hello everyone my name is claude ruenetsky and it's a pleasure to welcome you to our third webinar as part of our mit and true africa university webinar series as you might have seen when you register this whole entire series is about sustainable development in africa and we have different ways of defining the sustainable development the way we're looking at it is really more from the perspective of the various industries the various services that can really help africa to leave prague and and really kind of fulfill its potential as as potentially an extra and very important powerhouse in the global economy and and today we have a very very very very special speaker who i was just saying uh just a few minutes ago is a bit of an overachiever but before i get to him i wanted to um to share my screen and um and actually kind of tell you what we're doing why we're so so excited about this series which is lasting 11 weeks this 11 week series and what i was saying about sustainable development in africa is really about identifying specific industries and finding the people the movements and the possibilities around growing industries in africa and so today our topic is what are the initiatives and investments transforming africa and our our speaker is inoluwa abuyeji and we'll talk about the name um later but um some people call him ian some people call him e but in any event he is an entrepreneur in the public interest um he made news a lot of people have been talking about his of his latest company over the past week because he helped to co-found and lead flutter wave which is africa's latest unicorn the company raised another 170 million dollars last week out of nigeria and at a valuation of one billion dollars and and then there's been talk that they might go public uh potentially on the new york stock exchange and become one of africa's fastest growing and most successful startups but prior to that e as i call him he had co-founded andela which is africa's largest engineering organization that has received investment from mark zuckerberg and google venture amongst others he now leads future africa which is really what we're going to be talking about today because you know he's been spending his time as a successful serial entrepreneur and investor helping other founders as well as philanthropists and other investors from around the world not just silicon valley not just nigeria but really around the world understand how to build fast growing and impactful technology business in africa so the word fast is important and the word impact is really important so i'm um i'm claude gonitsky the founder of two media companies uh trace and true africa and my entire career has been dedicated to championing the creativity and the innovation of young africans and i say africans that define africans very broadly i say africans from the african continent but also africans from the diaspora and also african afro descendants that could be african-americans that could be afro-brazilians that could be afro-caribbeans so that is what i've been doing i'm a product of the mit environment i received an mba as a sloan fellow and the reason i launched a true african university is because i'm one of those people who want to help to find actionable ways to nurture africa's talent and and i wanted to say um ian is exactly in on the same vibe and this series would not have been possible without the support of our partners and those partners are the mit center for international studies i'm actually a research affiliate at the mit center for international studies i've been a research affiliate there for about 10 years and and we aim to support and promote international research and education at mit uh we produce research that creatively addresses global issues while helping to educate the next generation of global citizens the website is cis.mit.edu our other sponsor and partner is the mit africa program which is based at the mit center for international studies and the mit africa program empowers mit students and faculty to advance knowledge and solve the world's great challenges by connecting them with leading researchers companies and other partners in african countries the website is misti misty.mit.edu again it's misty.mit.edu and finally this introduction is going to summarize what true africa university is all about so created by africans for africa true african university which hopefully one day will be known as tau just like the massachusetts institute of technology is known as mit tau aims to become the pan-african learning community that is committed to accelerating africa's sustainable development by mobilizing a global network of academic industrial and institutional partners our website is trueafricanuniversity.com and all the videos for the webinars as well as the supporting materials that are presented during the webinars are available on trueafricanuniversity.com so
now i get to stop sharing my screen if i can and i get to uh get off the stage and really turn it over to my friend um ee aboyeji who again is one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the african continent and he's built two very successful companies actually now three and he hasn't even turned 30 yet so e please the floor is yours and i'm very much looking forward to seeing your presentation before we get into our our fireside chat absolutely absolutely thank you so much cloud for being so generous um i do want to apologize before i start to speak because um we had a small schedule in snafu because of the the way uh time is done in america so i was hoping i would be sitting in a lounge ready to talk to you in an hour and then all of a sudden realized that time moved forward one hour because of the time zone shift over the weekend so please apologize i've informed my my friendly driver here to uh just keep me packed so forgive the the lack of a scenic background uh i'll find a way to make up for it um i i guess um the best way to to begin would be again to thank mit and in particular claude for the opportunity to speak to you today um i'm deeply grateful to have