Young African Entrepreneur

Dr. Lulu Gwagwa is CEO of Lereko Investments, a black-owned investment firm in South Africa. You can connect with Dr. Lulu at http://www.lulugwagwa.co.za. Born in a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal, Dr. Lulu came from a large family that included 25 family members. Growing up, she wanted to be a doctor, but there was no math teacher in her village, which halted her future medical career. She studied at University of Fort Hare, a historically important black university. Encouraged by a professor, Dr. Lulu completed her masters in urban planning at the University of Natal, a predominantly white higher education institution where she was one of a handful of black students. She qualified as the first black town and regional planner – a remarkable achievement in apartheid South Africa. In the late 1980s, Dr. Lulu left for London for further graduate studies; she graduated from the London School of Economics with a masters in social policy & planning and the University College London with a PhD. With the election

Karan Singh is the founder and CEO of Yegomoto, Rwanda’s motorcycle taxi ride-hailing startup. You can connect with him @yegomotoafrica on Twitter. Karan is a successful entrepreneur who grew flourishing businesses in both India and Singapore. In 2015, he travelled to Rwanda on business and saw an opportunity to use tech to organize the informal motorcycle taxi sector, which is prone to road accidents and associated with theft and crime. The Rwandan government had even banned, albeit briefly, motorcycle taxis from Kigali around this time, but as the main means of transportation, they had to let them back onto the streets. He set up Yegomoto which mounts a IOT-enabled device with a point of sales terminal onto all of its bikes, which helps drivers, who are earning better wages and avoiding deadly accidents, and riders, who no longer have to haggle for fares and are safer. And the exciting part of Yegomoto’s business model is that it can use the reams of data on its bikes, including the speed, location, fare co

Akin Sawyerr is the Managing Director of Feleman, an investments and consulting firm focused on payments systems, remittances, and blockchain solutions to catalyze growth in emerging markets. You can connect with him @akinsawyerr on Twitter. Akin is also the co-founder of RocRemit, a blockchain remittance company, and is a director of Splash Mobile Money, a mobile payments company in Sierra Leone. Akin is a fount of knowledge on mobile money and payments in Sub-Saharan Africa. We chatted about his early involvement in Splash, why blockchain will revolutionize remittances in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the changing profile of the successful African startup founder. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Akin Sawyerr.

Leo Stiegeler is the general manger of Ringier Africa, publisher of the popular Pulse media brand. You can connect with him @LeonardStiegeler on Linkedin. Leo is passionate about Africa’s digital media and marketing. For the last five years, he has led the expansion of Ringier, a 200-year old Swiss media giant, into Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya’s booming digital media markets. Leo is quickly establishing Ringier as one of Africa’s leading digital media brands. In July, Ringier reached a total of 169 million users across its platforms. Before Ringier, Leo was at the forefront of Africa’s e-commerce as one of the co-founders of Jumia Nigeria. He later served as the CEO of Startup Partners Africa, a Lagos-based internet incubator. We talked about Leo’s early fascination with Sub-Saharan Africa, his experiences in Nigeria’s budding e-commerce market, and the vast potential of Africa’s digital media. He’s an adamant believer in local content and the power of video, saying if “a Nigerian is spending his/her last kobo,

Mira Mehta is the founder and CEO of Tomato Jos, a tomato paste company based in Kaduna, Nigeria. You can connect with her @ShoutsAndMiras and @TeamTomatoJos on Twitter. Mira was born and raised in New England in the US. Fresh out of college, she landed her first job at BlackRock, a large asset manager. Driven and ambitious, Mira quickly realized that she’d never have a leadership role, as her department was just a “line item” in the company’s P&L. She was looking to make more of an impact and joined the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which sent her to Nigeria. While she was once driving to Kano in northern Nigeria, Mira saw a glut of tomatoes lining the side of the road. The quantity of rotting tomatoes was so great that the road resembled a red carpet. The image lingered with her. Why was Nigeria, which imports hundreds of millions of dollars of tomato paste per year, not able to manufacture tomato paste locally from its domestic tomato crop? After finishing her MBA at Harvard, Mira still couldn’t sh

