen is up to standard.



“We really tried to stay true to home,” says Bancroft seriously. “We even have signs on the bathrooms in seven of South Africa’s official languages.”



The family-oriented mindset common in South Africa has also served well in South Korea, with most of the staff having been with the restaurant for over seven years. “They’ve looked after us here,” says Bancroft, “and so we look after them. It’s really comfortable.”



The combination of nostalgia and adventure seems to be working well for Braai Republic, which now has three eateries in Seoul, and is finally expanding into the original idea of a deli as well.



“Being South Africans, we grew up learning how to interact with people from different cultures, and we’ve relied a lot on that here in Seoul,” says Bancroft.



“We’ve given a personal and unique experience here, and we are excited to see it grow.”



While looking forward to visiting his home country and family in September, the innovation does not stop.



Bancroft makes a point of visiting as many different restaurants every time he returns to South Africa, looking for inspiration in different dishes and flavors that he can introduce back into South Korea.



Having overcome numerous obstacles to bring Braai Republic to success, Bancroft’s typical South African humor still stands true on his current struggle. “We’re still trying to convince the locals that lamb chops need to be eaten medium rare,” he smiles, “but we’ll get there.”

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Food For The Seoul: A South African Restaurateur’s Sizzling Growth Story In South Korea 

This unassuming entrepreneur from Benin has created an alternative to chemical fertilizers that most farmers use in Africa. He is the CEO of AGRECO Sarl and at 22, is looking to expand his company creating impact across West Africa.



THE RISE IN FOOD PRICES AS a result of the war in Ukraine is accelerating inflation in regions of Africa, a new report by the World Food Programme (WFP) outlines. It says that increasing food prices pose a threat to food security in a region dealing with conflict, climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic.



The report further highlights that countries like South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi are highly dependent on imported chemical fertilizer, and shortages will create issues for the next agricultural season’s planting and yields.



Despite this bleak outlook, innovators in Africa are trying to change the game. One of those is Djifa Constant Ayihounoun, from Abomey-Calavi, 20km from the city of Cotonou in Benin.



At only 22, Ayihounoun has already secured his place as an entrepreneur, as the founder of AGRECO Sarl, an organic fertilizer and pesticides company.



In 2018, while he was still a student and trainee at an environmental impact studies firm, he conducted a study merely out of curiosity – on the impact of human economic activities on the environment.



“My research allowed me to discover that agriculture alone is responsible for more than 25% of global warming, and therefore has a huge negative impact on the environment,” Ayihounoun says.



This is echoed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) which says agriculture, forestry, and the alteration of land-use account for as much as 25% of human-induced GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions.



He decided to study agricultural practices in depth. He learned that chemical inputs in fertilizers and pesticides have an adverse impact.



Then, he brainstormed solutions.



Ayihounoun decided to focus on providing information to the main players in the industry, who may be uninformed or have no alternatives. He created an NGO called Africa Bio House at the age of 18, in order to raise awareness to farmers in rural areas.



He holds a degree in Entrepreneurship and Management of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) with a specialization in environment and green economy from the University of Abomey- Calavi in Benin.



Through his study he learned that beyond the soil, chemical inputs have a profoundly negative impact on the environment as a whole, on biodiversity, as well as on humans.



“Speaking of the consequence on the soil, we have discovered that one of the main disadvantages of chemical fertilizers is their high content of sulphuric and hydrochloric acids,” Ayihounoun explains. “These lead to the destruction of microorganisms and trace elements that are present in the soil, thus, the first consequence of the use of chemical fertilizers is the depletion of the soil, which leads to a drop in yield, and the exposure of crops to attacks and diseases.”



“Similarly, substances not assimilated by plants are carried away by the rains and poured into our environment and also infiltrate the soil and pollute the groundwater. Chemical fertilizers due to their harmful chemicals have an impact both ecologically and on our body,” he adds.



Ayihounoun says that the first challenge he faced was raising awareness: bringing farmers together and informing them about the impacts of chemical fertilizer. He solved this by making products freely available, for experimentation and gaining farmers’ trust. Another challenge was the certification and approval process required for the marketing of agricultural inputs in Benin.



“The first gratifying aspects are the satisfaction of our very first customers, it gives a feeling of pride and accomplishment to see a producer who is satisfied and very happy to have used our products. The second gratifying aspect is the awards we have received, especially in terms of grants that allow us to accomplish a lot and move forward.”



In 2021, Ayihounoun became an Anzisha Prize Fellow in recognition of his entrepreneurial efforts.



Throughout school he says he was an ambitious and dynamic boy, who did research on the best young people in Africa and the world. He met a mentor who guided him towards an entrepreneurship training center at his university.



“The hardest part of being a young entrepreneur is that people are reluctant to trust you or take you seriously sometimes. Especially in French-speaking communities where the culture of youth entrepreneurship is not yet developed, basically it is the weight of culture and society. Beyond that, the heavy administrative formalities remain a burden for the youngest at their start,” he explains.



AGRECO Sarl’s fertilizers are made with living matter and the recovery of bio-waste from livestock farms and agro-food processing units.



“It enriches the soil with natural nutrients, increases yield and facilitates the conservation of crops. What differentiates it above all from the others is the fact that it has nematicidal and soil-improving properties because it is enriched with azadirachtin and helps fight against soil nematodes that attack the roots of plants. Beneficial for all soils, all crops, all seasons. Above all, it increases the amount of humus on the soil, ideal for soils low in organic matter.”



Soil nematodes are the worms responsible for plant diseases. Some soil nematodes are beneficial, but more study has gone into those that negatively affect plants.



Azadirachtin is used as a general-use pesticide, found in the seeds, bark, and leaves of the neem tree. It is regarded as having low toxicity to mammals and the environment and even bees, when used correctly. Humus is the substance remaining after plants and animals have decomposed through a process done by earthworms, bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms, found in the top few inches of soil.



Ayihounoun’s company is expanding into the northern region of Benin, a big step for them as it means increasing production capacity. Since its creation, AGRECO Sarl has impacted over 500 people.



“Currently, we are concentrating on developing a large clientele and mobilizing resources to launch industrialization.”



The high cost of the certifications, marketing approval for the production process and product is the main reason they are concentrating on organic fertilizers.



Later, they will move on to biopesticides.



They want to roll out their products beyond Benin, namely to Togo, Burkino Faso, Niger, Mali and Senegal.



He says these countries have a huge need for organic fertilizer. After conducting a study in Togo, they believe they could expand there first.



Africa could face challenges head on, with environmentally- conscious and innovative people like Ayihounoun.



The question remains, where will our investments go – to the historically profitable and known, or the new and sustainable?

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Organic Growth: Meet The 22-Year-Old Farmer-CEO From Benin

There are many small ways to achieve sustainability for Tanzania’s smallholder farmers, as agripreneur Johanna Omere is proving in the green locales of Tanzania.



BY INAARA GANGJI



GROWING UP IN AUSTRIA, JOHANNA OMERE’S life revolved around making things from scratch. Her family carefully baked their own bread, molded their own chocolate, and held the earth close to their hearts at their organic farm. It was a lifestyle inspired by food science and a passion for doing good for their bodies and the world.



Having spent 14 years in Tanzania, Omere has brought this natural zeal straight to the doorsteps of Tanzanians with her social enterprise, I Am Organic.



Omere and her business partner, Jacqueline Namfua, now run an organic restaurant and shop with its own local supply chain, creating an ecosystem that comes with its own unique challenges, but also a renewed sense of hope.



“Local value addition is one of my big passions&#8230; to fix systems that are not working the way I envision they should be working&#8230; [but] in the beginning, there were hardly any organic products available in Tanzania,” rues Omere.



She was about to open a bakery and, in the process, found her local partner and thereby opened the Wild Flour Café selling organic products made in-house.



“We want to provide excellent services to the community with local job creation and not to export all the high-quality products or resources. We really are passionate about creating and making things here locally.”



However, the local Tanzanian organic market is still in its infancy, she adds.



Consumer and farmer sensitization is low, and there are challenges in transportation, and supply chains have to be built from scratch.



Governments have shown great progress in dialogue both regionally and continent-wide on the issue, but implementation of policy on a large scale remains a problem, attests Mwatima Juma, Chair of the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement.



“We are interfering with already-established business. You know, the business of industrial chemicals,” she emphasizes.



Omere only works with smallholder farmers, where organic farming is possible and so is building those relationships for sustainability.



Organizations like Juma’s help coordinate and promote organic agriculture among farmers, distributors and consumers through sharing information so these relationships can form.



But it is not always easy to stay afloat and keep up their daily activities.



“If we get any [financial] support, most of the support is project oriented.” But Juma knows there is opportunity here. She notes that Tanzania is widely regarded as a country not using a lot of chemical fertilizers. And she sees more consciousness among consumers.



However, to meet demand and deal with all these challenges, Omere notes not one person can do it all – the need for collaboration to create awareness is paramount.



Not only agri-businesses, but also organizations like Juma’s that work with farmers are needed to achieve the reality of true organic farming.



“We collaborate with our farmers face-to-face and make them business partners,” says Alexander Wostry, CEO of Operations at Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT), a non-profit that Omere and other organic agri- businesses in the country work with that engages in training, consultancy and research to improve organic production in the country and region, even on a government level.



Not many Tanzanians are aware of these products, he adds.



Traceability is not a concept that is thought about, agree all three.



“And then we have probably almost 2.5 million hectares in Africa for organic production. But when you look at this, more than 99% of this food is going to export,” he rues.



Farmers in the field have more knowledge and organic practice also assists them to combat soil erosion.



“The conventional agriculture approach has expired.”



However, it is not easy for farmers to switch over. The farmers have the power to transform &#8212; it is about creating that community that encourages sustainability, he adds.



But Wostry’s work, like Juma’s and Omere’s, is not easy.



“Our work is not input-intensive, but knowledge-intensive, and labor-intensive, and that needs several stakeholders in place like the government,” he says.



Wostry’s goal is to eventually connect farmers to retailers like Omere and funding organizations like Swissaid and GTZ, to develop this ecosystem.



“On the one hand, [farmers] get better prices for their products because we pay them a premium and we work very closely with them,” says Omere. “And on the other hand, there’s that kind of trust that consumers put in us because they know it’s farm to fork – we kind of took on the challenge.”



While not being profit-oriented as much, the next step is ramping up communication to the customer and penetrating a larger market. SAT has its own products and so do a few other agri-businesses like Omere’s.



“Organic doesn’t just mean less pesticide, but it’s also away of living, a way of producing, a way of processing food, a way of caring for the environment. I think sustainable is a big word, but then there are many small ways to get there.



It’s also a way of keeping up the common consciousness for community, which is really strong on the continent,” emphasizes Omere.

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Hope For Smallholder Farmers: How This Tanzanian Entrepreneur Is Planting The Future

Nigerian billionaire Abdulsamad Rabiu and founder of BUA Group says Africa must remove its reliance on imports and add value to locally-produced food as much as possible.



Nigerian billionaire Abdulsamad Rabiu, the founder of BUA Group, a Nigerian conglomerate active in cement production, sugar refining and real estate, has embarked on an ambitious 20,000-hectare large-scale sugar plantation featuring other ancillary production facilities such as a sugar mill, sugar refinery, and ethanol and power plant in Africa’s biggest and most populous economy.



The Group currently has two “ultra-modern and automated mega sugar refineries” in Lagos and Port Harcourt in the country with a total combined installed refining capacity of 1.5 million metric tonnes, but say the new initiatives, for which it has secured more land in both Kogi State and Kwara State to establish sugar plantations in the future, will add significantly to the development of Nigeria’s local sugar industry.



“I am passionate about looking inwards and seeing what we can do as Africans,” says Rabiu in a recent interview with FORBES AFRICA.



“We realized that a large amount of money was being spent on importing raw sugar and we asked ourselves ‘why can’t we solve this problem and produce locally’?” adds the entrepreneur with a real time net worth of $5.7 billion according to Forbes.



Russia’s war on Ukraine has sparked a global food crisis and Nigeria, Africa’s most populous economy, traditionally reliant on food imports, is facing the brunt of this.



In a recent report published by the United Nations World Food Program, Nigeria, along with Ethiopia and South Sudan, are amongst the countries with the direst conditions. The report asserts that 19.5 million Nigerians are “facing high levels of acute food insecurity”.



Furthermore, when it comes to children under the age of five years, the report estimates that about 1.7 million will be prone to acute malnutrition by August this year, signifying a 34% rise from 2021 figures.



Reflecting on these numbers, Rabiu believes that there has to be a fundamental shift in Africa’s approach to food production.



“Eighty percent of the food we consume in Africa is imported so when you have a situation like the Russia-Ukraine war which has had a knock-on effect on food imports, where last year alone we imported over 55 million tonnes of wheat, the current crisis we are facing is bound to happen,” says Rabiu.



His concerns are shared by Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank (AfDB) who in May this year approved a $1.5 billion facility to help over 20 million African farmers to produce 38 million tonnes of food.



“We are facing a situation where food prices are skyrocketing by the day. Wheat has gone up from $250 to about $600 per tonne; this accounts for a 60% increase in the past year,” says Rabiu.



The price hikes in importing wheat means a further increase in prices to consumers who are already struggling to make ends meet. According to Rabiu, the only way to avoid this situation in the future is to remove our reliance on imports and add value to locally produced food as much as possible.



“We need a concerted effort to increase our homegrown production,” says Rabiu.



Adesina and the AfDB are hoping that by making the credit facility available, African farmers can do exactly what Rabiu is suggesting and begin to increase the supply of food to curb impending disaster.

Abdulsamad Rabiu; image supplied

‘Concerted Effort To Increase Homegrown Production’: Nigerian Billionaire On Plans to Boost Local Sugar Industry

Using innovative delivery and payment solutions in Lagos and Abuja and raising $2 million recently for their new platform KwikStore, founders Romain Poirot-Lellig, Olivier Decrock and Yinka Olayanju aim to empower SMEs and merchants scale their businesses.



Logistics plays a pivotal role in moving goods and services in Africa’s most populous economy, Nigeria, with over 200 million inhabitants. Everything from meals, groceries, documents and packages relies on the intricate network of couriers who make the country move.



However, different government policies over the past three years have created major roadblocks for the logistics sector. For example, when the government decided to ban ride hailing in Lagos State, many startups pivoted to motorbike delivery only to face further challenges like extortion from local government and exorbitant taxes.



In 2020, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications and the Digital Economy released guidelines which increased the licensing fees for courier and logistics companies, further exacerbating the issue.



Kwik, a logistics company based in the country, knowing all too well the challenges in the motorbike delivery sector, in March this year, raised $2 million to upgrade its services from motorbike delivery to an e-commerce solution to help its growing African B2B customers sell online via their smartphones.



Founded by Romain Poirot-Lellig, Olivier Decrock and Yinka Olayanju, Kwik’s new platform, KwikStore, is looking to address the gap in the market by using technology to streamline some of the difficulties moving documents or packages in sometimes-chaotic environments like Lagos.



“We are an on-demand, last mile delivery service with the goal of providing speedy delivery services within Lagos and Abuja. KwikStore is a free e-commerce solution that enables businesses or individuals to establish online stores, with little or no technical knowledge, from their phones. Our solution is fully integrated with all major payment solutions in Nigeria,” says Poirot-Lellig.



The company makes money by taking a percentage of the amount that customers pay for deliveries, and is also hoping that by introducing technology into the delivery business, it will empower SMEs and merchants to scale their business exponentially. The platform has over 100,000 businesses already signed up and using its delivery services.



“With the use of our innovative technology, you can check, track and even provide user feedback to clients, which in the long run builds trust,” adds Poirot-Lellig.

Romain Poirot-Lellig; image supplied

Quick Clicks And Scaling Businesses In Nigeria

<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">“Leadership will only emerge through challenge”<cite>Dr Reuel Khoza, South African entrepreneur, author and award-winning businessman</cite></blockquote>

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Quote Of The Day

As CEO of Amplify Africa, Dami Kujembola is on a mission to create global representation for African talent and the diaspora, and connect them to their homeland.



The contribution of the African diaspora to the continent’s GDP cannot be emphasized enough. A total of $45 billion was remitted to sub-Saharan Africa in 2021 accounting for a 6.2% increase from the previous year according to the World Bank.



And Dami Kujembola, the CEO and Co-founder of Amplify Africa, is the man on a mission to harness these resources and connections further and bring about economic impact in Africa.



Along with his co-founder Timi Adeyeba, who plays the role of COO, he is creating platforms for education in different African cultures while promoting African creativity to a global audience.



At its core, Amplify is an entertainment/media company, born out of Kujembola’s passion for entertainment law and providing better representation and red-carpet treatment for African artists who travel to Hollywood to receive prestigious awards like the BET Awards.



“We started by throwing parties and we did our first parties to welcome our friends who were nominated for BET Awards and we wanted them to feel welcomed when they came to Los Angeles. We had artists like AKA and other big artists and we saw the interest in people being represented,” he says, recalling the journey.



From there, the parties got bigger and more prestigious, such as when they partnered with the United States Congress to throw a gala as a way to promote Africa to the world.



“A Congresswoman offered to speak at the first event and gave us certificates that legitimized our events and we started hosting the Afro ball gala in partnership with her office.



“We gave awards to amazing Africans but they didn’t get the chance to speak and empower people so the idea for Africon (Amplify’s flagship event) was to create a platform where you have people who were successful in their field to impact knowledge and get people learning from them and show the world that these amazing Africans exist,” says Kujembola.



This was a far cry from his early days in Nigeria. After the assassination of his grandfather who was a politician, Kujembola vowed to become a lawyer with the goal of putting bad guys away. After graduating from Babcock University with a law degree, he interned for a law firm and that is where he found his mentor who would be pivotal to his law career.



“One of my professors was really cool and well-dressed and he taught intellectual property so I wanted to be like him and that is how my interest in intellectual property/entertainment law started. So, I interned at his firm before I finished in law school and once I finished law school for the most part, I decided that was the area I wanted to specialize in,” says Kujembola.



After working for a year, he joined a fledgling record label startup.



“A friend of mine took me to this entertainment conference and there seemed to be a lot of chaos and lack of structure within the Nigerian entertainment system and as a lawyer I wanted to enter that space and build out that structure. I decided I wanted to focus on entertainment law because it wasn’t as developed and crowded like criminal law so I felt it was the best place I could grow,” avers Kujembola.



When he relocated to Los Angeles for his master’s degree at the University of Southern California, he found himself working for an entertainment company which amongst other things, managed artists.



“My experience as an immigrant in a different country pushed me more towards building a company that could help create representation for African talent and the African diaspora. So, I always pitched African talent but they didn’t take it. I also wanted to educate the world about Africa because I got tired of answering questions about gorillas and whether we had mobile phones in Africa,” avers Kujembola.



That drove him to create a company that would provide more representation for Africans and build a community. Africon is a ripple effect of the intention Kujembola and Adeyeba had to create a community, representation and educate people about the African continent. Another focus for the company is to reconnect African-Americans back to their ancestral homeland.



“We realized it wasn’t just immigrants that yearned for that reconnection to the continent. There are a lot of people [who] due to slavery have been robbed of that reconnection and because of the negative stories that are told by Africans in the mainstream media, a lot of people didn’t have any pride affiliating themselves to the continent,” says Kujembola.



Under his leadership, Amplify Africa has grown with a digital audience of over 50,000 millennials across the United States, United Kingdom and Brazil and has produced over 100 events focusing on telling authentic stores about the continent so people in the diaspora feel proud to associate themselves with Africa and ultimately boost its economy.

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Connecting African Culture, Creativity And Community

Online thrift shopping has become hugely popular among the close-fisted but style-conscious consumer wanting brands for less in South Africa. Showing the way is this entrepreneur with an eye for slow fashion.



By Ross Holland



Surely, you have heard about e-commerce, but ‘re-commerce’?



Loosely defined, it’s known as reverse commerce or re-selling previously-owned or previously-loved products through physical stores or online distribution platforms.



Going into this further is the trend of ‘online thrifting’, a form of re-commerce becoming increasingly popular in Johannesburg in 2022, according to Fayyaadh Limbada, the founder and owner of ThriftyWays, an online medium selling second-hand and used clothes.



He should know. The 20-something entrepreneur started his thrift store in 2015 while still in university. The pandemic proved to be a boon for this budding businessman as more people took to spending conservatively through the lockdown period.