an opportunity to share the little i know with your community um and i hope that um you know some of what i say today resonates well enough that a couple of a couple of you are looking into africa um as a focus for your work and for your endeavors going forward um i imagine now is a good time to put up the slides is that possible absolutely michelle will put him up now amazing amazing so i was asked to talk about initiatives and investments that are transforming africa and i'm just gonna try um to kind of uh speak to things uh more or less at a at a super super high level um you know just thinking about things from a frameworks perspective um and and slightly less from a super specific perspective because i find that oftentimes i'm talking about initiatives and investments that are required to transform africa it's very easy to get caught in your weeds um and the return order because really that's how things get done over here but at the same time i think it's usually helpful to put things in a framework perspective so people understand you know what the role in particular of technology investment is playing um in transforming the continent um i um please next slide hello michelle awesome i'd like to show folks this slide because i think that it really does sum up the reason why um quite frankly there should be a lot more uh attention being paid to what's going on in africa um i mean that's not to say the attention being paid right now is insufficient in any way shape or form but definitely we should be thinking if we're thinking far enough into the future about more more things right um i like to tell people if you just look at the population demographics you know it's very easy to figure out that africa is at the heart of our shared global future um you can see that straight line for africa in that line for asia which is rapidly coming down in terms of population and what you quickly recognize is that you've got a bunch of energetic 20 year olds in africa who are hopeful for a better future for themselves regardless of how big the present circumstance may seem um and the real danger is that if you don't find a way to engage these 20 year olds who are over the next 15 years going to be the largest workforce um in the world um you you um you really end up in a you really end up in a scenario where you you um you're you're basically struggling um to keep the world peaceful and productive um because if you have a bunch of despairing young people um across across africa and everybody imagines they're going to be able to move on to a better and more progressive world without them uh well i i got a bridge to nowhere to sell you it just simply will be impossible because that's just not how human beings work human beings will do whatever it takes to give themselves a better life even if it means making life slightly worse for other people and i think that's why the whole world has to kind of pay a lot more attention to what's happening in africa because it's never a good idea to have a ton of young people without a future and opportunities and most important people our next slide well it goes without saying that despite how amazing um uh you know the african continent is um and all the promise that that it holds as a result of all the young people you quickly realize also that africa is home to some of the world's most difficult challenges right you've got for example um kids out of school right highest proportion of kids out of school reside in africa it's almost as many as uh 300 million kids um by by 20 35. um you have unemployment um people need jobs right you have over 300 million people who need jobs by 2035. you've got a really bad malnutrition problem more than a third of all children under five in africa are stunted because they simply don't have good food with good nutrients and that means that their mental capacity um is likely to be challenged for for for a long time and and you know this is um this is very concerning because you know when people don't have mental capacity um um you know then they become extremely violent and and when they become extremely violent their real consequences and behaviors that follow that and and i say this to just simply say that you know these are real challenges that come from africa i'm not here really to sell you an africa rising story there are real challenges in africa but again um as as you see on my next slide uh michelle can go on to the next slide um the the big challenge really with these problems is normally we would be able to you know throw a bit of dollars at it we'll be able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars maybe or billions of dollars to to to tackle these problems that's how you know other continents got a shot at doing it you know you had uh in europe you had the mashup the marshall plan in america you had the reconstruction i mean most most governments government typically is expected to step into it and solve it but i think what's different now is that governments can step in because they don't have the money especially post corona to actually do this everyone everyone all over the world is struggling with providing the basics for their people they're unlikely to um prioritize africa over their own local populations and most african governments are just cash strapped right you know this is a very fanciful graph that kind of illustrates um gives some level of quantum to the challenge um when it comes to finances so you have you know um the state of new york's um uh um on budget versus you know the annual infrastructure requirement um and you can see new york can meet theirs adequately um but you know nigeria nigeria's cap infrastructure budget is just nine billion dollars kenya's infrastructure budget is just five billion dollars um and and the state of new york which is perhaps like a tent in size um you know at least from a size of government perspective just a state in the in the much larger um um behemoth of the united states is you know um um able to to to to get over three times the infrastructure funding so the whole idea of spending your way out of these challenges just doesn't work because the solutions really can't scale fast enough and i think what makes these challenges particularly tricky is they're wicked problems so wicked problems are problems that kind of get more complex as time goes on so think about it you know how are you gonna put 300 million kids into jobs if in nigeria alone over 10 million of them can't even go to school what kind of jobs would you have in 2035 that wouldn't at the very least require um a sound understanding of of literacy uh sound understanding of math i think it's almost impossible so they can't get the kind of hello hello king henry yes we can hear you you went in and out but you're broken you're back now okay okay fantastic sorry um so yeah so they don't they don't have um an education to be able to get any kind of decent job and this this is unfortunately the challenge um you know without uh the education to get a decent job the spiral continues and that's that's the definition of a wicked problem and then even when you think about an early childhood medication right if you're malnourished between the ages of one to five when you should be developing your brain um and um and and so you get into um standard one um at five years old and you you you have a malnourished brain it's going to be really really hard for you to learn right so these are examples of some of the challenges you know they get far more complex far more dangerous as time goes on and and that's where you know and and the governments don't have the money to fix all these problems um next slide so i think my own theory really uh and it's called from uh the last book that somebody who many people in this room would know very well um wrote before before he died um you know the the great um um christensen uh who's the father of disruption theory you know he wrote he wrote an excellent book with a friend of mine called afoso drama um and and the book basically talked about these market creating innovations right and the big idea with market creating innovations was that you know things that basically look pretty innocent you know things that look like toys um could basically scale to become you know these effects effective solutions to huge societal society-wide wicket problems um and any differentiates between you know sustaining innovation efficiency innovation and market creating fashion you know so steady innovation is what government tends to do with these large grants um like they gave with you know the when you know when when we were rebuilding europe and all that wire up the city and make sure there was infrastructure um you know and and and that was a lot of what was happening right um that that kind of sustaining innovation um it just comes in from somewhere else to improve performance at incredible costs um then you have efficiency innovation right which is really about doing more with less right so you know private equities right up this alley you know where you know they're going to cut jobs and they're going to use a lot more technology and so on and so forth target existing customers with lower prices and all of that but you see market creating innovations is a completely different kettle of fish because what you have with market creating innovation is that they are you know they're very simple they start out very simple and affordable it's not about uh you don't need a hundred billion dollars to start as you see with some of the companies whose examples are used as in the course of this course um and they target they kind of serve the underserved or the unserved so they target new customers not all customers but new customers um they tend to create tons of jobs right because they're just brand new stuff i mean typically they require some level of kind of labor effect to work if you think about something like an uber and the kind of impact that it's had on the society in terms of creating gig work for lots of young people um that doesn't have a high barrier to learning that's creating tons of jobs so if you didn't have an uber you wouldn't be able to create those jobs and and most importantly to enable development so our belief in my belief in particular is that you know africa just needs to be thinking more about market creating of issues i think for me um i normally ask new new um analysts that come to work with us these questions like what's the most successful venture capital investment of all time and and um people have a lot of very interesting answers but the the one the one um i i appreciate the most and my own assets that question is a mobile phone the mobile phone is by far the most successful venture capital investment of all time because not just did it uh return um um you know uh uh returned capital and and uh folks like moy bryan can tell you all of that stuff but but i think that um more importantly it's um it's um it's actually spawned at industry if you look at at every single um um institution um you know that has come out of uh of this telephony revolution in africa it's just absolutely extension almost every country in africa the number one or number two company is a mobile telephony company um and and even more more interestingly uh you know if you if you really take a deep look at what's really going on you know you see all these multi-billion dollar industries that were built on the back of the mobile phone um you know whether it's doing back tunes whether it's mobile money and and that's the power of market creating innovation what people used to do before the mobile phone um was a reality in africa was you know people imagined that just like in the uk in the us um we would have fixed phone lines and there were a few fixed phone lines i remember having a fixed phone line in my house when i was growing up and we would have long lines of people queue um to come to our home so they could speak to their family abroad with fixed phone lines but now everybody every single person over 900 million phones across the continent so that's the power of the market creating innovation next slide so what i try to do is you know with the with the fund for africa's future because that's that's kind of what what we work as um we try to work with the best companies that can deliver these innovative solutions and and really unlock these new markets that's kind of our own secret sauce it's really how do you work with companies that are so revolutionary they not only make a ton of money but they make you make a ton of impacts right because they just create this brand new categories that no one ever saw coming in africa um next slide and you know what we try to do um as we do that is you know we find these companies um we provide them with capital at the very earliest stages provide them with coaching provide them with community um and and you know work very closely with these mission-driven innovators who just want to change the world to to build these companies that turn africa's biggest challenges into global business opportunities and by so doing great economic opportunity and development um and we work together with so many uh amazing people from founders governments to investors to large companies that want to change king uh these are these are the the people we work with to make to make these opportunities possible next slide so every time we start a company we start a company we like to say we start companies to answer questions um you know we don't just start a company we have a question we want to answer and we think the right answer is to build a company um that answers the question and i remember when we started in florida with the question in our mind was you know africa has suffered because it's it's a very insular economy right it's not very connected to the global economy i think africa is about four percent of global trade um which is which is pretty interesting um so i i i um you know when when we're starting florida wave we we started to ask the question you know how do you connect africans to global economy and the first step was you know well how do you get all the different you know 200 payment methods that african business people and merchants have to use to send and receive money how do you make that one platform um and then how do you make it easy for them to accept and just burst money however they choose right to move money across mediums and that's what we've been able to achieve with flutter wave and and the journey is just beginning even with the unicorn valuations just evaluation but really the mission remains uh to connect all africans to the global economy by enabling them to be able to leverage payments to participate digital payments to participate in the global economy um the market woman who sells corn doesn't have to wait um for you know somebody to drive by her farm and buy her corn at an unnaturally low price when she can sell her corn on one day on global commodity exchanges and get paid um via florida wave and and that's the kind of global economy we want to create one that's fairer and that provides more acts next next next slide forgive me next slide so again another another big question we're answering how do you create 400 400 sorry uh can we go one slide behind hello hello can we go back to the andela slide yeah i think the andela slide is it was on just now yeah i think there might be a delay on your end fantastic thank you so much so the question we asked when we're building when we're building mandela um was you know how do you create 450 million jobs for young africans right because you have you know over the next 15 20 years you've got about 450 million young people who you need to create jobs for right and you don't have enough of those jobs and for the longest time you know jobs in africa were tied in many ways to the local geography and no matter how fast you can grow as an incontinent you know there's just so many jobs you can create growing eight percent yeah and being a sub trillion dollar economy it's just physics you know it doesn't work and what we were able to do with angela was really kind of fashioned out the path to just in time education to employment skills training where essentially you're able to identify job openings all over the world um you're able to find talented young people who are motivated to fill those jobs if they could get the right training and then you basically bankroll the training and uh and when the young people get into the jobs you take a rake um from their earnings um which then allows you to continue to deeply invest in the next generation uh of of uh of of uh of talent and and then continue to scale so so that was the question we tried to answer how how do you market create now we didn't exactly reach uh those those heights uh particularly um and we're still on that journey but i think what's really exciting about andela was that it created a market for african technology talent created global market for african technology town for the first time in the world you could go on the internet and say you know i work in africa and people will take you seriously um and hire you to do job swimming and in the last report i was reading from google i think they said there were about 77 000 senior developers working remotely from nigeria alone and i think about 150 across 150 000 across the continent that's just an example of the kind of impact that a company like academics had you know creating amazing middle class jobs remotely from from all over the world next slide hello next slide yeah healthcare you know how do you how do you create affordable healthcare for people who are earning you know two dollars a day right a lot of healthcare is predicated on you know some cost of tons of huge facilities and buildings and so on and so forth and these young folks at mdas which is ironically an mit and the founders are mit grads you know what they've done is basically make diagnostics the full crime of health care delivery which is amazing right um you know when you when you have the diagnostics you know what what it makes it a lot easier for you to direct them to the right doctor who can remotely actually um they have going back in order to treat the ailment and this rapidly particularly when you're using these diagnostic devices that are fairly cheap um and used so this is just an example um next slide sorry i'm starting to get messages next slide stem coffee i promise this is the last one um so so with stem cafe um you know what what we realized was you know um science technology engineering and math uh in africa is severely challenged and the reason for that is you know our schools don't really have um the technology facilities and the way that our teachers tend to teach is not play-based you know it's very much you know take this textbook and cram it into your head those of you who went to school in africa can relate um and basically you know we started display-based spaces network of play-based spaces um for for young innovators um enabling them to make things with their hands and to use modern tools um to unlock in their in their minds the power of science and technology and so it's you know chemistry is not just a boring textbook to them it's you know a bunch of experiments they can do with households goods or or you know a lab experiment they can do from the comfort of their home or something they can be curious about i'm just like this young lady is and i have no doubt that that spaces like stem cafe as a proliferate across africa are going to inspire uh the next generation of scientists and engineers to come from africa because you know it's in getting our young people are comfortable with the physics and the science of the world that we live in that we're able to actually build new technology that increase productivity and and further accelerate our economic growth yeah so you know what we've developed because of because of our time and the way we think about the world it's really a framework for building the future in africa and and i'll just share with you kind of the highlights of that model i think you know the three things a company must do right um number one they have to prove uh that they have a big market that they're trying to pursue you know without a big market it's kind of kind of silly i see lots of people kind of make really uh nice apps for the one percent of the one percent of africa um you know people who want to book private jets and app and stuff like that but it's a very small uh a market in africa and you really want to back founders that are building transformational businesses um then you talk about mission right so mission is extremely important you got to have founders who whose most important priority is not even being enriched it's just making change happen and they're actually happy if somebody else figures it out before data and they're happy to collaborate with the colleagues because about the industry and about the impact they can have on people's lives not really about just making money and then most importantly you got to take close look at the business model you know um this is a society where the vast majority of people living extreme poverty under a dollar a day um so you know for the most part if you're trying to build a mass market product you've got to be very careful to design the product such a way that people can make money from using the product rather than the product costing them and that's something that a lot of people still have to learn um when you think about yeah okay i okay i was almost done when you think about what what somebody must have you know you have to think about talent you gotta think about data um you gotta think about design and most importantly distribution and when i say you know i've talked about some of those things take about thailand you're asking is this a mission-driven founder you think about data you're thinking is this market big enough think about design thinking how is this product optimized uh to ensure the least possible friction using it and we think about distribution you know what allies do i need to have to get this business to scale and then most importantly you know we try to support these companies building the future in africa with capital um with coaching and with with a huge community you know um that that can support them in reaching their business goals um yeah so i'm gonna stop there and and then uh i'm sure we'll get to the rest of it either during the fireside chat or or much later thank you very much for your patience thank you so much e for sharing um these i'll just call them words of wisdom even though you're a young man still in your 20s for a few more days um it's really great to to to be having this dialogue with you and i i want to actually go back to uh you know we met almost like 10 years ago and i want to go back to an interview that i did um right after you raised quite a lot of money from mark zuckerberg and a bunch of people for andela and and and one interview that i did for the true africa website you you said something to me that um that we printed on the true africa website in the interview and you said from a very early age i knew that my whole life would be about helping to build the future of the african continent so uh i want to get deeper into that but tell me when you say from a very early age how did that how did that start because you are uh an exceptional entrepreneur having built two and now there was three very successful companies while still in your 20s so how did it all start for you i want to get to the genesis yeah sure um i mean i i got into this whole building the future thing somewhat by accident to be very honest um i mean i definitely knew that i wanted my continent to be different i i would say i had my first experience with um um africa because you know you got to leave a very sheltered childhood when you live in nigeria at the time that i did and i had my very first experience with the reality of the kind of country i lived in when when i was 15 um myself and a bunch of my friends were supposed to be flying home and um i missed the flight uh but my friends weren't so lucky they didn't miss the flight and they died in a plane crash so soliso uh plane crash dc 10 uh december 5th 2005. uh december 10 2005. forgive me and um and i think and no one was called to account on that and i think that radically changed the way i thought about the world because all of a sudden you know i i suddenly occurred to me that no amount of privilege um was going to [Music] uh was going to protect me from the harsh realities of the society that i was living in and i figured you know what i was going to have to do with the privilege that i had was to was to fix all of that and and i thought i'd do that by going to work at united nations and then i thought i was going to do that by becoming a journalist and and then i thought i was going to do that by um you know becoming a lawyer but the good thing was you know i kind of ran into tech i had a really good friend's name's pierre eris polish kid and he basically um you know he introduced me to the world of technology and i never never found my way back out um and and quite frankly that was the genesis that when i realized that there was a possibility um of changing the world by just building products that other people use um and by doing so you know you could change the way they think you could um you could inspire them and most importantly you could solve very big problems for them um i mean that that power to be able to change things without anybody's permission kind of built in comparison to all the other parts to to building the future of africa that i had seen and and so i just stuck to it i don't know if that answers your question car it does it does and and i want to go maybe fast forward a little bit and i want to talk about again in that same interview um you know you were saying and this was just a few months after you you know raised this money for and launched this company which instantly became the most talked about startup in the whole of the african continent and and then you said you know i think if you do something and it turns out pretty good then you should go do something else wonderful not dwell on it for too long and then and then shortly after that you left andela and then you started flutter wave which became an even more successful company and so um when we talk about serial entrepreneurs usually people stick to companies for for five ten years then they move on but you were thinking in your twenties that every couple years you move on to another challenge uh you want to maybe share a little bit of insight behind that thinking yeah i mean um i think for me really the the i've always had a long road map for for the continent you know um uh you know i i there's so much work to do that i don't think that if you're if you're capable and you're as determined that some of us can be you you have the luxury of like settling on one idea um for a very long time it's kind of like you're always on the road you're always trying to build stuff and um and i think for me you know when andela was established and was as i like to call it when the companies are inevitable um then you then you start to look around and figure out okay what's the next big challenge to solve and and for me you know with andela it was fairly accidental you know like i i i had um you know i kind of locked out because i had a long string of failures before angela and then uh i kind of locked out an andela and there was a lot of pressure to kind of you know you know not catch a break you know like just kind of stick to what was working um but but i quickly realized that there was there's a lot of danger in that as well you know um the the the danger uh in that approach um is that other things don't get built and um and you're very comfortable and you know when you're young that's the best time to take risks and build things so you know i started to look at that and and i figured you know the right approach to to dealing with uh some of the challenges was just you know go build something else go show people that other things need to be built in this space and that was um and that was what led me to to flood a wave but then you know i thought a wave i then started to build a road map you know and for me it was very simple was you know we built a stanford then we need to build the paypal and now now i'd like to say we're building the the founders fund um of africa um and then you know who knows what after that you know maybe i do maybe i don't we'll see but uh but but i but but i i mean the way i think about the world is really that you know africa we have a long road map of things to build um we can't just dwell on one feature we got to kind of keep it moving as soon as something we've built becomes uh um inevitable but then i i really want to go back to what you said about a sheltered life and the life of privilege and those who have access to education you know i met you in new york we spent time together in boston uh we spent time together in in san francisco on the campus of stanford university many other places but the reality is you know a lot of these companies that you've built the funding has come from the us and you're also one of those africans like myself who are able to navigate all these multiple worlds and to be able to go to the us and and convince the mark zuckerberg to invest in your company and be at stanford and and you know all of those things my question is really those of our younger brothers and sisters who did not have that access to the world of elite academic institutions or silicon valley or mit you know what what advice would you give them yeah i mean for me i think it no matter what but it still begins with being able to take out the mental barriers right i find that you know if it's kind of like if you if you uh if you put a um a dog in uh in chains or in a cage or you put a a cage you put a bird in a cage even when you let the cage out if if if the bird doesn't have a mentality of freedom you know they're gonna just stay in the cage and i like to say the first thing is look the world is becoming more and more the sort of place where you have a place um and you you shouldn't um let your your mental barriers keep you from pursuing all the opportunities that are around you and before you and you know people like me have a responsibility particularly because of the privilege that we um that we had we enjoyed growing up um to to make sure that people like you have have opportunities um and and that's what we work for every day um and so you know let go of the mental barriers and and don't don't outsource your outcomes to anybody don't make it anybody's fault um that that that you're not able to be successful uh make that your responsibility instead that would be my advice yeah i wanna i wanna go back to what you said earlier in your presentation because i was so happy that you mentioned clayton christensen may he rest in peace and i was so happy that you mentioned his co-author and and really mentee i would even call him a disciple a fosaujomo who we love so ifosa is an a gerund author he's a researcher he's a thinker speaker and i actually interviewed him for the mit africa innovate conference two years ago and he the book had just come out uh the book that you mentioned and for those in the audience um who don't know about it it's called the prosperity paradox how innovation can lift nations out of poverty and so he was talking as you mentioned earlier about market creating innovations and they these are innovations that target new customers as you said the underserved um ibrahim is the example they give at the beginning in chapter one in in the chapter about market creating innovations and they talk about how you know in the late 1990s ibrahim saw this opportunity which with cell phones and that you know that the people never thought they would need cell phones and all of a sudden he saw he created this company out of sudan celtel that became very very very popular but then what we don't talk about is a lot of those companies that actually end up failing so um can you as in your short but successful life as an entrepreneur what would be for you some of the reasons why companies have failed um you know outside of just choosing a really narrow market as you said earlier what are some of the and the mental barriers that you know africans sometimes impose on themselves just because of the way we're treated and lack of self-confidence and lack of resources and lack of infrastructure what would you say would be the main reasons why people have failed um i i think there are multiple different reasons people fail but but i i i don't i i like to qualify um failure quote unquote you know because i feel like if you learned something you didn't really fail it was just an experiment um but but i think sometimes you know when when the experiments don't don't go very well um that typically happens because uh people tend to um not not be willing to um kind of build iteratively and organically as they go along right and build with in a series of experiments that test the existence of a market that they can serve i feel like a lot of people kind of you know in africa particularly our mentality tends to be to go bigger and go home um and that tends to be very expensive and very difficult for you to iterate you know it's like you know if you try to build you know the ark you know it's very different from building the boats and if you build the ark you know you better make sure that you have those male and female of all the species in the ark with you otherwise you end up with a big expensive you know and difficult to get rid of projects but if you build a boat you know and you need to perhaps build out more space that that tends to be a a bit more easier i don't know if folks connect with the analogy but basically my point is you know we got to learn as africans to kind of build more iteratively you know build very lean as opposed to kind of uh go fast uh very quickly and i think if we do that many times we would be able to test confirm the existence of a market uh before we actually go all in wonderful so i want to get to the questions and there's a lot of questions we can only get to a few of them but this one is from buluwatife aquinola and she says oh i'm actually one of those people who went to the same school the same secondary school as ian and my question is centered around how do we create a system to provide resources financial as well as otherwise to fund innovators on the continent who are tackling challenging problems like this i personally don't believe the governments are the reliable answer but how can private players and external agencies engage with that innovative community absolutely i mean and you're absolutely right that governments can't be the answer um like i said they don't even have uh enough resources to do kind of their primary responsibilities so funding innovation which can be risky and and uncertain um is is a bit of a reach um and so that's why we set up the fund for africa's future and i'm i'm super excited about all the different um types of investment communities that are emerging um you know with the fund for africa's future what we've designed is really an invest investment community where essentially you know people pay a membership fee of a thousand dollars a year um and then in exchange for that they get very detailed memos and data rooms for 20 companies a year that are african companies that are turning some of our biggest challenges into global business opportunities um and are being led by amazing innovators and then you get an opportunity to invest from 5 000 up uh into into uh these companies uh by leveraging uh some of the infrastructure that we've been able to build around the world depending on where you are um licensed infrastructure um across across uh across the world and and just doing this has enabled us to raise over two million dollars between last year and this year for um for african uh companies and we're just in the first quarter of uh of 2020 we've raised two million dollars already um and and we're looking to raise even more so i think these are examples of how you know private private individuals um not to even talk about government not um private agencies or talk about kind of corporates can participate in giving innovators the capital coaching and community that they need to be able to turn our biggest challenges into global business