Nnamdi Oranye is the founder of Disrupting Africa, an open platform promoting Africa’s innovators. You can connect with him @Nnamdi Oranye on Linkedin and @nnamdi_oranye on Twitter. Nnamdi is passionate about Africa’s tech innovation. He is the author of Disrupting Africa and Taking on Silicon Valley. Nnamdi is also the former host of a weekly show featuring African innovators on radio station PowerFM 98.7 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He’s a regular contributor on African tech innovation to the BBC, CNBC Africa, and Mail & Guardian. Nnamdi spent his early years between the UK and Nigeria before moving to Botswana with his family where he studied engineering at university. Itching to leave for the “first world”, he immigrated to Australia. But a bullish McKinsey report changed his perceptions on the opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa. When he was asked to lead the Africa expansion of an Australian mobile money company, he jumped at the chance, moving to South Africa. This experience in Africa’s fint

Manuel Koser is the co-founder of Silvertree Holdings, a South African investment firm. You can connect with him @ManuelKoser on Twitter. Originally from Germany, Manuel started his career as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG). During an assignment in South Africa, he fell in love with Cape Town. Looking to relocate there permanently, he left BCG and co-founded Zando, South Africa’s e-commerce fast fashion platform. After he stopped running the day-to-day operations at Zando, he helped to co-found Jumia Nigeria. In 2013, Manuel set up Silvertree Holdings, a holding company that invests and develops South African startups. Manuel was disenchanted with the large-scale, heavily capitalized, and massive valuation startup model that was epitomized by Jumia. He wanted to take a radically different approach to his investment model that provided patient capital and resources and mentorship to startup founders. We chatted about Manuel’s early days at Zando, his involvement with Jumia Nigeria, and why the S

Joanna Bichsel is the CEO and co-founder of Kasha, East Africa’s leading e-commerce platform for women’s health and personal care products. You can connect with her @JoannaBichsel on Twitter. Born and raised in Canada, Joanna worked as a software developer at Microsoft in Seattle in the US. Disinterested in climbing the corporate ladder, she changed careers and moved into development. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she learned that women in Africa faced real challenges in buying sanitary pads and other basic health products. She thought, “Why not develop a e-commerce platform for women to buy affordable, high quality health products confidentially?” The idea for Kasha was born. In 2015, Joanna set up the company with her co-founder Amanda Arch in Rwanda and has recently launched in Kenya. While East Africa was the logical starting point, Joanna aims for Kasha to disrupt how women buy health products in emerging markets around the world. We chatted about Joanna’s move to Rwanda, how she finally go

Addis Alemayehou is the founder of 251 Communications, Ethiopia’s leading communications and branding company. He’s also the co-founder of Kana TV, Ethiopia’s first TV station to dub international content into Amharic. You can connect with him @addisale on Twitter. Born in Ethiopia, Addis left when he was a child after the socialist Derg came to power. He grew up in Kenya and later moved to the US and Canada for his university studies and work. But, he always felt restless and out of place in North America. He itched to be where people wouldn’t ask him anymore, “Where are you from?” Against all advice, he moved to Addis Ababa in 2000, and after working for USAID for many years, he launched 251 Communications in 2011. The World Bank, Coca-Cola, and the Gates Foundation are just some of his clients. “You’re like a kid in a candy store when it comes to business in Ethiopia,” says Addis. Just like that proverbial kid, surrounded by candy, he couldn’t resist the allure of getting into broadcasting. In 2016, he and

Bram Fudzulani is the co-founder of Angle Dimension, Malawi’s leading software developer. You can connect with him @ Bram Fudzulani on Linkedin. Bram is passionate about developing in-house software solutions to problems in Malawi’s finance and insurance sectors. Bram is passionate about developing in-house software solutions to problems in Malawi’s finance and insurance sectors. While he worked full-time at Malawi’s leading ISP, he and his co-founders would meet up in their spare time – after work, weekends and holidays – to work on their side hustle, building bespoke software solutions to local problems. After a big break – and check – from an insurance client, Bram and his co-founders decided to make a go at turning their side hustle into a full-fledged software development office. Angle Dimension was born. Over the years, Bram has developed B2B products for micro-finance institutions, commercial banks, and insurance companies. He’s just developed a platform for unbanked Malawians who organize into savin

