Sprinting across the globe in her Chuck Taylor sneakers with her headphones on, 28-year-old Zim Ugochukwu is not what you would call travel-weary – she’s travel-wealthy.
As founder and CEO of Travel Noire, a digital publishing platform for travelers of color, her passport is a diary of her life, of her many immersions into cultures other than her own.
But before we dwell on what Ugochukwu actually does, it’s important to know what she has done before: she cloned a gene at the age of 19 as a biology major in college, helped open a civil rights museum, led an anti-tobacco drive in the United States (US), worked on the Barack Obama presidential campaign in 2008, and lived in a train in India for two weeks with 400 other young people traveling the length and breadth of the subcontinent.
Ugochukwu appeared on FORBES’ 30 Under 30 list in 2016 for “being at the forefront of what is being called the Black Travel Movement”; was named one of Glamour magazine’s Young Women Changing the World; and more recently, Travel Noire was named one of the Most Innovative Companies in the World by Fast Company.
Born in Mankato, Minnesota, to Nigerian immigrants, Ugochukwu is going the extra mile “using technology to empower people of color to lead more global lives”.
“Whenever I travel I kind of spend time getting lost and not necessarily having any plans, but letting serendipity kind of guide me,” says Ugochukwu.
She was in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2016, when she found she had made Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 list and had 48 hours to get to Los Angeles to meet Winfrey and her team.
When FORBES WOMAN AFRICA e-meets her on FaceTime, for once, Ugochukwu is sitting still, at Filter Café, a coffee house near downtown Chicago; it’s just after 4PM on a Sunday in the Windy City where she is based.
<div id="attachment_32107" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32107" class="wp-image-32107 size-full" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2016/12/zim-oprah-in-L.A.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="439" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/zim-oprah-in-L.A.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/zim-oprah-in-L.A-300x220.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Zim and Oprah Winfrey</div>
This mode of communication is quite fitting for Ugochukwu. Judging by the constant banter in the background, punctuated by the sounds of coffee dispensers and clinking cups, the café is packed.
Ugochukwu says she is still jet-lagged after a vacation in Thailand.
“I just wanted to kind of get away, I went with some friends, it was really fun,” says Ugochukwu, who was to return to Thailand to speak at a conference but couldn’t on account of a bout of food poisoning.
“The amount of stress that you can put on your body when you have to travel so much can be a lot, but this is the life that I asked for, if I wasn’t doing this, I don’t know what I would be doing.”
Her first international trip was at the age of 16, when her mother took her and her brother to visit Nigeria, their home country.
Her travels today have taken her to five continents, and she has paid rent in places like Greensboro, New Delhi, Dharamsala, Bengaluru and San Francisco. Chicago has been her home since mid-2016.
While in college, she was Vice President of national anti-tobacco organization, Forget Tobacco, which gave her the opportunity to travel across America. She also founded Ignite Greensboro, a campaign to raise awareness about the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. She in turn galvanized thousands of students to help bring awareness of the museum. She deems this to be the cornerstone of her career.
Her love for science saw her majoring in biology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She cloned a gene “discovering a link between cells found in the digestive system of a tiny fruit fly and a rare genetic disorder whilst examining a region called the superior Cupric autonomic system or sCans”.
She further elaborates in a language few understand: “Within this region lies a cluster of neuron-like cells called lettuce head cells, they function as pacemaker cells controlling muscle contractions, in the gut. These cells express a number of genes found in nervous system tissue.” One of these genes, Cg16972, Ugochukwu claims, was founded by her.
Whilst she majored in biology, her minor subjects were political science and sociology and as part of her course requirements, she worked as an organizer for Obama’s campaign. While still in college, she says she was also the youngest appointed precinct judge for North Carolina’s Board of Elections.
“I was responsible for the conduct of the election in the precinct polling station, the backbone of the electoral process.”
Ugochukwu speaks Hindi, a language she picked up during her time living in India, an experience that changed her life. Right before finishing college in the US, she won the Henry Luce scholarship, and moved to India for a year.
During this time, she lived in the Jagriti Yatra train, an initiative promoting entrepreneurship, as she traveled across India with other youth and 50 international participants, stopping in a new Indian city every day to follow social entrepreneurs.
For the rest of that year, she worked helping connect young business owners with resources, doing work for various organizations, as well as helping farmers get grants. This experience allowed her to see at least 75% of India, and later led to her abiding love for Asia.
It was during her time in India she realized there weren’t many black tourists.
“If you picked up any magazine, you typically didn’t see people of color,” says Ugochukwu.
She wanted to change that, and create a space for black people to talk about their travel experiences and connect with others.
After returning to the US after her year in India, with limited funds and no career plans, yet, she moved to Southern California to live with her mother.
“Often parents have a different idea of what a fulfilling life should be. You are either a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a failure.”
Her mother, a nurse, wanted Ugochukwu to become a doctor, and when she decided not to, didn’t understand it.
Soon, she packed up and headed to San Francisco with $300 to live with her “fairy godmother”, who opened the doors of her home, free of charge.
Ugochukwu worked as producer for the Digital Health Summit, discovering ways technology can create change in developing countries. She launched Travel Noire while still working there in 2013 with only $50, enough to buy a domain. In June 2014, three days before her 26th birthday, Ugochukwu was fired from her job as her heart was not in it anymore; up until this time, she had run Travel Noire on a part-time basis.
With no job, Travel Noire became her main focus and she took her $17,000 in savings and began to put her business blueprint into action. She spent 18 months building up the community before selling any product. Many people volunteered their time to build the brand that Travel Noire is today.
The company offers group travel experiences to young people of color who hail from different walks of life, to explore various international destinations together. It has over 50 on-the-ground partners and offers travel experiences in different time zones.
“It could’ve been so easy for us to get a brown stone office in New York City, but I wanted people to have the flexibility, to work wherever they felt the most happy; we can live and work just about  anywhere in the world where there is a Wi-Fi connection,” says Ugochukwu.
Today, Travel Noire has a strong social media presence; with an audience of over 300,000 on Instagram alone. Her mother has since become a proud supporter of Travel Noire.
Her advice for budding entrepreneurs? She warns it’s not all as rosy as it may appear and that behind the glamor, are long 14-hour days, and times when there is not enough money, especially in the beginning.
“You need to be willing to put everything on the line and be comfortable with the possibility of not having enough money for rent at times,” says Ugochukwu.
“I didn’t ever think that [my business] would be this big, but people told me that I had to think bigger.”
Clearly, the world is not enough for this millennial.

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Obama,  Oprah And The World On Her CV

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FORBES AFRICA has told many spellbinding business stories in its five years. The story of its own difficult birth is one of the most riveting.
The idea of the pan-African business magazine was born in the heart of a financial crisis which wiped out many investors and left businesses lucky to survive. The media suffered the most.
In the depths of the downturn in 2007, soon after launching CNBC Africa, a business and finance TV channel, the two founders, Rakesh Wahi and Zafar Siddiqi, wanted a magazine. It was the worst time to launch.
“The whole publishing market was collapsing around us. To launch a new title at that time; people externally would have said you are foolish. Some of our other shareholders did not want to invest in the publishing business owing to the economic downturn,” says Wahi.
The pair refused to throw in the towel.
“I had a strong feeling this was going to work. When I told Zafar about it, he only asked if how I felt about it and I told him that the brand would be an instant success and after his thumbs up, we ran with it.”
Towards the end of 2009, a meeting in New York sparked the interest in joining the worldwide FORBES family. The magazine has a string of franchises around the world, from FORBES MEXICO to FORBES INDONESIA.
Wahi followed his gut, in the face of scepticism.
“Every time we spoke about FORBES, people’s eyes would light up,” he says.
It was the right time, he believed. The pair waited for the market to turn around slightly and made their move.
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“We didn’t like that very few African business leaders had made it into the international version of FORBES… people didn’t understand that there is so much entrepreneurship going on in the continent,” says Wahi.
It wasn’t easy. Building a pan-African magazine was expensive and complicated; but the gap in business and finance reporting in the continent was there to be filled.
It took about two years to complete the legal agreements of the franchise. The most difficult challenge was hiring the right people to steer the magazine to the top. Wahi’s 13 years in the Indian army, where he had become one of the youngest to receive the Vishisht Seva Medal (a military decoration in India) in 1986, helped.
“The army teaches you about looking after people. The core of it is that you have to do things together and you have to inspire people.”
He brought these principles with him to the world of entrepreneurship.
“When we were looking at finding an editor for the magazine, I searched around trying to see who would be the right fit… I was impressed by the experience people brought to the table but something was always missing… Chris Bishop’s name came up because he had done a great piece of work for me a couple of years before that, and impressed, so we took him on… He said he would even do this job for free,” recalls Wahi.
Magazines were in trouble everywhere. In the United States, according to MediaFinder, 152 closed in 2011 and 82 in 2012. In South Africa, Heat, Seventeen, FHM, Sports Illustrated and Shape are a few magazines that shut down because of declining advertising, circulation and competition from online.
Despite this, on September 28, 2011, on a night of glitz and glamour in Johannesburg, billionaire Patrice Motsepe unveiled the historic first cover of FORBES AFRICA.
It turned out that Wahi’s decision to hire Bishop was the right one. In just five years, the team has turned FORBES AFRICA into the leading business magazine in Africa against the odds.
The magazine came out ahead of its competitors in the IPSOS Affluent Survey Africa in 2014 and 2016. The independent research study, released on August 4, shows FORBES AFRICA reached 163,000, or 4.7%, of the 3.4 million qualifying adults, aged between 25 and 64, across seven markets.
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“What we have managed to achieve in just five short years is truly remarkable. Our success is attributed to the hard work and dedication of our teams from across the continent,” says Sid Wahi, Executive Director at ABN Publishing (FORBES AFRICA).
The IPSOS 2016 figures show a 7% increase from the 2014 survey.
“As the founding editor of this magazine it gives me immense pride to see our circulation figures increasing; all this at a time when magazine circulation around the world is falling. I think this is a tribute to the hard work and determination of our young band of highly talented journalists,” says Bishop.
FORBES AFRICA’s work has been recognized by various accolades awarded to the journalists and the editor. The hard work is also appreciated by readers. In Zimbabwe, entrepreneur, Blessed Mushamiri, says he drives around the city looking for a copy each month.
“Sometimes I have to drive to five different uptown shops to bump into one but I don’t stop looking. If I can’t find one, I ask people in South Africa to send me some copies. When I read FORBES AFRICA it engages me in an affair of pure pleasure, an exciting brush with business in Africa that shows me, as a young entrepreneur, that I can participate in something rare and thrilling. It is a must-read for every businessperson,” says Mushamiri.
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In West Africa, Emeka Akano, CEO and Co-Founder of Jara Mobile Ltd, says reading about entrepreneurs from different backgrounds who make it to the FORBES lists has inspired and motivated him.
“Features in the prestigious FORBES AFRICA magazine have gone a long way in giving me much more exposure to a credible audience, increased my personal profile beyond measure, opened doors for new business opportunities and business connections,” says Akano.
No matter the praises, Wahi says there is still more work to be done. He wants to grow the magazine to an even bigger success story, as with many of his other businesses.
Wahi is a smart entrepreneur and risk taker. An audacious one, five years ago, put this magazine in your hands.

Behold The Business Bible Of Africa

He is the political cartoonist who was sued by his president and won. He has made a name for himself by being outspoken and critical and he’s not about to slow down.
Jonathan Shapiro has been publishing his annual collections of drawings in the Mail &amp; Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers for 19 years. In 2014, his book, It’s Code Red, features left-wing, overall-clad opposition party leader, Julius Malema, marching into South Africa’s Parliament on its cover. Inside, it’s a record of 12 months in a country weighed down by political scandals and high-profile murder trials. On page 87, however, is a ray of sunshine: an illustration depicting a conversation between two children – one white and the other black – discussing how far South Africa has come since the first democratic election 20 years ago. It’s playful and a bit silly and it sums up the man who draws South Africa’s news for a living.
“There is a difference between scepticism and cynicism. I am a sceptic and that means someone who reads between the lines and doesn’t take things at face value. The cynic doesn’t believe that anything’s good. I am not cynical about South Africa. I’m a patriotic sceptic,” says Shapiro.
“The whole idea of being a critical cartoonist is that my drawings will start a debate and hopefully something good can come out of that.”
Shapiro, known to those who read him as Zapiro, grew up in Cape Town and worshipped at the altars of Tintin creator Georges Remi and Charles Schultz of Peanuts fame. Pursuing cartooning as a career however was not on the cards and a teenage Shapiro enrolled in a seven-year architecture degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
“I lost confidence in my abilities and I didn’t think I could make a career out of being a cartoonist. I was lacking the vision to pursue my dreams.”
Shapiro’s university career in the late 1970s and early 1980s overlapped some of South Africa’s darkest years under the apartheid regime. His political views were progressive but Shapiro struggled to fit in with the student anti-apartheid movements which were simmering – and occasionally boiling over – at the university. Things changed in 1983 when Shapiro’s mother, Gabby, became involved in the political party the United Democratic Front and recruited most of her family to the cause within months.
Shapiro’s political awakening coincided with more time spent cartooning.
“The first time I did a political caricature was in my second year at varsity. The subject was the head of the architecture department at UCT. The picture showed the duplicity of his personality and the way he ran the department. He flew off the handle and that was when I first realized that my cartoons – these pictures that I drew – had a potential to be powerful. Definitely more powerful than anything my architecture work could accomplish,” he says.
Shapiro changed majors from architecture to graphic design after a month of backpacking through Europe as a fourth year student visiting, mostly unannounced and uninvited, the art studios where some of the world’s best loved comics such as Asterix were drawn.
“It was a shot in the arm. I came back to South Africa and told my parents I wanted to change my degree to graphic design. They were unbelievably supportive.”
Shapiro’s first fulltime cartooning job was at the now defunct South newspaper in 1987. He has spent almost three decades since then depicting the fall of apartheid, the country’s transition to democracy and the travails of the various presidential administrations.
“What gets me really down is when things get really bad politically and trying to find the glimmers of hope is not easy,” he says.
His cartoon depicting the rape of Lady Justice – a metaphor featured repeatedly in his work – by President Jacob Zuma was met with outrage by the ruling party and many members of the public. Shapiro’s only concern around the picture’s publication was that it may be interpreted as insensitive to women.
“Critical cartooning is the foray into the taboo as well as the pushing and the prodding which breaks down boundaries and creates discourse in society.”
Shapiro’s work is increasingly critical of Zuma – who has been immortalized into South African consciousness as ‘shower head’ on account of Zapiro’s work.
“I am not anti-ANC but I am against the corruption and the complacency prevalent in the ruling party. It is actually unbelievable to do cartoons in this environment because you become part of the moment, part of that political discussion.”
Shapiro works from a home studio in Cape Town. He has no plans to give up cartooning and doesn’t anticipate running out of material in the foreseeable future.
“Sometimes reality in South Africa is weirder that anything I could ever dream up.”

The Satirical Thorn In  The President’s Side

WHEN MEDIA MOGUL  Oprah Winfrey bid farewell to 25 years of The Oprah Winfrey Show in May, she left viewers with a cliff-hanger. “I won’t say good-bye,” Winfrey said on her final show. “Until we meet again.”
<div id="attachment_197" style="width: 823px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-197" class="size-full wp-image-197" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO101011_191.jpg" alt="" width="813" height="621" />In 1976, at 22, Oprah became coanchor of Baltimore&#8217;s WJZTV</div>
But the promise of that glorified gathering place on her glittering new cable network, OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network, has fallen short of expectations. OWN’s 24-hour-a-day programming launched on Jan. 1 in 80 million homes as a partnership between Winfrey’s Harpo production company and cable programming powerhouse Discovery Communications. The goal was to remake a forgotten, high-numbered cable channel into Oprah-branded gold. Ratings quickly tanked. Chief Executive Christina Norman was shown the door in May. Winfrey became the chair, CEO and chief creative officer in July. Now the pressure is on Oprah to save TV’s feel-good network.
Winfrey admitted to fans on Facebook that OWN hadn’t found its flow because she and her staff had been too focused on ending the syndicated Oprah TV show. (Winfrey declined an interview with FORBES.) Critics argue that the issues run deeper. Since OWN’s launch in January its average prime-time audience dropped 37% to 250,000 viewers in July, according to Nielsen. An average of 109,000 viewers tuned in on an all-day basis that month—just one-third of the viewership expected by advertisers.
<div id="attachment_199" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-199" class="size-full wp-image-199" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO101011_193.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" />Founded Harpo in 1986</div>
Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television &amp; Popular Culture at Syracuse University, believes OWN launched too early, without enough programming. The shows it does have are weak, he says. Adding to the troubles: OWN is difficult to find on the channel guide. “Some people thought anything Oprah introduced would be a hit. She could introduce the chicken pox, and people would want to get it,” says Thompson. “We now know Oprah’s name isn’t enough.”
Discovery Communications Chief Executive David Zaslav, who approached Winfrey with the idea for an Oprah-inspired network in 2007 and subsequently okayed pumping nearly $200 million into it, says he isn’t worried by the lower-than-expected ratings. “It’s going to take time,” Zaslav insists. “There is no cable channel that launches from nowhere to immediate success.”
Zaslav has pushed for more involvement from Oprah. He persuaded Winfrey to double her on-air time in 2009, before the launch. With Winfrey in charge, “Oprah’s now at the center of OWN,” Zaslav beams. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.”
Winfrey may be one of the media industry’s best brand managers, but can she rise to the role of a programming executive? On Aug. 1, after spending her first full week focused on the channel, she told fans that while she wasn’t “frazzled” by OWN’s performance, managing it turned out to be one of her biggest challenges. “It’s ten times harder than doing my daily show,” she said in a Facebook note. “Doing that show felt like breathing every day. Now I’m in so many meetings I sometimes have to step out and catch a breath.”
<div id="attachment_200" style="width: 685px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-200" class="size-full wp-image-200" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO101011_189.jpg" alt="" width="675" height="805" />Started monthly O magazine in 2000. Has over 2 million subscribers</div>
Part of Winfrey’s new strategy is integrating OWN’s staff in L.A. with Harpo’s staff in Chicago. “One team, one heart,” goes the mantra. Harpo presidents Sheri Salata and Erik Logan were tapped as OWN presidents in July and will lead both teams. Instead of chasing ratings, Salata and Logan plan to focus their attention on brand-consistent programming and hope better ratings will follow. “We feel very bullish that we will deliver on the commitments that we have in the marketplace,” says Logan.
Zaslav, too, maintains that advertisers— OWN launched with about ten blue-chip ad clients that had signed multiyear deals—have been incredibly supportive. Of them, Target, Kellogg’s and Procter &amp; Gamble declined to comment. A General Motors representative says GM remains committed to OWN.
Some close OWN watchers warn that advertisers’ support has just about reached its limit. Derek Baine, a senior analyst at media research firm SNL Kagan, says OWN’s ratings have sometimes been lower than the ratings for the Discovery Health channel, which preceded OWN on the same channel number. “If we get to the end of the year and ratings are still terrible, then it’s a big problem. Advertisers will pull back on their commitments.”
That means Winfrey has to work fast to ensure OWN’s new programming— scheduled to launch Oct. 10— catches on. After all, even with her $2.7 billion net worth Oprah can’t subsidize a cable network indefinitely. OWN executives are placing most of their hopes on a daily talk show, The Rosie Show, hosted by comedienne Rosie O’Donnell, and a rehash of the Oprah show, called Oprah’s Lifeclass. The latter will use select clips from the 4,561 Oprah episodes, along with new footage of Winfrey sharing personal revelations and life lessons. “At my core I’m a teacher, masquerading as a talk show host. And now I’ll have a nightly class on OWN,” Winfrey said on Facebook.
<div id="attachment_201" style="width: 442px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-201" class="size-full wp-image-201" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO101011_190.jpg" alt="" width="432" height="288" />Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush chats with talk show host Oprah Winfrey Tuesday Sept. 19, 2000 after appearing on the program in Chicago. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)</div>
In January a second show hosted by Winfrey, Oprah’s Next Chapter, will follow her around the world as she interviews high-profile subjects. “All it takes is a couple of big hits,” says Syracuse University’s Thompson. “The really important question is, can Oprah still do a hit show?”
It’s a bet that Winfrey, with Zaslav’s backing, is willing to make. With the cable property valued as high as $1 billion, it’s no small risk. “We’re making a lot of progress,” says Zaslav. “Watch out for us over the next two to three years. We’re going to make a big splash, and we’re going to have a big impact.”
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Tag: Publishing

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Obama, Oprah And The World On Her CV

Behold The Business Bible Of Africa

The Satirical Thorn In The President’s Side

Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Battle