opportunities well so romi sumaria is asking a question and her question is what is your most successful failure it's a very interesting question i'm most successful failure yes um that's that's a very that's a very interesting question i would say my most successful failure was probably trying to run a presidential campaign um so after i left flutter wave i tried my hand at politics and i ran uh um a presidential campaign for a mentor and friend of mine um madame obviously she used to be a vice president uh at the world bank and um and it taught me a lot because you know i got to actually for the first time really think about policy at a national level we put out um project rescue nigeria which is by far one of the most detailed policy documents um that nigeria has ever seen and uh it actually is funnily enough uh being implemented even though we didn't even come close to running in the election actual election success of winning so you know i saw the other day that the government had put in place uh 2.5 trillion uh uh 25 billion dollar infrastructure fund and that was one of our core recommendations about the need for us to kind of bring private sector in to come and help us build infrastructure and concession a lot of assets and you know to see all those ideas be implemented even though you're not the one implementing them is a bit of a success and i'm glad we were able to popularize some of those ideas with that campaign even though we didn't even come close to women well so um i you know we always wrap up with uh the three books that you might recommend for our audience because we're all about learning right and and improving and being about what one of them is the prosperity paradox right so uh i'm going to put that of course so we need you to recommend two more books that uh that could be helpful to our channels to understand um africa and innovation and transformation okay um i mean the one of the books i recommend is not about africa but it's helpful frame for understanding um innovation and transformation and the book is zero to one by peter field um i think it's definitely one of uh the biggest uh one of the most important books i've read about you know how to think about the world of technology and what is possible um especially uh for africans um in in the world of technology um the other book i would recommend uh you know is it's a it's a it's a pretty uh i'm thinking thinking i don't want to also recommend a book that's extremely nigerian yeah okay why not why not uh well you know they're probably there probably isn't uh very much of a need to but you know i'd say one thing i would say is you know i would say getting into the founder mindset is important for anybody who's looking to get into technology and now one of the things that i've gotten a lot of inspiration from um you know in my own journey as an entrepreneur is really being present to see other people who've done done it or to read about other people who've done it i actually think anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur should probably spend you know um you know a whole year before they make that jump reading stories of other entrepreneurs who've made that jump and that they didn't actually you know die because that you know it's kind of like reading the word of god it gives you a lot of faith you know because you suddenly realize that um people you know like things are possible you know um so one of those books i really like are founders at work by jessica simpson i believe oh no jessica livingston i think it's the name of the book it's a really really cool book because it talks about the founding stories of companies that we all know and love from blackberry to you know um lotus um to to you know um bill gates and so on and so forth so yeah that's third book sorry it doesn't i don't have many africa specific texts to share yeah well your own story is a book in itself so we can we can end there because we have your story and those three books the prosperity paradox zero to one and founders at work and all those books along with the the full presentation that you gave us today will be available on the true africa university website so with that i want to i want to thank you for for this session which was enlightening as as usual i do want to say that um your presentation dovetails really nicely with the one that we will be uh having next thursday at the same time hopefully the time difference won't confuse too many people and and and then they'll come on at 12 eastern uh eastern standard time eastern time boston time cambridge time and in that presentation michelle if you could share it with us because i'm very excited to have a different perspective on transformation in africa and it's really um again in a related topic what types of new partnerships can lead to african development uh we will be welcoming uh professor jeffrey sachs who is one of the most famous economists in the world he is the founder of the earth institute at columbia university and he is one of those people who wrote the millennium development goals and the sustainable development goals for the united nations so he's going to be talking about transnational transporter partnerships exactly like the ones that allowed our friend and and and actually um uh uh acolyte uh e to become this very very successful entrepreneur while still in his twenties and so with that i to also once again thank our partners and sponsors who again have made this series possible it is the mit center for international studies which aims to support and promote international research and education at mit and the mit africa program which empowers mit students and faculty to advance knowledge and solve the world's greatest challenges so again i'm claude grenitzke i'm the founder of true african university which we have created by africans for africa in order to accelerate africa's development through sustainable solutions so thank you very much for your time and we look forward to seeing you next thursday at 12 p.m
eastern time cambridge time we'll see you there thank you thank you
2021-03-24