Will Hunnam and Lanre Oloniniyi are the co-founders of Orbitt Capital. You can connect with them @OrbittCapital on Twitter. Close friends since business school, Will and Lanre were well-seasoned Africa private equity professionals. For years, they crisscrossed the continent in search of great companies looking for capital from global investors. But, this matchmaking process was fraught with difficulties and inefficiencies. On occasion, they’d work on a transaction, which was on the verge of closing — only for the investor to walk away at the last minute. Or they noticed that the company didn’t interest the investor due to sector, geography, etc. The old-fashioned way of deal origination just wasn’t cutting it. Frustrated, they brainstormed how it could be done better — and the idea for Orbitt was born. Orbitt gathers all the players in Africa’s investment ecosystem onto a single platform, instantly connecting the buy-side (investors) with the sell-side (companies) as well as invaluable intermediaries, like br

Florida Uzoaru is the founder/CEO of Slide Safe, Nigeria’s first STI self-testing kit delivery service. You can connect with her @dasexlady on Facebook and @slidesafeng on Twitter and Instagram. You can also find her on LinkedIn @Florida Uzoaru. Despite coming from a commercially minded Nigerian family, Florida grew up hating sales. For her, it was like begging. In her 20s, she entered the public health profession and became passionate about promoting safe sex in Nigeria. While Nigeria has one of the world’ highest rates of HIV infection, only 10% of the population actually gets tested. Frustrated with the approach of NGOs, which failed to tackle the problem on the ground, she came up with the idea for Slide Safe –an online service that delivers self-testing kits for HIV, hepatitis B, and other sexually transmitted infections as well as contraceptives. But, she was reluctant to publicly promote her business. She thought she could be a behind-the-scene founder. After all, she grew up hating sales. But, she fin

Today’s guest is Henri Nyakarundi, the CEO of ARED Group. You can connect with him @henrinyakarundi on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram and at his website www.henrinyakarundi.com. Henri grew up in Burundi to Rwandese parents. A self-described indifferent and rebellious student, he was expelled twice from high school. Henri only stumbled upon the world of entrepreneurship after he moved to the US for university. He launched several businesses which all failed before he set up a successful trucking business. But, burnt out from the trucking business and reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, Henri packed his bags and returned to Africa. He moved to Rwanda to test the market for a solar-powered kiosk which would be used for charging phones and became the core product of ARED Group. The kiosk was a hit and has gone through multiple iterations to adapt to it bottom of the pyramid customer base. ARED Group sells multiple services on its kiosks, providing Internet connectivity, collecting data for NGO and

Sam Gikandi is the CEO and co-founder of Africa’s Talking, a pan-African mobile technology company empowering developers across the continent. Prior to Africa’s Talking, Sam worked for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, in the US and Hong Kong. In the Asia office, he helped build the high frequency trading platform and led a team trading hundreds of millions of dollars per day. In 2010, intrigued by the burgeoning tech scene in his home country of Kenya, he set up with a co-founder Africa’s Talking. While it started as a side hustle, two years later, Sam took on a full-time COO/CTO role in the company, developing the software developer-facing part of the business. As demand for business APIs in Kenya exploded with the strong growth of tech startups and mobile money payment solutions, Africa’s Talking software developer business took off. The company turned profitable after only 1 year of operations. Africa’s Talking helps the growing software developer community across the continent integrate into the telec

Gregory Rockson is the founder and CEO of mPharma, a digital healthcare company present in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe. You can connect with him @Rockson2 and @mPharmaHealth on Twitter. MPharma is a digital healthcare company that is helping Africans access high-quality medications. When Greg left for the US to study at university, he wanted to be a doctor. But he quickly realized that he could have a greater impact by studying the business of healthcare on the continent. How often have you gone to a pharmacy which didn’t have the drug that you needed? It’s a problem that is common across the continent and has a devastating impact on Africans, especially those who have illnesses requiring regular treatment, like diabetes, cancer or heart disease. Greg wanted to tackle this problem. Hence, mPharma was born. He built an e-prescription platform that would allow seamless communication between doctors and pharmacies so that patients could get their drugs on time. But he realized that this was the tip of th