“I experienced spikes in sales in 2020, this was when the Covid pandemic hit and a hard lockdown followed here in South Africa,” Limbada begins, in an interview with FORBES AFRICA.



“Re-commerce is important as it gives clothing a second chance and slows down the production of cotton, which helps us go green,” says Limbada.



He adds that there is a certain eye you need in this industry to be able to tell the difference between ‘slow fashion’ and ‘fast fashion’.



Limbada explains that fast fashion only lasts a season at most, while slow fashion captures a trend in such a way that it looks timeless and provides the wearer with the opportunity to stand out.



His online outlet, ThriftyWays, features an array of American pro sports athletic hoodies and jackets from all sport codes such as American ice hockey, American football and baseball, even the occasional La Crosse team sweatshirt.



Limbada mentions that his apparel is curated in such a way that each item is placed along with other items of a similar price, in order to give a feeling of consistency and offer more bang for your bucks.



The most expensive item he ever sold was a Canada Goose jacket for R4,000 ($237). These jackets and coats are exclusive and normally retail between R10,000 ($593) to R28,253 ($1,667).



Thrift entrepreneurs are usually discreet and tight-lipped about where they source their goods from and Limbada is no different – given the serious competition they face and the fact that they are only as good as the quality and exclusivity of the goods they sell.



Good suppliers are hard to come by and cater to everyone and anyone willing to buy from them.



“Your supplier isn’t just your supplier, he supplies your competitors too,” Limbada says.



Even so, thrift shopping for the consumer is an exciting process, Limbada explains, as there is something cool and quirky about it.



From old school Liverpool F.C. team jerseys to classic Gucci sport coats or even a Cooperstown collection Boston Red Sox hoodie, it’s all there for the asking at the multiple thrift stories mushrooming in Johannesburg selling sports goods.



Limbada equates this form of shopping to a “lucky packet” – you never know what’s inside the packaging or in this case, what’s on the pages of his online thrift platforms as you’re “always in for a surprise”.



The spike in sales and customer traffic for his online business has resulted in Limbada now opening his first physical, brick-and-mortar store in the city.



The entire process of store-to-door would be easier for the customer and it would grant Limbada an opportunity to house more stock and do more business.



Entrepreneurs like Limbada continue to add color and texture to the fast-paced fashion industry in South Africa’s bustling streets with his version of slow fashion that’s also good for the planet.

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Giving Fashion A Second Chance In Johannesburg

Yesterday’s newspaper is today’s pencil for Wada Kealotswe, the young innovative female entrepreneur in Botswana turning reading matter into writing tools. And she has already sold over 70,000 pencils.



BY ALASTAIR HAGGER



IN SETSWANA, THE NATIVE language of Botswana, there is a typically evocative proverb that goes: Dilo makwati re kwatabolola mo go ba bangwe – Sharing knowledge is like the stripping of bark from a tree to pass to others.



Though digital news-sharing has now become the norm throughout Africa, the traditional newspaper is still widely consumed as an important news source. But the damage its production entails is literal, not figurative: for every ton of newspaper, 12 trees are destroyed.



We strip the bark, we share the knowledge – but we damage a world that should be made immeasurably richer and safer through our accumulation of that knowledge.



Many modern economies routinely recycle paper so that industries which utilize this material can be less reliant on wood pulp, but widespread and effective waste recycling remains atypical in the developing world.



The UN Environment Programme laments that Africa is currently recycling only 4% of its waste, describing this failure as “a far cry from the African Union vision that African cities will be recycling at least 50 per cent of the waste they generate by 2023”. Given that an estimated 70- 80% of Africa’s MSW (municipal solid waste) is recyclable, this shortfall is as alarming as it seems avoidable.



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In Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone, there are a number of private companies offering recycling services, but still no integrated recycling initiative to prevent the bulk of the MSW ending up in landfill. In September 2021, the Botswana government announced its Integrated Waste Management Policy, which it said would encourage “increased shared responsibility among stakeholders for the protection of public health and the environment”. It remains to be seen what practical (and enforceable) solutions the policy will implement, but in the meantime, an innovative young female entrepreneur has taken a proactive step in demonstrating the economic potential in the savvy reconfiguration of physical knowledge.



Wada Kealotswe is the founder of Eco Zera, a company which recycles waste newspapers into pencils that wear their origins proudly: the text and photographs of the newspaper pages can be seen clearly embedded in the pencils’ bodies, like some strange reincarnation of dead information tasked with recording the knowledge that will take their place.



A development economist, Kealotswe reached the semi-finals of a competition at the 2019 World Bank Youth Conference in Washington DC for a more generic newspaper recycling idea; the project evolved into Eco Zera Pencils when she discovered there were machines available in China that could turn reading matter into writing tools.



“I knew that in Botswana, no-one was recycling newspapers, and I was always wondering, ‘where do they go?’ So I got in touch with The Voice and The Sunday Standard (two of Botswana’s most widely-read newspapers) and asked them. They told me they have a warehouse outside Gaborone where they just pile those newspapers. So I thought, ‘okay, I can source them – and maybe at a competitive price’.”



The used newspapers are combined with resin and graphite imported from China, rolled in the Chinese machines, dried in the sun, and then finished in an oven, where they bake to the wood-stiffness of a traditional pencil.



“When you look at them, or sharpen them, you would never know they’re made of paper,” Kealotswe says. And for those who like to take their writing or studying frustrations out on their tools, they have a pleasing snap as crisp as that of their wooden counterparts: “They’re very hard. If you break them, they break like wood.”



The production is labor-intensive: only 20% of the manufacturing process is driven by the machines Kealotswe has set up in a garage on the outskirts of Gaborone. She has three permanent employees, and has recruited and trained a further 15 young people, who assist in the fulfilment of large orders when needed. In the two years since the company’s inception, Eco Zera has sold over 70,000 pencils, with a new range of colored pencils due to be introduced this spring; the brand was also featured at this year’s re-scheduled Expo 2020 Dubai. “And we even sell them in pharmacies,” says Kealotswe. “You know, when people are getting their nails, they get interested, and buy our pencils!”



Last year, Eco Zera won a SEED Climate Adaptation Award, which has helped her scale the business; ‘Zera’, appropriately, means ‘seed’ in Hebrew. “We are seeding the planet,” she says. “We are making sure that trees are safe. And these newspapers would otherwise be going to landfill, and landfill produces methane. So we believe that the little we are doing will also contribute to reducing rising temperatures.”



Kealotswe says she expects the brand to finally be profitable this year, despite the myriad barriers to entry facing an African entrepreneur in a landlocked country.



“Some of the challenges are the high cost of labor, and the fact that we have to source our other raw materials from abroad. We don’t have a port, so we rely on South Africa and Namibia,” she says. “And it’s not so easy to get finance for young people who need collateral. I self- funded my project, to overcome the challenge of having to go to banks or investment enterprises, so I didn’t have that stress. So how should I describe it? Yeah – that’s hustle!”

EZ+4+

SHARPENED SENSE: The Young Entrepreneur From Botswana Who Is Turning Reading Matter into Writing Tools

BY RIDHIMA SHUKLA



Yussouf Ntwali’s edtech company has grown from idea to impact, changing the recruitment landscape in Rwanda.



IN THE BEATING HEART of the impeccably-green city of Kigali, in one of the most sought-after commercial zones, past a small gate and a garden is a shared space for home-grown Rwandan startups.



Entering the first building, a double- storied structure marked BAG, a white board reads ‘Training, Problem Solving, IoT and Education’.



Inside, there are more white boards in the middle of a large room, which looks like a cross between a classroom and a workplace, buzzing with youthful energy and the start of something bright and new.



Across the foyer is the office of Yussouf Ntwali, the 21-year-old CEO of BAG Innovation, an edtech company into innovation and social impact, one of Rwanda’s most popular tech companies today.



Since its inception, the company has grown from an idea to a real impact firm. Ntwali, who started out as a curious 17-year-old volunteer, climbed the ranks to becoming the Chief Operations Officer (COO) and now the CEO.



With no university degree or background in technology, Ntwali’s badge is his unwavering enthusiasm and unapologetic approach to learning on the job, which he reiterates during our interview.



Now resident in Rwanda, he spent his early years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, born to a Rwandan father and a Congolese mother.



After spending his formative years in 



Lubumbashi with his parents and three siblings, Ntwali moved back to Rwanda in 2007. Accustomed to the Congolese school curriculum, he was bilingual and spoke Swahili and French. To his surprise, Rwanda favored English.



“I spent the first few years in Rwanda without studying Kinyarwanda or English. But, around the age of 10, I began to pick it up.”



An extrovert brimming with confidence and with a penchant for conversation, Ntwali picked up the two languages quickly.



“I always like the challenge of learning new things, even as a child, I pursued everything with the same passion,” he says.



Apart from his professional zeal, he loved rap music, and for a while, even thought he was going to become the next Jay-Z. Ntwali spent a few years focused on music and was selected for a national competition in Rwanda.



But when it came to academics, he couldn’t be tied down to the conventional.



After high school, he instead opted to attend workshops and training sessions in business management and entrepreneurship.



Instead of going to university like most of his classmates, Ntwali made music, also working as an assistant manager at his father’s chain of barber shops. This is where he first faced the day-to-day challenges of running a business and realized the gaps in his own skill- sets as well as in others.



After months on the job, thanks to his brother – another entrepreneur in the family – he was motivated to attend an entrepreneurship event in Kigali unaware of the several early stage creative startups he was about to encounter.



Ntwali was 17 when he met the founder of BAG Innovation, Gabriel Ekman.



“He spoke about the lack of skilled youth in Rwanda and the gaps in training. How most students had degrees but did not know how to use them. Employers had employees that did not perform and I thought ‘yes! I have seen this’!”



Intrigued and excited by the social impact model illustrated by Ekman, Ntwali approached him to find out more and the two instantly connected on their shared energy and desire to solve problems.



Ntwali joined Ekman in his tiny workspace with a laptop and began to work on improving the recruitment, training and selection ecosystem of Rwanda.



Making use of simple tools like Facebook and interpersonal skills, the two would approach small companies in the country to learn about their challenges. After acquiring a fair understanding of the challenge, the two would brainstorm on solutions, but not alone.



“If a coffee shop told us they struggled with pushing higher sales, we would advertise to students on Facebook to solve the problem for the shop, to sell more coffee.”



Once they had worked out the solutions together, the group would offer them to the coffee shop. This was a social impact exercise that built the foundation of BAG Innovation.



After a few successful attempts, the two began training the students with the best solutions and preparing them for various job scenarios. By connecting the students with the shops/companies, they would not only offer solutions but a pipeline of potential employees.



This led to companies coming forth and asking to employ the students trained and acquired by BAG Innovation.



“When we noticed that our services were gaining demand, we sat down to chart a monetize-able model for our business.”



Ntwali joined the company in 2018, by which time, the company had reeled in many contracts and was able to pay off bills and expand operations.



When asked what differentiates them from a HR firm, he says: “We complement each other. We are not looking for the right candidate for you; we are creating the right candidate for a job. We are working with the same social impact model but one that is scalable, sustainable and profitable.”



Even though BAG Innovation makes its money from companies that hire talent through them on a per-person basis, its blended model of offline and online interactions for tackling specific challenges within a firm and the ability to offer a range of employee portfolios to choose from is their differentiator, they say.



“Those who do not perform in our trainings, we offer them further programs to learn from and improve while keeping them out of our talent pool, until they match the required standard.”



Ntwali’s ability to pitch his company’s unique model, ideas and potential to others has won him a few cash grants.



From the African Union startup challenge to the Hanga Pitchfest, he is now a name in the startup community.



“We have used the money from these competitions and grants to scale up operations and improve our marketing and sales team.”



As the non-technical founders of a tech company, a lot of BAG Innovation’s funds have gone towards outsourcing their IT services.



Just last year, they hired an engineer to lead tech and a full marketing-sales team to support the founders in bringing more clients.



“I always function like a COO – I like to work closely with the team and know everything that happens in the company, that’s how I learned and grew.”



Ntwali has a spring in his step as he walks around the office, saying hello to his colleagues and stepping out the main door to stop and stand next to the sign, Bag, beaming with pride.



As a 21-year-old business head, he has enough reason to smile.

Category: Entrepreneurs