Neil Gordon is the founder and CEO of Global Agricultural Exchange (GAEX). You can connect with him @gaexcocoa on Twitter. GAEX is a Blockchain-enabled platform that provides liquidity to cocoa farmers in West Africa. Neil is a former bank having worked at JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and KPMG. Neil is probably one of the most ambitious people I’ve met in a while. His goal to disrupt the Ivorian cocoa sector is a breathe of fresh air. It’s uplifting to meet someone who isn’t scared of dreaming big and masters the mechanics of how it’d work. Cynics — and the cocoa sector has a few — might say it’s pie in the sky. But, this is the wrong attitude. I survived a year and a half trading cocoa and I know that the sector does not lend itself to innovation. But, as margins for commodity traders get whittled down, traders need to boost efficiencies, which Blockchain can provide. However, Cote d’Ivoire’s cocoa sector is known for its problematic supply chain. Whether right or wrong, it is synonymous with child labor and ram

Today’s episode is going to be a different from my usual long-form interview with an African entrepreneur. Today is a special “best of” episode where I’m going to highlight the top ten tips, advice, hacks for cultivating an entrepreneur mindset. Since the podcast launched, I’ve interviewed a dozen amazing entrepreneurs with thriving businesses in Africa. They’ve candidly shared advice, tips, and insights into how they persevere in the face of challenges. What’s remarkable is that all of these entrepreneurs share a common mindset that has been critical to their success. As renowned entrepreneur Tony Robbins said, success as an entrepreneur is 20% skills and 80% psychology, or mindset. You have to develop the right psychology to handle the emotional rollercoaster of being an African entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur anywhere is tough, but I’d argue that being an entrepreneur in Africa is even more difficult. When I looked through my notes from past episodes, it was incredible to see the similarities of these

Wiza Jalakasi is a serial entrepreneur and current head of international expansion at Africa is Talking. You can connect with him @wizaj on Twitter and via his website http://wiza.jalaka.si. By 16, Wiza had already founded his company, Mwtunes, an online music distribution platform that was ahead of its time in his home country of Malawi. At university in Nairobi, he and his cofounder set up Djuaji, Research, a market research company that paid survey participants via mobile money. It held a lot of promise. It was innovative, cost effective, and accurate. Early on, Djuaji raised seed capital from Savannah Fund and participated in its elite accelerator program. It all seemed to be going well. Until it wasn’t. Wiza and his cofounder were running out of cash and they weren’t close to figuring out how to make the business viable. He made a tough choice: He resigned and returned to Malawi. Shortly thereafter, he spoke with Sam Gikandi, founder of Africa is Talking, an API developer, who offered him a job to set up

Technologist. Blogger. TED fellow. Serial Entrepreneur. Passionate advocate and patron of Africa’s tech startups. Erik Hersman is a well-known elder of Kenya’s tech scene, having helped to found some of Kenya’s leading tech companies and ecosystem institutions. In response to the outbreak of post electoral violence in Kenya in 2008, he set up with three other co-founders Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing mapping tool deployed in crisis situations. In 2010, he founded the iHub, Nairobi’s innovation hub, which is the nexus for Kenya’s entrepreneurs, hackers, designers, researchers and investors. In 2014, he helped to set up BRCK, a manufacturer of a rugged Internet router for Africa and a provider of free Internet via its Moja service. He spends most of his time at BRCK these days where he’s CEO. He also helped to found Gearbox, a hub for hardware development, and is a principal at Savannah Fund, an African venture capital fund. He is the founder of the influential Africa technology blogs, The White African, and Afriga

This episode is a slight departure from my normal YAE interview show. Episode 010 feels like a mini milestone. Young African Entrepreneur has been live for six weeks, but I’ve been preparing this show for six months! And, I thought it would be interesting to share some reflections on my podcasting journey, especially the difficulties of creating an Africa-focused podcast for an African audience. Podcasting is an exciting medium that has taken off in the US and Europe. But, Africans are new to the world of podcasting, which poses its own special challenges to marketing and distribution. Don't miss the show notes at: