Gaurav Dhar, a tech investor and second generation fintech entrepreneur in Dubai, has a keen eye on the sector in Africa, saying the continent will see larger and larger funds coming into enabling environments–and there are also some key lessons from the Middle East.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center">
“THE CONTINENT OF AFRICA HAS ITS OWN PATH OF ADOPTION FOR TECHNOLOGY, INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE DIFFERENT ECONOMIES… THERE IS HUGE POTENTIAL BUT THE UNLOCKING OF IT HAS TAKEN DIFFERENT TRAJECTORIES…”
</blockquote>



At the Dubai Fintech Summit in May, Gaurav Dhar is outside the lavish Madinat Jumeirah hotel where the event is being held, walking out of the venue into the afternoon sun in a dapper blue suit. Like the weather by this chic coastal property, he is warm and welcoming, referring to our chat a few weeks earlier.



As the Group CEO of Marshal Fintech Partners, these are the events you will typically find him at in the spiffy Middle Eastern emirate, those that focus on investments, fintechs, startups, venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation.



Just like Dubai, the city he was born and raised in, his specialties too are as dynamic and diverse. 



Like any third generation expatriate, Dhar says he has a great sense of pride locating his activities out of the glistening emirate, yet doing business for the world, even for Africa.



“I consider myself an ambassador of the UAE. I have Indian roots, but for all intents and purposes, I consider myself an honorary Emirati. Because there is this pride when you [have been] part of the story of building this country in some way, shape or form.” Dhar’s grandfather came to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the early 1970s to become the General Manager of General Motors, when the country had just been carved out as seven emirates from its hitherto existence as the Trucial States.



Dubai was still a dusty city being developed around a port, bringing in tidings and tidy profits from the sea.



“The UAE was its own little paradise, and now is this behemoth global player… Our business evolved along with the country–it was a very side-by-side story,” says Dhar about how after his grandfather, his father, Anil, too followed in the late 1970s and took to “the landscape that was fresh, exciting, mixed and new”.



He worked at Unilever and Texas Instruments before “manifesting his own destiny” and deciding to go his own, turning around an office furniture and supplies company, slowly implementing it also as a technology-focused enterprise, incorporating typewriters, photocopiers and fax machines, as more and more businesses in the region started looking for ways to formalize and store work.



“My father wanted to follow the next trend…and understand the space where again, he could control his own destiny, as opposed to waiting for Xerox or Microsoft to tell him what to do, how to build or what his revenue could be,” recalls Dhar. Called Marshal Equipment and Trading LLC, the company started in the UAE, expanding across the Gulf Cooperation Council states and Africa. “It has been profit-generating for over 35 years and consistently growing,” says Dhar, speaking from his new office on Dubai’s ritzy Sheikh Zayed Road, also home to the almost-kilometer-long Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower. When his father started his business, it was in a small office in Deira–a historic district bursting with character, old forts, wind towers, the legendary Clock Tower and the shimmering waters of the creek.



As a curious child growing up in this space, watching the business evolve, Dhar’s answer to questions while studying at Doon School in India was always that the family was in “payments technology”. His mind was already on the job.



The business grew from one country to another and so did the public penchant for payments technology slowly gaining currency in the boardrooms and bourses of Dubai as “people also started understanding the blocks that make up the fintech system”.



When Dhar–who studied law at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and calls himself “a second generation fintech entrepreneur”–first started exploring fintech, it also took a little convincing to get Dhar’s dad, who is 70 this year, to get on board.



“When we started talking in 2015 about the concept of nonprofit generating companies that are pure valuation-based, you can imagine his reaction, as a businessman, it was initially to say this is not going to fly, this is not going to work as a concept, because it’s very easy to spend money, but it’s very difficult to make money.”



Dhar started spending time in San Francisco, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India and other places to understand more of what was happening in the “high-risk, high-return, high-failure-rate” venture capital space in this regard.



About seven years ago, Dhar, in his personal capacity, started investing in fintech in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States, and three years ago, the company’s name changed to Marshal Fintech Partners–as it got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East.



With over 19 years of experience under his belt in various aspects of business, Dhar now has a well entrenched interest in fintech ecosystems and solutions.



“It’s very exciting to be a part of this evolution, where the ecosystem from a startup or investing point of view has started maturing and we were part of that as it started again…



“If I were to have an intellectual conversation in detail about payments technology with my father, he is extremely wellequipped, because he was there as it was being written, assembled, and literally adopted by all parts of the ecosystem in the Middle East, so he’s extremely capable,” smiles Dhar.



The business growth has been organic, as the entire ecosystem works mutually on codependency and reciprocal relationships from a technology, landscape, business and venture capital perspective. Along the evolution journey, through these collaborative interactions, Dhar says he has also formed networks and friends with “tangible value exchange” and “a genuine desire” to drive economic growth and create job opportunities in the Middle East and Africa.



The Middle East has historical ties with Africa, and Dhar continues to build connections on the continent, often featuring founders of African fintechs and Web3 startups on the podcast series (on Spotify, Apple, YouTube) he hosts every week. “The continent of Africa has its own path of adoption for technology, infrastructure and the different economies… there is huge potential but the unlocking of it has taken different trajectories…



“Let’s not forget that the Middle East has a lot of sovereign wealth, and they have been engaging in investing internationally for decades…So along with that wealth comes access to knowledge, learning, and exposure, so it has been much faster.



“I think the African continent again has it in pockets, but it’s not been [able to] move that timeline faster to have the whole continent benefiting from the influx of capital. So these are very separate ecosystems with different outcomes,” he says.



But there is no doubt there are massive opportunities and synergies between both regions.



“What you’re going to see is larger and larger funds in Africa, either pooled from Europe, or within Africa itself. Entrepreneurship still needs funding and fueling.”



“Whoever is going to be the most-friendly regulator is going to win, then the most-friendly telco operator is going to gain massively; and then the third is with the government allowing people to understand subsidized ecosystems to spark long-term talent staying in those ecosystems, and the understanding of educating properly what is happening in that ecosystem.” Effective partnerships between the government and the private sector is one thing the Middle East has done extremely well, he adds. 



“They have written the playbook for this essentially–the marriage between the government or the federal ecosystem and the private sector has been very close. They talk to each other and push each other to do bigger and better things. And one of these things in the UAE is the venture capital space. And that perhaps is something that needs to happen more in Africa.”



Also a board member of the MENA FinTech Association, a trip to Africa is on the cards soon, but when Dhar is not spending his time on advisory boards and “giving back” to the entrepreneurial community, he dabbles in his other interests: F&amp;B, collecting vintage cars and hosting vintage car rallies every year, where all roads eventually lead to Dubai.

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Guru Of Fintech: The Dubai Entrepreneur With An Eye On Africa

Reitumetse Kholumo, the 25-year-old founder of Kwela Brews, is working to ensure that indigenous knowledge systems and makers of homegrown alcohol (umqombothi) earn their rightful place in South Africa’s formal economy.



In apartheid-era South Africa, it was popularly known that if women could not find domestic work, they would turn to brewing beer in their backyard – even though it was illegal– as a means of making ends meet. Eventually, alcohol was supplied at scale that largely supplanted these traditional brewers.



While women from all walks of life are no longer excluded from working in the formal alcohol market, monopolies such as pay disparities continue to reign.



This is something 25-year-old Reitumetse Kholumo hopes to change.



She was in her second year of chemical engineering at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, when on a field trip to one of the top brewers in the country, what stood out for her was the lack of representation.



She was studying bioprocessing and curious about indigenous African beverages, sought lessons in brewing from her grandmother.



Later on, she did a humanities elective about how engineering affects the broader public, specifically with a lens on how the profession was used to engineer apartheid. “I then looked at things a bit differently, being conscious of the fact that if I become a brewer, I’m just one brewer, but there are so many African women who are brewing on the ground, and the engineering solutions that exist do not address their problems,” she says to FORBES AFRICA.



Kholumo entered the informal industry from a bio-engineering perspective, believing the challenges to be efficiency and safety. 



While these are valid concerns, once she met the women making beer, she found other more pressing issues.



“When I met more women, their issues were more related to the market itself – they don’t have consistent buyers.”



Part of the reason was the prevalence of low-cost tier beers competing with traditionally-brewed beer.



“The women that brew authentic traditional African beer, they know how to brew safely. Efficiency is something that we are building on in a way that will complement their indigenous knowledge and how they usually brew.”



As the founder of Kwela Brews, Kholumo isn’t going to impose her ideas but rather collaborate with the women to assess the process, and see what they can adopt in their daily practices.



Kwela Brews became a distributor to solve the main problem: finding regular buyers in their relevant low-income communities.



“So, what we do is we pay the women for the brews, and we also supply them with the ingredients that they like. They’re my bosses, if anything,” she laughs.



In 2022, Kwela Brews began testing the market with products – going to Jazz in the Native Yards, a concert hosting South African musicians, primarily held in the Gugulethu township of Cape Town.



They have also now partnered with a local restaurant in Stellenbosch that sees traffic from international students and tourists, so they are widening their reach. 



“In the near future, we’re going to be doing tastings and collaborating on events just to de-risk it for them, but also so that we can learn what the market requires.”



Still completing her master’s degree in chemical engineering at Stellenbosch in the Western Cape, Kholumo’s broader interests are the beneficiation of indigenous bio-products when it comes to nutraceuticals and therapeutics. “What I want more than anything is to create a space where indigenous brews are appreciated, as they come from the indigenous knowledge-holders.” 



She says each batch of her brew tastes different because it will have different micro-organisms, which are good for people’s gut microbiomes. 



“Different women from different tribes will have different ways of brewing, and this is all over sub-Saharan Africa. So I feel like there’s a lot of potential there.”



While she received R20,000 ($1,100) in funding from the University of Cape Town’s student pitch competition, hosted by Akro, along with UCT InvestSoc and UCT Entrepreneurs Society in 2021, she quickly used the startup money. In 2022, she was on the Mastercard Foundation program that gave her another R120,000 ($6,500). And even though it’s an alcoholic product, she wants to eventually get certification about benefits for gut microbiome. She’s raising the bar for homegrown alcohol to be distributed and sold at scale. After all, as they say in South Africa, local is lekker (good).

Kholumo hopes to change the landscape for indigenous brew-masters1

Stirring It Up: The 25-Year-Old Entrepreneur Who Wants to Put South African Traditional Beer Makers On The Map

Despite the public roasting Levi’s took for flirting with AI, smaller clothing sellers who model their own products online maintain a growing interest in replacing themselves with the computer-generated kind.



On Tracy Porter’s&nbsp;clothing site, it’s all Tracy Porter.



Thin, blonde and 5-foot-10, the 55-year-old entrepreneur poses in each and every one of her designs. Her husband uses his iPhone to snap pictures, which they often take on the wildflower-strewn bluffs overlooking the beach 15 minutes from their home in California’s Santa Ynez Valley, before uploading them to their e-commerce site, The Porter Collective. There, you can see Porter in her striped midi dress, in her multicolor crocheted cardigan and in her black-and-white rattan visor.



Porter said she’s been searching for ways to replace herself as a model, not only to lighten the load but to bring some diversity to the site. Humans, however, are prohibitively expensive. So she’s been testing a new artificial-intelligence service from Israeli startup&nbsp;<a href="https://botika.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Botika</a>. She said the images look so realistic that when she showed her sons, they told her she was out of a job.



“I’m actually excited about that. I don’t want to be our model anymore,” Porter said with a laugh.



After Levi’s endured a scorching backlash in March for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.levistrauss.com/2023/03/22/lsco-partners-with-lalaland-ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">its plan</a>&nbsp;to bring more diversity to the site with AI-generated models – critics flayed the company, which had 2022 sales of $6.2 billion, for not simply hiring more humans – it would be no surprise if big clothing retailers have gotten skittish about using, or admitting they use, nonhuman models. That same public disapproval hasn’t yet extended to the many mom-and-pop clothing shops, whose budgets, like Tracy Porter’s, would collapse under the costs of professional hair, makeup and photography – even without inflation, rising borrowing costs and a recession that feels as if it’s been looming forever.



Services like Botika let brands easily display their clothing on various (computer-generated) fashion models. However, they are still working to add more ages, body shapes and ethnicities.BOTIKA



“In the current economy, customers are mostly looking to optimize costs,” said Eran Dagan, cofounder and CEO of Botika, which caters to small businesses and plans to start subscriptions for its AI model service at just $15 a month. It’s preparing to launch on Shopify and has a waiting list of over 1,000 customers. Dagan said Botika has gotten interest from sellers on resale platforms like Poshmark and Depop, where entrepreneurs typically photograph clothing on themselves and crop out their heads.



Another company in the space,&nbsp;<a href="https://lalaland.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lalaland</a>&nbsp;— which is still set to power Levi’s attempt to go AI — said its recent growth has been driven mainly by small and medium-sized businesses. While the company declined to disclose revenue figures, cofounder and CEO Michael Musandu said business has picked up significantly over the last eight months and sales have grown by eight- or nine-fold.



“We’re helping emerging brands that are just starting out and have zero budgets, or low budgets, to actually plan photoshoots,” said Musandu. “We really help level the playing field by representing the underdog.”



The fact remains that for everyone, photoshoots are pricey, and while shoppers are increasingly demanding that clothes be shown on a variety of models, no brand has an unlimited budget to do that. Tracy Porter used to hire outside photographers, models and hair and makeup stylists to shoot her products, but it would cost $5,500 every time she brought them out. If she outsourced photography for her multimillion-dollar business today, she estimates it would set her back $500,000 a year. “It’s just too much money,” she said.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“What I’d like to do is take an image and see it on different sizes. Small, medium and large. But I don’t want to have to hire all the people to do that.”Tracy Porter, small business owner
</blockquote>



Which is how Porter landed on modeling the clothes herself. However, that makes it difficult for shoppers with a different body shape or ethnicity to get a sense for how her products would look on them. “What I’d like to do is take an image and see it on different sizes. Small, medium and large. But I don’t want to have to hire all the people to do that,” said Porter. “Because there will be no profit left in our company and we’ll have to close.”



Another small business owner, Jacob Flores, is looking forward to more easily finding models that reflect his customer base. The 50-year-old former web designer from San Antonio, whose online store Blissfully Brand sells skintight dresses, skater skirts and bell bottoms in colorful prints inspired by fashion from the 1960s and 1970s, has a lot of customers in their 40s and 50s. But many models for hire tend to be much younger.



Flores recently started using Lalaland, where he can hand-select digital models from a library, dress them in his products and upload the images to his site without leaving the house. For $300 a month, he gets 50 images, enabling him to display more of his clothing on models much faster. He was previously limited to doing photoshoots four times a year, where he would pay $900 to get as many shots of a few models in 20 outfits as he could in two hours.



Now he plans to do photoshoots just once or twice a year on location so he can show his clothing at the beach or on a city street. He also sees AI being helpful with social media ads, allowing him to target certain audiences with tailored images.



Richard Evans, founder of wellness startup Juro Miru, also opted to include some shots on AI models to launch his new e-commerce site, in addition to images of clothing laid on a flat surface.



Startup Juro Miru displays some of its products on AI models.SCREENSHOT OF JURO MIRU WEBSITE



As for shoppers, it can be impossible for them to tell whether they’re looking at a real or fake model. There are no clear rules for disclosure, although companies are beginning to think about it. TikTok is reportedly working on a tool that will give creators a way to say whether they’ve used generative AI.



“When you’re presenting an image that could easily be mistaken for an actual person, I think you should disclose that it’s a computer-generated image,” said David Danks, a professor at the University of California, San Diego whose research explores the ethical issues around artificial intelligence.



Porter is wrestling with this question, among others. “How would you even know? Do we have to say? Are we supposed to say? There are a lot of questions,” she said. Her friends seem afraid of AI and have told her they think it will put models out of work. “It’s a constant dinner table conversation for us.”



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/"></a>By Lauren Debter, Forbes Staff

Pacific Islander woman wearing artificial technology mask

Clothing Entrepreneurs Can’t Wait To Fire Themselves As Models And Hire The AI Kind Instead

Tanzania’s beer-guzzlers have a locally-brewed option as this entrepreneur attempts to change the country’s drinking culture with a social enterprise.



By Inaara Gangji



&#8220;Tanzania has a rich beer history. Each tribe has its own beer. They were producing beer [even] before the Germans,” Swiss native and Tanzania-resident Raphael Flury says, in an interview with FORBES AFRICA.



That was perhaps the impetus for running his own outfit – a first-of-its-kind craft brewery and brewpub located in Arusha, Tanzania 



When Flury acquired Twiga Brewery and its talented team in 2015, he wanted to offer more options to the Tanzanian market as an alternative to wine and mainstream beers. He got on board Tanzanian native Damian Mosoka as the head brewer, and more locals from the community to create locally-crafted beer.



“It was a desire for better beer but also to combine job creation and social impact. We did the research and thought this would be an interesting way to enter the beverage industry. We wanted to learn on the job about how this industry works,” says Flury.


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<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/tanzania-beer.png" alt="" class="wp-image-58088" width="407" height="309" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/tanzania-beer.png 407w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/tanzania-beer-300x228.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Photo Supplied</figcaption></figure></div>


The brewery is his second sustainable venture; the first being an organic food company. It was a natural instinct to work with local staff and build capacity before expanding.



In line with its mission, Twiga focuses on premium beers and offering customers an experience – 80% of his client-base is Tanzanian.



“We do small quantities, which is typical for a craft brewery. All our ingredients are of the highest quality, and we give it plenty of time to develop flavors. We aim to offer the customer a fresh tasting beer,” adds Saphira von Moos, Flury’s COO.



Served on draft and bottled, the beer aims to be all-natural, unlike industrial beer produced on a large scale.



“People deserve a premium product, brewed the German way. It is unfiltered with no additives,” echoes Mosoka. However, their challenge is to convince the beer-favoring Tanzanian consumer that locally brewed beer is good, especially since it’s not standard in the market.



“We have an innovative product and a lot of customer interaction as well. You can touch the brewery [the machines and processes] which is an innovative concept in Tanzania.



“Not a lot of people know what a brewery is… but we are constantly trying to change the beer culture, and that Tanzanian SMEs can make quality products just as [well] as international brands,” says Flury.



Another challenge is to convince customers that beers are best enjoyed cold, which is how it is served fresh from the draft. “It’s fun to do all this work and take the customer with you on this journey…” avers von Moos, who also has a mandate to encourage women to join in key production jobs at the brewery.



At the end of the day, Flury wants to be a role model and show other companies that it is possible to create and sustain equitable businesses in Tanzania. 



“As a social enterprise, we mirror our values in the company too. It’s a marathon, it’s not easy, but we want to be sustainable and a hub for young Tanzanian talent,” he says.

tanzania

Tapping Into The Market: What’s Brewing In Tanzania

With over 600 young brand ambassadors and/or business leaders expected to be part of the four-day event, the Forbes Under 30 Summit Africa kicked off in Botswana’s economic and political capital, Gaborone, on April 23.



Thousands gathered in Botswana’s capital Gaborone yesterday, April 23, in the historic Main Mall and square, for the pan-African opening of the Forbes Under 30 Summit Africa, held for a second year in the southern Africa city.



The four-day event kicked off with celebrations at the outdoor shopping and commercial hub as summit delegates and members of the public swayed to live on-stage music featuring energetic performances from some of Africa’s finest musical talent including Sauti Sol, Stabito, local Botswana artist Dato Seiko and one of the country’s rising stars, ATI.



South African Grammy award-winner Nomcebo Zikode also enthralled the audience with her foot-tapping music and viral smash single, Jerusalema.&nbsp;



The eager crowds gathered outside the Cresta President Hotel, known as a legacy hotel, overlooking the main stage.



“I am thrilled to be attending the 2023 summit,” said Muhle Ndwalane, the Managing Director of Asante Tech Solutions&nbsp;and FORBES AFRICA’s 2022 Under-30 lister. “This is one incredible platform that brings together some of the brightest minds and most innovative leaders from across the world.”



“With this being the first day of the summit, we have really been having fun,” said FORBES AFRICA’s 2021 Under-30 lister, filmmaker and creative director, Ifan Ifeanyi Michael, during the festivities.



“Apart from it being fun, it&#8217;s actually such a good networking experience for me. Meeting people from all parts of the continent, and all over the world; sharing business ideas, and also connecting with individuals who are also very optimistic about changing the narrative of Africa.”



Throughout the summit, attendees are looking forward to riveting conversations with change-makers from Africa and across the globe including the continent’s youngest billionaire Mohammed Dewji and Grammy award-winning artist Davido (who is also set to perform at the Bush Party), but part of the “fun” will be hearing from some of the past listers as well continuing the African growth story.



“This year I’m at the summit to speak on the topic of securing equitable funding, with fellow FORBES AFRICA listers Shaun Shoriwa and Charlot Magayi,” said Dr Brett Lyndall Singh, 2022 Under 30 list-maker, and founder and CEO of AOM GrouP.



“Last year, I came to the summit as an excited delegate, eager to learn from successful young entrepreneurs, and I ended up meeting a fellow lister, who became my co-founder! This year, I’m here to hear more! This summit is the most important event for any serious young entrepreneur, and I’m excited to share, learn and support this wonderful community.”



Held under the theme Entrepreneurial Africa—with Botswana at the Center, the summit will start day two with conversations and panel discussions with several African leaders and elite entrepreneurs, at the Botswana Innovation Hub.

Copy of Copy of Ilan Godfrey for Forbes_T1A5622

‘This Summit Is The Most Important Event For Any Serious Young Entrepreneur’: The Forbes Under 30 Summit Africa Opens In Gaborone 

Winifred Nwania is using her status as a YouTuber and influencer to seek out Nigeria’s rich repertoire of ingredients and recipes to put her country on the global food map.



When Winifred Nwania was 12 years old, her world turned upside down. The happy, idyllic life she and her six siblings were accustomed to in Lagos in Nigeria was shattered overnight when their father passed away.



“In the Igbo culture [of Nigeria], when a person loses her husband, the husband’s relatives come and make life really difficult for the woman, especially if they don’t like her and that was the case for my family. They took my father’s assets, his properties and everything he owned from us and my mother had to start life from scratch,” says Nwania.



In that tragic moment, Nwania would serendipitously find her calling. Noticing her brothers were hungry, Nwania decided to step up to give her mother a breather during the mourning period.



“I don’t know where that strength came from but I decided to do something for my brothers who were hungry and wanted to eat. So, I made the worst pot of jollof rice ever in my life but because I had this winning spirit that my dad had taught me, I changed my strategy the next day,” recalls Nwania.



The next day she decided to enlist the help of her mother. In between running back and forth from the family kitchen to her mother’s room for instructions, Nwania made her second pot of food and this time, it came out a lot better. That was all Nwania needed to convince her that she wanted to spend the rest of her life in the kitchen, cooking for all.



As fate would have it, during her one-year mandatory tenure as a National Youth Service Corps, the Nigerian government introduced an initiative called the skills acquisition and entrepreneurship development program to help everyone learn a skill before they left the youth camp.



“It came to my mind that I loved to cook and so I looked for a catering trainer in the camp and I joined her class and the first [dish] she cooked was with yam. She made a yam piccata and I still have the picture to this day. I was so intrigued by how she transformed the yam and I said this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. I made up my mind that I [would] delve deeper and make something out of this,” says Nwania.



But first she needed to pay her bills. After graduating from the camp, she joined an oil and gas company where she worked in the finance department to help foot her daily expenses but reserved the weekends for learning all she could about catering.



“I would go online, and on social media for articles and videos and the next step was to go to culinary school. The prices in Nigeria were too high and I couldn’t afford it at the time. So, I decided to go to the website of the school and I went to their curriculum section and saw that they had put the names of the books and the materials that they were going to use to teach the students. So, I took down all the names of the books and I bought them myself and trained myself by practicing in the kitchen.”



Nwania decided to post the images of her culinary creations on her Blackberry phone and soon began to get recipe requests from her followers. Her sister introduced the idea of blogging to Nwania and before long she was building a steady following online.



“I wasn’t really excelling in my nine-to-five job anymore. I was given a task and I was making so many errors and mistakes. My boss came and asked me why. He decided to check my computer and saw that I had so many windows opened about food. None of it had anything to do with my actual job at work and my boss said ‘if you want to go and cook in the kitchen why don’t you go and do that instead of sitting here’. And that is when it hit me. I quit my job without a plan,” laughs Nwania.



Her first plan was to have her own cooking channel and she reached out to every network she could find for a TV spot. No one responded. Yet again, her sister came to her rescue with another plan. This time, she suggested Nwania create her own YouTube channel and self-publish her content.



“At that time, YouTube was not that much of a big deal. So, I went on the platform and there was no one there I could look up to. So, I got a one-man production company and our goal was to get 5,000 subscribers but in the first six months, we got over 50,000 subscribers and grew so fast.”



Zeelicious Food was born. Today, Nwania boasts her own cooking show, My Naija Plate, on DSTv’s Honey TV where she has aired two seasons. She her own cook book and a lucrative YouTube channel with over 840,000 subscribers. Her videos average over a million views with brand partnerships from telco companies and other brands wanting to tap into her growing audience as an influencer.



“The main goal was to actually put Nigerian food on the global food map and help people with the opportunity to have a food repertoire. We are blessed with a very rich array of ingredients and I took it upon myself to research and use them to develop recipes that the people in this part of the world can relate to. The feedback has been amazing with people [even] telling me how I am saving their marriage by helping them be better cooks,” says Nwania.



Next up in building her food empire is to become a qualified nutritionist. Looking back on that fateful day when she was 12, Nwania believes everything happened for a reason. She ponders out loud at the end of our call that it was her mother’s tenacity in the face of unimaginable difficulty that made her a successful food entrepreneur.

Why Success Is On The Menu For This Nigerian Chef

Darey Art Alade of Livespot 360 is using innovation and ideas to build out Nigeria’s entertainment and experiential events industry.



Darey Art Alade and his wife Deola are the powerhouse duo behind one of Nigeria’s leading creative companies, Livespot 360.



From launching global entertainment formats such as The Real Housewives of Lagos and The Voice to producing Last One Laughing, shooting commercials and creating viral radio jingles in Nigeria, Art Alade and Deola, who wear the hats of creative director and CEO respectively, have been at the helm of cutting-edge experiential events in Nigeria for the last decade.



Art Alade also moonlights as one of Nigeria’s most sought-after musical talents and event hosts. His foray into the content production and event space began in his early years when chance and preparation got him his first gig on the radio. Born in Lagos, he grew up surrounded by music. His father was a legendary media personality and musician who counted Nigerian icons like Fela Kuti amongst his friends. His parents met when they were both singing in a church choir years ago which incidentally is also where Art Alade honed his skills as a musician.



“I learned how to make commercials, interview people etc, from the radio. One day, someone hosting the morning show opened up an opportunity for me by not showing up for work and I was there, ready, prepped and I took over and the opportunity built itself. Everything was all about time and chance,” says Art Alade to FORBES AFRICA.



From that early opportunity, Art Alade became the go-to name for event hosting, wedding ceremonies and corporate launches in Nigeria.



“Along the way I met my wife and we ended up releasing and promoting my first album and from then on we continued to make music. We set up a record label and she was running a design outfit at the time and we came together and there was always ideas and creativity and that’s how we started out doing things together and we went into the creative space,” recollects Art Alade.



Nigeria’s creative industry is the second-largest employer set to account for about 2.7 million jobs by 2025 according to research by Jobberman, Nigeria’s leading career site.



Like many things in Africa, innovation comes from a lack of infrastructure or scarcity of resources and Art Alade saw this lack in the entertainment space as an opportunity to provide a solution.



“A lot of things we wanted to do at that time couldn’t be done because there was no infrastructure or experience so it was necessity that forced us to create our own experiences,” says Art Alade.



The first experience they created was Love Like A Movie, a Vegas-style experience where music meets theater at the intersection of cutting-edge production – with Kim Kardashian even flying out to join the party. That was the first time in Nigeria’s entertainment history that a solo artist had launched an album like this.



“I was one of the first to engage in what everyone is doing as a template when it comes to launching an album. So, you have a body of work and then it’s time to perform that body creatively, then you invite the whole industry and make it an experience. That happened years ago and I set the trend as a solo artist,” says Art Alade.



That gave birth to the first iteration of Livespot. As word-of-mouth spread, Livespot production morphed into a content ideation and execution hub responsible for the entire 360-degree delivery of brand activations. The company is so busy that during our call at 9PM, Art Alade was still on set



putting the final touches together for their new experiential event, Gangs of Lagos, Amazon Prime’s first Nigerian Original, which is set to launch in a week. From Heineken to Apple, Netflix to Showmax, Livespot 360 has built a clientele of both blue-chip Nigerian companies and multibillion-dollar global industry giants who have a vision of sampling the growing Nigerian creative space.



“We want to be the go-to creative solutions company not just in Nigeria but across the globe. We want people to come into Nigeria through our eyes because we understand the challenges on the ground. A lot of global brands want to come into the country but sometimes what happens globally doesn’t apply here and you need a nuanced understanding on the ground and the infrastructure to navigate the challenging waters here.”



Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy with over 200 million inhabitants so it is no wonder that all the global entertainment companies are making a play to capture a share of this market. From music labels like Sony Music and Roc Nation to the National Basketball Association’s establishment of NBA Africa and Amazon and Netflix, it’s boom time for Nigeria’s creatives.



“I think the Nigerian entertainment industry is flying but we must not get carried away because it is very important to translate a lot of the hype to actual success. It is about building for the future and we have to invest more and more in infrastructure as well as people by training and educating our technical hands. When the hype is gone, just like Bollywood had its peak, how are we going to trickle that down on the value chain and not just internationally but in Nigeria to invest in the people that will solidify the success?” says Art Alade.



And that is where Livespot 360 wants to make a difference. From investing in people and technology, the company hopes to continue contributing to the Nigerian creative industry and owning the platforms that will shape Nigeria’s entertainment future.

Darey Art Alade, image supplied

Insights Into Nigeria’s Booming Entertainment Industry

For Rachel Moré-Oshodi of RUWAH, financial literacy is a major issue that needs to be tackled to end the cycle of generational poverty for many Africans on the continent.



A basic understanding of your financial health goes a long way in not only how you plan your economic wellbeing but also how healthy an economy is. These small micro financial decisions are so crucial that they are learned by most people by the age of seven, according to Rachel Moré-Oshodi, an investment professional turned entrepreneur, with her solution to teach children about financial literacy called RUWAH.



RUWAH, is a prepaid debit card and financial literacy platform on a mission to educate kids and teens in Africa about generational wealth. As a former investment banker, Moré-Oshodi defines wealth as not just money; wealth is about having a purpose and vision for your life and going for it. She learned the importance of wealth-building after a bitter personal experience – when she lost her father to cancer.



“Growing up, money was not spoken about. When my father died 23 years ago, there was no will that we could find and my mum and kids lost everything. We had a legal battle with some of [my dad’s] family members over assets and we are still in court today,” says Moré-Oshodi.



Originally from Cameroon, she has spent a significant amount of her life helping to raise investments for organizations such as the World Bank, Rand Merchant Bank and Total Energies. But even with that breadth of experience, it was not until 15 years ago that she truly understood the importance of having a firm grasp on financial literacy.



“I have been helping raise money for companies and I thought I knew finance but I didn’t know anything about personal finance. Then I realized I had an issue with money and I didn’t have a relationship with money. The money was just sitting in my bank and going from my paycheck to my bank and I didn’t realize that I had a fear of investing”.



Moré-Oshodi believed it was good and safe to leave the money depreciating in her bank account instead of making the money work for her.



“Until I started to research and educate myself and utilize some of the resources available, that is when things changed. Even though I lost some money, I made so much more and as I was making more money, I wanted to pass it on to my kids.”



So, she started teaching her kids about financial literacy and very soon, friends and family started signing up to learn from her. But it was not until she enrolled on a Harvard program that the idea of RUWAH began to truly crystalize. According to S&amp;P’s global financial literacy survey, African countries score the worst in the world in financial literacy.



For Moré-Oshodi, this is a major issue that needs to be tackled to end the cycle of generational poverty for many Africans on the continent.



“RUWAH is a comprehensive financial literacy program that aims to reduce the knowledge and opportunity gap that exists between kids in Africa and the rest of the world. We teach African kids and teenagers (between seven to 18 years), the knowledge and skills that they need to succeed financially later in life. Our self-paced financial classes, pocket money app, and prepaid debit card will teach them the essentials of personal finance, i.e., what money is, how to earn it, how to save, how to multiply it and use it to achieve their goals,” says Moré-Oshodi.



The goal of the platform is also instilling confidence and providing the foundations for kids and teens to become financially savvy at a young age and secure their financial future intergenerationally. For Moré-Oshodi, tackling this issue requires a psychological approach to looking at money.



“Money is not scarce. It is either you don’t have a good relationship with money or you have an unhealthy relationship with money. In Africa in particular, we feel we cannot make more money and it cannot grow and that is not true. The scarcity mindset instead of the abundance mindset is a real issue. But when you start dealing with that at a later stage it is much more difficult to change that mindset. Money is psychological and money is emotional. Money tells you your value and who you are and where your heart is. I felt instead of dealing with adults, it’s better to deal with children.”



RUWAH leverages technology to make the program accessible to most children in Africa. The platform is device-agnostic as well as user-friendly and tailored specifically to the African landscape, considering the cultural nuances that affects decision-making about money on the continent.

Rachel Moré-Oshodi, pic supplied

‘Scarcity Mindset Instead Of Abundance Mindset A Real Issue In Africa’: The Cameroonian Enabling Financial Literacy

Kene Okwuosa and Moses Babatope set out to deliver world-class movie-going experiences to the Nigerian public and 10 years later, that vision is still going strong.



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“We were so passionate about cinema and so passionate about film that not figuring it out was not an option.”
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When Kene Okwuosa and Moses Babatope met for the first time at Odeon Surrey Quays Cinema in London, they had no idea that in just a couple of years they would be redefining the movie-going experience in Nigeria. In October 2002, Babatope was looking for a part-time job while studying at Middlesex University and Okwuosa was the manager in charge of recruiting the new batch of young hopefuls to join the Odeon Cinema universe.



“We had two or three stages in the recruitment process where you speak to a full auditorium and play out an emergency situation. If you do well, then you go to the interview and after your interview, you were told whether you were successful or not. I didn’t have a good session when it came to the scenario part of the interview so I was going to walk myself out when a gentleman called me and said I should do better next time and I am okay to proceed to the next phase. That gentleman was Kene,” recalls Babatope.



A bond was immediately formed between the two gentlemen. Today, they are co-founders of one of the biggest cinema chains, Filmhouse Cinemas, in Nigeria. They are also best friends married to two sisters.



Okwuosa, the group CEO and Babatope, who doubles as the group deputy CEO, offer advanced cinema experiences to the average Nigerian with the official rights to IMAX for the West African region.



In hindsight, the duo never saw their entrepreneurial journey unfolding this way. In fact, there was a time not too long ago that their dream almost didn’t take off.



The duo initially experimented by offering Nigerian movie producers an opportunity to premiere Nollywood movies in the United Kingdom for the first time.



“That was a game-changer. We got real insights about people’s experiences and how they felt during the cinema experience. In all of that, we never thought to ourselves that we can find capital and start our own. Our scenario was ‘let’s go, show our experience and see what happens’,” says Babatope.



Then, they became more audacious.



“The vision started in Nigeria. When we came, we joined a new cinema at the time called Genesis which didn’t go as planned. Our vision was not aligned and we ended up parting ways. But we knew we had to build this thing one way or the other. We were so passionate about cinema and so passionate about film that not figuring it out was not an option. It was an opportunity to step back and say we can do this on our own,” says Okwuosa.



But to have a dream is one thing and finding money to back that dream is another thing entirely.



“We understood that we did not have the last names that would open doors in Nigeria for us to get investment but we were convinced that if we could just get started and figure it out, we would learn and figure it out on the way,” says Okwuosa.



Okwuosa and Babatope spent two years knocking on every conceivable door they could find in Nigeria trying to raise capital and convince investors to bet on them. As luck would have it, the Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2011 had established a creative industry fund, which was being managed by the Bank of Industry, a development finance institution in Nigeria.



“At this time, we just came from London and we assumed we would fill out a form and wait for the call. We did that and no one called us back. We got as far as being invited to pitch properly for a loan for one million dollars. They were impressed. We had no security or collateral but they were taken by the passion and management expertise we had to set up cinemas,” says Okwuosa.



They became the first company to access the fund and with that injection, they opened their first Filmhouse Cinemas, which was a three-seat cinema in Surulere in December 2012. Okwuosa and Babatope set out to deliver world-class cinema experiences to the Nigerian public and 10 years later, that vision is still going strong.



But Covid-19 was by far the biggest singular challenge they faced as a business and the biggest one they faced professionally.



“Within a period of three months, it looked like everything we had worked hard for during the seven years prior was going to evaporate and this was the reality. I was really depressed,” recalls Babatope.



The company had to close its doors to the public for seven months effectively cutting off all revenue.



“On the one hand, we were not generating anything and on the other hand we had stock that was wasting away. We also had equipment and machinery that needed some access to be maintained so they would be in good working condition when we opened. Also, the government didn’t understand the importance of our sector or prioritized it at all,” says Babatope.



But as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. For the budding entrepreneurs at Filmhouse, this came in the form of multimillion blockbuster Nollywood releases as well as the highest-grossing film of all time, Spider-man: No Way Home, when the lockdown ended.



“These were all released in the [peak] of the Omicron [wave] in 2021 and we just hosted the official premiere of Black Panther Wakanda Forever during the Covid era and it’s looking to be the number one film of all time and we are hopeful it will be the first billion-naira film out of our country,” says Babatope.



Another way the company survived was with the help of global streaming platforms that were hungry for quality Nollywood movies. Filmhouse had expanded their offering to also include FilmOne, a content production and distribution business, with a host of blockbuster hits under its belt.



“Back then everything was going to streaming so the catalogue we had built over the years, we were able to monetize that and that was able to help sustain things while the cinema revenue took a hit. As the largest supplier of content to our streaming partners, Netflix and Amazon, everyone wanted content so we were able to boost supply and through that we also strengthened our studio relationships as well,” says Okwuosa.



The company currently stands at 400 employees strong. The key to their continued success they say is their ability to build a sense of community.



“It was a huge part of my growing up so I always understood the power of community. In our time in Odeon, that was the core of everything that drove us passionately. When you think about cinema it is a communal experience as well and that has been at the center of a lot of decisions going forward,” says Okwuosa.

Moses Babatope and Kene Okwuosa

Redefining The Cinema Experience In Nigeria

Désire De Oliveira, a pioneering Civil Blaster and Managing Director of Laduma Blasting in South Africa, has worked in one of the most male-dominated industries of all – construction and mining. And all she wanted to really do was hone her skills as a French pastry chef.



In her 65 years, Désire De Oliveira has never stopped moving, running her own financial accountancy business for 30 years, raising four kids, qualifying as a French pastry chef, and starting the Seaside Lodge B&amp;B in Salt Rock in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province in 2006.



Seaside Lodge B&amp;B remains consistently booked and was one of the accommodation businesses that survived Covid-19.



She’s also the first woman of color in KwaZulu-Natal to be a certified Opencast blaster (mining) and a certified Civil blaster. To put it simply: blasting is where rock gets blown into pieces with small amounts of explosive – a trickier process than one might think.



“Every accountant will tell you, the smaller the gross profit, the bigger the margin – that’s the business you’re looking for,” De Oliveira says to FORBES AFRICA. So when the owner of Laduma Blasting wanted her to partner in the business, due to her knowledge of its operations after doing its books, she agreed to make it her sole focus for one year.



She intended to return to her first passion – baking – after the year was up.



She put up the capital and he put up the blasting knowledge. In her first six months, she brought in significant business. Eventually, De Oliveira took over the company entirely and decided to get qualified as a blaster, while having a licensed blaster on hand to learn from.



It was not an easy road, as industry professionals told her she would need at least 10 years’ experience to find jobs in the sector. In 2015, she received her Learner Civil blaster, by 2016, her Opencast blaster certificate for mining, and in 2021 she finished her Civil blaster requirements.



And she’s managed to get the jobs they said she could not.



“Though everything I have succeeded at seems a walk in the park, that is because I embrace life for what it is. I have no regrets. Every hardship seems to have been used as a challenge. Looking back now and joining the dots, because of my belligerent attitude to life, I’m a non-conformer, not a follower, am also not a pushover, and certainly not a dreamer. Everything I have done, has been done my way – there’s been no mentors. I also do not carry baggage, none at all, life is too short,” De Oliveira explains.



Three of her family members contracted Covid-19 in December 2020, including herself. Her husband Peter Rutsch died due to Covid-19 in January 2021.



“It was a big shock. I missed him because as much as we didn&#8217;t see each other, we were good. He encouraged me. He let me do my thing. He did his thing. Nobody pulled each other back.”



She battled for four months with long Covid. Laduma Blasting was closed for that time too, and she had to pick up the pieces and start work again.



De Oliveira has spent the last 40 years working on average 19 hours a day, 360 days a year, including seeing to the children, cooking and caring for the home.



Home maintenance and childcare is called ‘invisible labor’, and something an Oxfam analysis valued at $10.9 trillion per year globally.



De Oliveira did not have an easy life as a woman of color in apartheid South Africa; facing the double blow of racial discrimination in all sectors including work and patriarchal attitudes, as well as surviving sexual abuse at a young age.



“Like most previously disadvantaged South Africans having lived through apartheid, we came with no capital, were not properly educated, worked hard, but could not command decent salaries – the old adage still prevailed, black people being paid far less than their white counterparts – that’s only starting to change now,” she says.



She thinks every mother in her situation wished for a better education for their children. After the 1994 elections in South Africa, the possibility of a good education started to be a reality, except she and other people did not have the finances to access it.



Now, she has managed to give her children a good education.



“I think I&#8217;ve done that my whole life, working on my own and steering my own ship so I don&#8217;t live off other people. I&#8217;m independent. So, it worked well for me that I didn&#8217;t have anything.”



Despite having long Covid and asthma, De Oliveira is preparing to run the Comrades Marathon for the 13th time this year. And she’s even thinking of opening another business.

Desire De Oliveira, first women in KZN to have a blasting license

Blasting Through The Glass Ceiling In South Africa’s Mining and Construction Sectors

Ghana’s Dikan Centre that opened recently was a result of Paul Ninson’s need to get African creatives to tell the story only they knew best about the continent.



For as long as Paul Ninson can remember, storytelling has always been a part of his DNA. Growing up in Kumasi in southern Ghana with his grandparents, Ninson would fall in love with storytelling by listening to the many community and historical accounts of his village told by his grandparents and decided even from then, that he would contribute in some way to telling his own story.



“I was always looking for a way to express myself. I used to draw a lot when I was a kid and I studied visual arts in school. When I reached university, I studied textiles but it wasn’t enough for me,” says Ninson.



One day, a friend of his returned from the United States with a camera and that is when things began to get interesting. Ninson was introduced to a new world of photography. At the time, he had a side hustle creating graphic designs and printing T-shirts but he decided to wrap that business up and sold his iphone to get himself a camera too.



“I decided to use photography as a medium to express myself and tell my own story. I wanted to tell real stories of my experience as a Ghanaian and my experience as a young man growing up in Ghana and the things I know and things I’ve seen and things I am motivated to talk about,” says Ninson.



To differentiate himself from the other Ghanaian photographers, Ninson adopted some ideas from a book he read called Blue Ocean Strategy. At the time, he was making ends meet as a photographer by taking images during events but he knew photojournalism was his true calling.



Instead of documenting his experiences in Ghana, Ninson decided to invest in telling more of a pan-African story. He saved up money and traveled to a village in Kenya famous for having no men and started snapping.



“My content was different and the pictures I was posting was different. That uniqueness earned me an admission to one of the best photography schools in New York, the International Center of Photography,” recalls Ninson.



All of a sudden, a world of opportunities opened up to Ninson. He spent his free time at the New York public library where he began to immerse himself in the thousands of books and images available to him. That was when he had his biggest epiphany about photography.



“I loved books and the library had pictures of thousands of images about Africa including one of Kwame Nkrumah (Ghanaian politician) which I had never seen before in my life. So, it triggered me to find out why these pictures existed in America thousands of miles away but not in Ghana or Africa for that matter. And that is how the idea of a photo library began.”



Ninson already knew he did not want to graduate and jump into the hustle and bustle of feeding the beast that was the American media industry.



“I did not want to join a queue of photographers waiting to just sell images to the New York Times for example. I was thinking about media in the grand scheme of things and I wanted to build my own ecosystem in Ghana rather than be in a queue and be a supplement to other institutions,” says Ninson.



Today, that small dream has evolved into “the biggest photo library in Africa” as Ninson calls it, the Dikan Center, which opened in December last year with 30,000 books. Ninson has built a media landscape in Ghana to finally empower him and other creatives to tell their own stories and also make



a living out of it. He began by sending books back home and started crowd-funding to raise $1 million to kick-start the center.



“I want to provide visual education for Africans. Now we are more than a library. We have education programs, we have a gallery that stands as a means of distribution. We also have a story lab and studios and a community center which is a space for people to come and enjoy free internet and resources for everyone to hang out and collaborate,” says Ninson.



Africa’s story has in the past always been narrated by outsiders and for people like Ninson, Africans are perfectly capable of telling their own stories. That initial love for storytelling which has followed him all his life has today mushroomed into a movement bringing together thousands of Africa-centric images told through the power of a lens and perhaps most importantly, by African creatives.

Screenshot 2023-02-23 at 14.06.05

Retelling The African Story Frame By Frame, The Man Behind Ghana’s Biggest Photo Library

Nigerian entrepreneur Adeshola Cole of Tritek Consulting on the road to achieving the milestone.



Adeshola Cole is no stranger to hard work and perseverance. When she was just two years old, she was sent to a foster home in Birmingham in the United Kingdom (UK) where in her 10 years, she experienced bullying and severe racism.



“I was the only black child within that village and was constantly ridiculed because of the way I looked. It was a lot of bullying. I think that’s why I am who I am today because I am quite a strong a person and I am not afraid to fight for what I want,” says Cole.



By age 12, her parents relocated Cole back to Nigeria where she lived until graduating from Lagos State University with a degree in literature and English before moving back to the UK. Throughout those years, Cole had a passion for the arts and dreamed of becoming an actor one day. But as life would have it, it was a career in tech that would eventually give Cole her true purpose in life.



That realization did not come easily to her. From doing several odd jobs in the UK upon her return to make ends meet like cleaning hotels as well as working as a chambermaid and working for a betting company for about three years, Cole found herself working in the financial services sector.



“That was the eye-opener that I needed from a professional perspective. I joined NatWest Bank. I started off as a cashier and worked my way up to be the bank manager. That role really opened me up to customer service and leadership and responsibility because I had to manage so many people with different levels of expertise.”



After a 10-year stint with the bank, Cole became frustrated with the limitations of the financial industry for people of color.



A friend of hers suggested she look at project management and business analysis and on completing the course, Cole found her true calling.



“I became a project manager and from there I just had the passion for helping a lot of people and mentored a lot of aspiring professionals who went on to get numerous jobs within tech. In March 2017, Tritek consulting was birthed and as they say the rest is history.”



Today, Cole is a mentor and coach recognized for her work in helping the black community transition into the tech space. Her firm is a project management and business analysis company that provides training and practical work experience with mentorship support. The company has grown from just two customers about five years ago to over 3,000 candidates on the platform with over 500 success stories and 180 of those testimonials coming last year alone.



“Ultimately the goal is to help people get into tech and our numbers have increased to over 200 percent post Covid. Having a vision and going with that vision to see it grow is a huge motivation in itself.”

Screenshot 2023-02-21 at 16.50.15

200% Post-Covid Growth Helping The Black Community Transition Into Tech

Faisal Al Deleigan has been a banker but is more renowned for his culinary skills. The food entrepreneur offers consultancy services to restaurants also mentoring chefs in Africa.



By Ross Holland



Faisal Al Deleigan was an investment banker for 10 years and had promising career prospects but longed to deepen his understanding of the culinary arts and pursue cooking, which had long been a hobby of his.



Time passed and he had to make a decision – it was going to be one or the other. Finance or food.



“You can’t be focused on two things at once&#8230;” says the Bahrain-based Al Deleigan to FORBES AFRICA. He chose food, and used his business prowess and culinary skills to become a chef.



He now runs a popular F&amp;B business and is the founder of Chef Faisal Consultancy, which has advised over 115 restaurants throughout the Gulf region.



His connection to Africa?



Al Deleigan is a professional member of the Foodservice Consultants Society International (FCSI), a premier global body for hospitality and food service with members based in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.



Through his consultancy, Al Deleigan mentors business owners and aspiring chefs from the three regions.



Chef Theo Doss Dosseh, a colleague of Al Deleigan’s and currently a chef at the US Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, mentions that the two regularly exchange ideas on certain dishes and value each other’s input when it comes to gastronomy.



Deleigan has developed and created over 2,415 original recipes, many of which are vegetarian and vegan promoting a healthy lifestyle.



He has a master’s degree in business from the New York Institute of Technology and also studied in Italy and England where he mastered global food techniques and developed his international fusion style of cooking.



His passion for food came from his mom, who he recalls had a very modest kitchen but took pride in her cooking.



“My mom is a good cook&#8230; she would always try something different, from different countries even.



“There would be guests visiting us from different places and people from different nationalities and they’d bring food… she would always want to know how it was made.”



The connection between food and family continued into his adulthood. Al Deleigan is inspired by many people, but none more so than his wife and two kids, he says. Everything he does is for them and they inspire him in every step he takes.



With Valentine’s Day and romance round the corner, the chef recommends dishes such as his specialty Balsamic Steak (tenderloin beef made with mashed potato and some alluring ingredients) and the Heart Pancake (with mixed berry sauce). Both young and old will surely flip for his dishes.

Chef Faisal Al Deleigan; image supplied

Head Over Meals: The Banker-Chef In Love With Food From The Gulf To Africa

Abdul Karim Abdullah, founder and CEO of Afrochella, on Ghana’s popular music and arts festival and that it will return with a new name.



“It all started out as a way to connect with African-Americans in Ghana,” says Abdul Karim Abdullah, CEO of Afrochella, a festival celebrating Africa’s diverse culture that will be rebranded as AfroFuture.



“I noticed there were limited daytime events [where] people can engage and speak to each other,” adds the founder about the beginnings of what has become Ghana’s biggest music festival over the Christmas period.



Abdullah, who also holds a day job working for an international pharmaceutical company as a clinical trial manager for cancer research, was born in the Bronx, New York, where his father and mother, who are Ghanaians, run a restaurant and a trading business respectively.



Growing up in New York, Abdullah was always immersed in the African community. Over the years, he had a dream to re-create some of the carnival events he attended in New York back in Africa where the community would come together to connect. Little did he know that his dream would turn into one of the biggest social events on the African social calendar attracting some of the biggest global superstars from the likes of Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Dave Chappelle and many more to the shores of Ghana.



But for Abdullah, this has been a slow and well thought-out journey.



“When we started the festival, I knew it had to be profitable and I still needed to keep my day job in order to live the lifestyle I wanted to live. But I am also passionate about the job that I do and I never thought I was going to fall in love with cancer research until I started the program in 2011.”



In 2014, after a hiatus of several years away from Ghana, Abdullah returned home over the holidays and had his first epiphany of creating an event bringing the diaspora together when they visited Ghana.



“Secondly, I am a very avid Twitter user and a couple of people from the diaspora were complaining that at Christmas, you come to Ghana and party and go and there is no benefit. I would see that people saw that friends were all coming to Ghana or Nigeria but they never had time to connect with each other on the ground,” says Abdullah.



Three years later, Abdullah and his team decided to do something about it. Prior to this, they had started a business to create Afro-inspired events in New York and they were keen to expand to Ghana.



After several iterations of the concept, they decided to create a festival where people could learn from each other and most importantly, drive the benefits to the people in Ghana as well as those from abroad. And just like that, Afrochella was born. The first event was a steep learning curve for the team. They had no money to hire the big artists so they decided on a strategy to focus on the emerging artists in Ghana who had the potential to be the next big thing.



“What I saw was there was a number of rising artists who were amazing at what they did and I noticed that we just wanted to do an event but we didn’t have any purpose behind it. So those rising star artists inspired me and I wanted to develop something. On December 28 2017, we had our first Afrochella.”



With no proper funding, Abdullah knew he had to get creative to get local businesses interested in partnering with them. They incorporated cultural elements that attracted startups in Ghana to partner with the festival. Today, those rising artists are some of Ghana’s biggest names.



“We only anticipated 2,500 people but we got 4,700 people so our expectations doubled and people traveled from all over the place just for one day.”



But Abdullah was not ready to celebrate just yet.



“We told ourselves, until we repeat what we achieved three times, we will not think this is worth pursuing. In year two, we grew from 4,700 to 12,500 in a stadium and that was the year we got a lot of partnerships and we had the endorsement of the Ghana Tourism Board. In 2019, we became the anchor event for The Year of Return [campaign] and that took us from 12,500 to 16,000 people and we had so many worldwide celebrities and tables sold out completely and we were overwhelmed with the amount of support we got,” says Abdullah.



Afrochella had ushered in a new wave of party-goers and cultural aficionados in Ghana. Five festivals later and the festival is still a hit with Ghanaians, African-American celebrities and the diaspora.



In 2022 though, they drew backlash from a much more established festival in the United States. Organizers of Coachella, the hugely-popular annual music and arts desert festival, reportedly filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Afrochella on the basis of leveraging its intellectual property and calling Afrochella the “Coachella of Africa”.



“We cannot really comment on the status of the lawsuit at this time as it is still ongoing but what I will say is we are in a good place,” comments Abdullah.



The brand also offers curated tours across Ghana for those wanting to experience the country’s heritage. Their vision is a lot more streamlined now.



“We have been approached for equity but for us it’s all about keeping the integrity of the event so we haven’t pursued that. We have had partnerships with Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Sony music, Apple music and Hennessey. We also didn’t know who to hire. We had to understand the different roles like health and safety, production, source the different festival managers we needed, security check points and barricades,” says Abdullah.



The brand is still going strong, he attests, confirming that Afrochella will be back as AfroFuture.



“The festival is in a great place! We are ushering in a new era of gap-bridging for the black diaspora.”



As 2022 closed with new partnerships, from Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty to American rap sensation Meek Mill taking the stage, Afrochella has put Ghana on the festival map with the country’s tourism industry reaping the rewards.

#TwitterVoices Dinner: #AfricaToTheWorld

Bringing The World To A Festival In Ghana

An Enron-like accounting scandal at South Africa-based furniture group Steinhoff International wiped out billions of retail tycoon Wiese’s fortune. After a four-year battle, he’s back as one of Africa’s richest, and at peace with the world.



Christoffel “Christo” Wiese exudes an air of calm that betrays no hint of the chaos that turned his world turned upside down for more than four years.



In December 2017, the then-76-year-old South African billionaire was informed about serious accounting fraud at retailer Steinhoff International, where he was both chairman and the largest shareholder. Those irregularities turned out to total $7.4 billion in falsified transactions over a span of nine years from 2009 to 2017, a PwC investigation found–making the Steinhoff affair the South African equivalent of the 2001 Enron debacle.



Steinhoff International had acquired Wiese’s discount clothing retailer, Pepkor, in 2015 for $5.7 billion in stock and cash; and he became its chairman a year later in May 2016. Wiese stepped down as chairman in mid-December 2017, soon after the accounting fraud was made public. While it was eventually proven that Weise had no role in the fraud, the 90% drop in the share price of Steinhoff–by far Wiese’s most valuable asset–pummelled his fortune, from an estimated $5.6 billion in March 2017 to $1.1 billion on the 2018 Forbes list of Africa’s billionaires and then off the ranks altogether by the time Forbes’ World Billionaires list came out a few months later that year.



Now, following a multi-year legal battle that ended in a $500 million settlement consisting of cash and stock, Wiese is back on Forbes’ newly released <a href="https://www.forbes.com/lists/africa-billionaires/">2023 list of Africa’s billionaires</a>, tied at No. 18 with an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion.



Asked about his ordeal last week, Wiese described his initial reaction–and what he’s grateful for. “It came as a huge shock to discover that this [Steinhoff] fraud was in the core of the business,” Wiese recalled in a Teams video call from his office in Cape Town, South Africa. The other shock? “That the people who were committing the fraud managed to get through all the gatekeepers,” he added, ticking them off: internal auditors, external auditor Deloitte, the South African Reserve Bank, international banks that were lending Steinhoff billions of rand, the South African and Frankfurt, Germany stock exchanges (where the company’s shares trade) and the ratings agencies.



What did Wiese know? Nothing, he insists. “People said, ‘But Christo, you were the chairman.’ And I said I chaired four board meetings in the entire time,” Wiese explained. “I am supposed to know what all the other gatekeepers missed?”



Despite his comments, Wiese–and the investment community–had been alerted to concerns about Steinhoff as early as a decade before the furniture seller admitted its problems. In 2007, Sean Holmes, a South Africa-based analyst for JP Morgan, published a critical 56-page report that questioned Steinhoff’s earnings and pointed to poor financial disclosure and a lack of transparency, according to the 2018 book Steinheist: Markus Jooste, Steinhoff &amp; SA’s Biggest Corporate Fraud. The book also recounts a 2009 meeting Wiese had with an analyst at a different firm who shared 40 slides that delved into concerns such as Steinhoff’s inflated assets and its “suspiciously low tax rate.” (That was years before he sold his company to Steinhoff). Then in 2015, right before Steinhoff shifted its primary stock listing to Frankfurt, a German tax authority raised concerns about the company’s accounting. Wiese said a forensic accounting firm the board hired shortly afterward failed to find any issues.



In fact, Wiese had demonstrated supreme confidence in Steinhoff as a business (or took a huge risk, depending on your perspective). In September 2016, he borrowed $1.8 billion from banks to finance the purchase of more shares in Steinhoff, lifting his ownership stake from nearly 20% to 25%. To guarantee the loans, Wiese pledged the vast majority of his Steinhoff shares as collateral. When Steinhoff stock tanked at the end of 2017, the banks took control of his shares. The loan transaction was ring fenced around the Steinhoff shares, so that in case of default, the banks could not go after Wiese’s other assets, a spokesperson for Wiese said.



Markus Jooste, a South African and the former CEO of Steinhoff International–who ran the company during the years of the accounting fraud, will be tried in Germany in April, South African media reported on Friday. In the spring of 2021, German prosecutors were reported to have charged Jooste and three colleagues with balance sheet fraud. Jooste, who has denied the allegations in the past, could not be reached for comment.



Altogether, Wiese claimed he was defrauded out of $5 billion (59 billion Rand) and sued Steinhoff for that amount in 2018. It took until late January 2022 for Steinhoff to get South African and Dutch courts (Steinhoff is headquartered in Amsterdam) to sign off on its settlement for shareholders–Wiese and thousands of others–and creditors. Wiese’s roughly $500 million (8 billion Rand) settlement came in the form of cash plus a 5% stake in listed retailer Pepkor Holdings (which is now 51% owned by Steinhoff International). Wiese says he accepted far less than he initially sought, partly to put a halt to the negotiations, which kept dragging on. Steinhoff funded the settlement with Pepkor shares and cash raised from selling off assets–though it still owns 50% of U.S. company MattressFirm and a few other holdings.



Wiese was never in danger of losing his fortune entirely. Besides his Steinhoff stake, he owns more than 10% of listed supermarket chain Shoprite Holdings, Africa’s largest retailer–a kind of South African Walmart, with a hard focus on low prices. It had $10.7 billion revenues in the most recent fiscal year, 145,000 employees and nearly 3,000 stores across southern Africa. In the wake of the Steinhoff accounting nightmare, Wiese sold off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his Shoprite shares, lowering his stake from 18% in 2017.



Other Wiese holdings include industrial investing firm Invicta Holdings, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which has investments in China, Singapore, the U.K. and a small business in the U.S. Via another firm, Tradehold Ltd., he owns industrial businesses in South Africa and commercial property in the U.K. And through Luxembourg-listed firm Brait PLC, Wiese owns stakes in Virgin Active health clubs and two South African firms: a fashion label and a consumer goods business.



“Christo has been a massive risk taker his whole life,&#8221; Syd Vianello, a retail analyst in Johannesburg, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2016/03/01/the-billionaire-african-behind-the-continents-greatest-retail-empire/?sh=14de17223a7a">a March 2016 profile of Wiese</a>. “Africa is not a place for sissies.” Wiese, who calls himself an incurable optimist, agrees. “I’ve been in business for 55 years,” he says. “I just accept that the world is always difficult.”



Wiese’s journey to become Africa’s biggest retail tycoon took a meandering path. After attending Stellenbosch University, he started working for his cousin’s husband’s discount firm PEP in 1970. Four years later he decided he wasn’t good at working for someone else, and wanted a job that required less hours so he could start a family. Following a detour that included buying, running and then selling a diamond mine, Wiese went back to his cousin, who’d grown PEP and added Shoprite, a grocery chain, and offered to buy him out. The cousin accepted.



He focused on maintaining low prices and serving poor customers of all races–at a time of apartheid. In 1986, Wiese spun off Shoprite and PEP (now called Pepkor) into separate public companies, maintaining control of both. By 2014, Wiese says he controlled the two largest retail businesses in South Africa, and there was really no way to grow more domestically due to antitrust concerns.



That is when he turned to Steinhoff, which did business in Europe and South Africa. “I came to the conclusion that here was a business with a very strong balance sheet, strong cash flows, experienced management and international operations,” he recalled. It didn’t turn out that way.



Now 81, Wiese said he has no plans to retire. “I nearly died in 2021 with Covid, so I’ve come to realize that I’m not necessarily destined to live forever. But my problem is I don’t play golf or do stuff like that. For me, my business is my pleasure.”



Plus he certainly has no desire for Steinhoff to be his final chapter.



“I was not going to let this almost unbelievable disaster spoil my life,” Weise reflected on the Steinhoff matter. “I have a lot to be grateful for. I love my country, I’ve got a wonderful family, wonderful friends. I just decided to carry on with my life.”



By <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/">Kerry A. Dolan</a>

How South Africa’s Christo Wiese Sued His Way Back Into The Billionaire Ranks

Rwandan-Canadian Charles Shima is deploying technology to create immersive cultural experiences for tourists in Africa. His dream? To build a unicorn in the travel sector.



Charles Shima was a young boy when he had a gun pointed at him at the height of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Luckily, he survived and was able to leave the country, which he loved, to tell his tale.



Destiny made him cross the high seas to the greener pastures of Canada, but little did he know he would return, almost 25 years later, and instead of being faced with just horrific memories, also see new hope in the East African country he once called home.



“I saw the changes that had happened in the country at that time and also the many opportunities you notice when you are in Africa. I had an ‘aha!’ moment and the idea was tourism and travel.”



This epiphany resulted in ZaNiheza, a travel marketplace for immersive experiences connecting travelers all over the world with verified local curators in Africa and beyond.



“I have always been passionate about the cultures of the world. I started building ZaNiheza as a tour operating company in Rwanda,” says Shima to FORBES AFRICA.



Shima fell in love with Africa again. The journey back home had unearthed a new passion to rebuild Rwanda with the goal of providing opportunities for the youth as well.



“When I arrived in Canada, there was a lot of bias towards Africans. I was no longer Charles Shima but just another black man. So, you have to basically fight for any opportunity you have. The success you have as a black person in Canada is only related to sports or music. And I thought ‘if someone can build a Microsoft, why not me; if Elon Musk can go to the moon, why not me?’ That made me feel if I ever built a company, it would have to change the world.”



ZaNiheza was launched in 2019 with the vision to change how the world experienced Africa. Shima was ready to start laying the foundation to build the next African unicorn until things went sideways. By March 2020, the Covid pandemic hit and the travel industry all over the world came to a complete standstill.



“We continued building this vision that goes beyond a tour operator company and my vision is global. So, I was thinking how can we bring the culture of Africa to the world and what we did was to build a global channel creating content and original shows about travel and [by] talking to the young women and men who are making a difference in Rwanda first,” says Shima.



Shima and his team continued to build bespoke travel packages in anticipation of the world reopening again for travel.



“We are in over seven countries in Africa and… on our way building the next unicorn in the travel sector. This is something that already exists in other countries like Europe etc, but when it comes to Africa there is no company that is really doing this.”



The company also has a presence in Vancouver, Canada, where they recently qualified for a startup competition that raised over $20,000 in funding for the business.



“What sets me apart is how we want to market Africa. It’s not just about wildlife. We need to go to the grassroots and then use the technology to make an impact. In Africa, your mindset has to change. You need to build from scratch and have the patience and drive and passion when everyone is going to say you are crazy. Seeing Africa through our eyes is my focus,” says Shima.



Shima says he has invested over $50,000 of his own money into the business which has gone into building the technology as well as creating the supply. The company is currently working with local travel curators in African countries. The young man from Rwanda has come far.

Screenshot 2023-01-24 at 18.13.47

Beyond Safaris: Digitalizing Travel In Rwanda

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



By Amy Feldman 



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

Woman planting.

Meet The Entrepreneurs Who Designed Pollution-Killing Plants

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Organic Naturals Skincare faced a number of challenges.



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



She adds that building the team was also a challenge.



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



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



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



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



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

Screenshot 2023-01-02 at 16.40.53

Business-Savvy In Botswana: From Plants To Profits

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

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

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



The launch has been a marked success.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

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

South African Entrepreneurs On The Power Of The Designers Collective

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Currently, they have 18 corporate canteens.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



“People always need to eat,” she explains.



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



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



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



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



And the most important thing she realized running businesses?



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

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The Joys Of Profit And Purpose For This South African Entrepreneur

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



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



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



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



What exactly is AMLD Africa?



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



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



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



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



What’s next?



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



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



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



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


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How Applied Machine Learning Days Impacted Africa

William Sachiti, the Zimbabwean UK-based serial entrepreneur and founder of Academy of Robotics, is finding tech solutions for the world’s needs.



William Sachiti was very young when he had an epiphany that would completely transform his outlook on life.



He would spend his summer holidays visiting his grandparents in their village in Zimbabwe and whose predominant activity was farming and herding cattle. These experiences helped ground him.



“I found out the invisible lottery of life from an early age. All of us have to play this lottery system and this lottery has a result and the result could mean life or death. We all play it; we have no choice and the system is best described as a single question and that is ‘where were you born?’ That question will decide your outcome in life,” he says in an interview with FORBES AFRICA.



Sachiti would herd cattle with his friends during summer but go back to his normal privileged life afterwards, but his friends would still be where they were, rearing cattle.



“The difference between them and me was nothing; it is just that they were unlucky to be born in that place.”



Later on, Sachiti figured that if there was anything that could be used as a tool to change the world, that would be education. But he had to find out the hard way. After relocating to England in 2000, Sachiti began doing odd jobs such as selling double-glazed windows and doors that led to a job as a stock broker when he understood the world of real money.



“Stock broking at the time was sales because you need to be able to convince people to give you some of their money to help you invest and it involved six weeks of financial training,” says Sachiti.



That understanding of money was enough to help him begin his journey as a serial entrepreneur.



By the age of 19, Sachiti had started his first business. Believing that the internet was going to disrupt the Yellow Pages, which was essentially a classified listing of all businesses in a book, Sachiti created 123 Registration.



“We started selling thousands of websites and domains where we made it automated in such a way that in three easy steps, you can create a website. It did pretty well and someone bought it and that was my first exit,” recalls Sachiti.



While knocking on doors for his first business venture, Sachiti made an interesting observation about billboards. They were highly sought-after for the attention they could garner for any company but the problem was they were sold in clusters. For example, a business could not buy a billboard right outside their store unless they bought other billboards they had no use for. Sachiti’s entrepreneurial spirit kicked in again.



“I found out that under planning law, there is a planning exemption and you can put adverts on dual surfaces such as bins or benches. So, it hit me that if you could put a bin that is absolutely stunning like the Ferrari of bins, you could put one outside Leicester Square and advertise there. I created this and took that to the BBC Dragons’ Den. The invention was called Clever Bins. The dragons thought it was the worst idea they had ever heard at the time,” says Sachiti.


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To the seasoned investors, a smart bin seemed like a dumb idea at a time when Steve Jobs had given the world the iPhone. They passed on Sachiti’s innovative bin idea but he would go on to license his idea in over 11 countries until someone finally acquired the main license for it.



After that exit came the problem of finding things to do in London.



“You come to London and you want to go to a club on a Thursday. That same club on a Friday is a rock night and the same club on a Wednesday is a gay night and it is an 80s night on a Saturday. So, you can’t go to a club all the time because what’s in the club changes all the time.”



Sachiti’s solution? Create a things-to-do-company called MyCityVenue, which grew to over 1.6 million users in the space of three years. That company was eventually acquired by a company called Secret Escapes and the data was also acquired by a big taxi business.



Cumulatively all the companies Sachiti sold made him millions of pounds. With that money, he set out on perhaps his most ambitious project yet, the idea of using robots to disrupt the world.



His first attempt at creating robots was when he enrolled in Aberystwyth University in Wales to study artificial intelligence and robotics.



Frustrated with the difficulty of finding the right locations for the books he needed, Sachiti created the first robot library where one could walk up to a robot and ask the robot for the exact location of a book and it would direct you.



After a number of hours on YouTube learning to build this interest, Sachiti decided to launch Academy of Robotics, a technology institute specializing in creating technology to perform or simplify complex tasks.



“In 2020, we built our flagship product, the Kar-go Delivery Bot which became one of the first vehicles designed for self-driving delivery to be licensed on the roads in Europe. The company’s services now include: self-driving delivery, indoor logistics robots and road defect detection and analysis,” says Sachiti.



At just 35, Sachiti is an expert on AI and autonomous navigation with regular appearances on TV and at industry and government panel discussions.



From creating a patent that will help build a super highway for drones to move from point A to B to creating a system to improve access to education and then publishing the technology as an open source allowing everyone to have access to the technology, Sachiti is an African determined to play the game of capitalism to disrupt any industry but create real value in the process.

William Sachiti

From Clever Bins To Smart Robots, A Driven African Entrepreneur

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-twitter-winners">TWITTER WINNERS</h4>



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff

Twitter Losing Its Most Active Users

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

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

Afropolitan is aiming to create a digital nation bringing together the best of Africa.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“It doesn’t matter how much you raise, we cannot entrepreneur our way out of these problems. We actually have to do the hard work of fixing these governance issues and letting the other sectors thrive.”</blockquote>



The bitcoin blockchain has evolved into numerous applications providing multiple opportunities for entrepreneurs not afraid to chart the unknown path.



Nigerian tech entrepreneurs Echeme Emole and Chika Uwazie, raised in the diaspora, are two such coming up with an innovative idea for cryptocurrencies.



Looking to build “a new digital nation” for Africans, they have managed to convince a group of investors to back their idea to the tune of $2.1 million.



“The way to think about it is that it is a country that firstly starts off as an online community but materializes into a physical one after reaching critical mass. For us, the reason for building a new country is that we are saying, the nation-state experiment has not worked for us collectively as black people and through this [platform], we can build a country that we choose,” begins Emole.



“So, the subsequence of the old system is that we have leaders, money and institutions we can’t trust. We want to go back to first principles and build a new country, one [where] we can re-draw colonial borders without historical constraints or political baggage. This is a country where people from Africa, African-Americans, Afro-Latinos and the diaspora in total can exist&#8230;”



In order words, they opine that without addressing the issues of bad governance and broken systems at the core of the African startup ecosystem, nothing meaningful can be achieved by the remarkable talent on the continent.



As Emole succinctly puts it: “It doesn’t matter how much you raise, we cannot entrepreneur our way out of these problems. We actually have to do the hard work of fixing these governance issues and letting the other sectors thrive.”



Now the co-founder of Afropolitan, an event and community building platform, Emole had pivoted from law to fintech as an executive for Nigerian unicorn Flutterwave before helping orchestrate one of the biggest exoduses of the African diaspora into Africa through the Year of the Return initiative that saw over a million people flock to Ghana and Africa’s shores with a direct benefit of over $2 billion in economic activity.



On the other hand, Uwazie had an entrepreneurial career in recruitment and HR that culminated in her joining the prestigious ‘500 startups program’ and becoming CEO of HR tech firm Talentbase in Nigeria.



After Covid hit, both Emole and Uwazie found themselves, as many did, working remotely and using social media to continue driving engagement and making an impact.



It was Uwazie who first told Emole that Afropolitan can be more than a community-building platform.



“I had a deep respect for Chika but it wasn’t planned for us to work together. It started in December 2021 where I had this idea and ran it past Chika and we both started working on it organically,” says Emole.



The two are co-founders of Afropolitan, a community-as-a-service company with a vision to build a network that brings together the best of Africa.



“We are building the next Facebook but this time instead of an online passive community there will be a country with shared purpose and shared value and a common currency and this allows us to capture the value we create at scale in a very seamless way,” says Uwazie.



Their idea is based on what is referred to as ‘a country in the cloud’ – as in an article published by the former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, who they say also happens to be one of the investors in the new venture. His idea hinges on building a cloud ecosystem first – rather than starting with physical territory – in building a new nation.



But the question remains, is there a need to build a new digital nation based on cryptocurrency? Emole certainly believes so.



“Flutterwave gave me some insights and data as to how bad things were on the continent. It’s like $5 billion of venture capital has gone into the African tech ecosystem in the past year, but the reality is people are actually very poor so it doesn’t matter how shiny your apps are because if people cannot afford to spend money on it, then what is it for?”



Without fixing the deep-seated governance issues that have caused a lot of startups to fail in Africa, Afropolitan believes that entrepreneurship will not thrive.



“Picture a house that has a weak foundation and the owners want to fix this house but instead of fixing the foundation they say ‘we are going to fix the lights, and the fans and walls’. What eventually happens is that the foundation collapses. So, we are saying instead of fixing this weak foundation we are going to build an entirely new one. The foundation represents the governance. We now live in a time where we don’t have to go through this journey alone. The diaspora sends some $70 billion worth of remittances each year so, we are saying can we build a network that allows us to build abundance on top of it,” says Emole.

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The Nigerian Techpreneurs Wanting To Build A New Country

Funmi Adewara, the founder-CEO of Mobihealth International, is changing the narrative of Africa’s ailing healthcare sector, so critical in these times.



DR FUNMI ADEWARA VIVIDLY REMEMBERS the first time she had a near-death experience in Kaduna State in Northern Nigeria.



At the time, her mother who had five children to care for, was employed as a nurse in the state hospital. On that fateful day, Adewara, who at the time was only 10 years old, had been in and out of hospital for her ailment for some time, but things took a turn for the worse and she needed immediate medical intervention.



“I was gravely ill and I was confronted by the fact that at that time the doctors were on strike and my life hung on the line,” recalls Adewara. Luckily, her mother’s position as a nurse in the hospital meant that she was able to pull some strings and get a doctor and colleagues to come in during the strike to the hospital to save her daughter’s life. From that experience on, Adewara’s fate in the medical profession was sealed.



“I was privileged to see the very dire situation of the health system in Nigeria. I would see doctors overworked and I remember very well the smell of the hospital corridors and multiple surgeries that I had to have as a young child. Sometimes when I was in admission, I would hear the wailing and crying of mothers who lost their children, or family members and that experience challenged me and fueled my passion to study medicine because I wanted to be able to help those who were vulnerable in the community,” says Adewara in an interview with FORBES AFRICA.



Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is facing a health crisis.



“When you have the president of your country spending some 200 days in the UK for medical reasons it begs the question; if the President of our country does not trust the medical system in Nigeria, why should the citizens, let alone Nigerian doctors, also care?” asks Philip Amosu, a Nigerian neurosurgeon who currently works in the United States.



Official figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates Nigeria’s doctor-to-population ratio at 0.3 per 1,000 persons. For a population of nearly 200 million, Adewara thinks this is inadequate and unacceptable.



“I was aware that more than half of doctors in Nigeria are outside the country. Nigeria has over 35,000 Nigerian doctors spread across the world and we only have 74,000 registered doctors and half of us are outside the country. With a population of about 200 million, if you compare that to the US who have about 1.5 million registered doctors, you realize how dire the situation is. So, I was looking for a way to make a difference,” avers Adewara.



Her solution? Mobihealth, a telemedicine and digital health service provider transforming the way patients access and receive care. Adewara is one of the thousands of doctors who left Nigeria in search of greener pastures. But that decision never quite sat well with her.



“Nigeria has a huge shortage of doctors and many counterfeit medicines. When I finished my youth service, it was always my dream to leave the country in search of greener pastures and to gain international experience and expertise to help me come back and give back to Africa.”



She joined the NHS in the UK after passing her exams as a stroke physician but her reputation as a leading medical practitioner in Nigeria meant that she was still providing consultation services to people back home.



“I was aware that more than half of doctors in Nigeria are outside the country. Nigeria has over 35,000 Nigerian doctors spread across the world and we only have 74,000 registered doctors and half of us are outside the country. With a population of about 200 million, if you compare that to the US who have about 1.5 million registered doctors, you realize how dire the situation is. So, I was looking for a way to make a difference,” avers Adewara.



Her solution? Mobihealth, a telemedicine and digital health service provider transforming the way patients access and receive care. Adewara is one of the thousands of doctors who left Nigeria in search of greener pastures. But that decision never quite sat well with her.



“Nigeria has a huge shortage of doctors and many counterfeit medicines. When I finished my youth service, it was always my dream to leave the country in search of greener pastures and to gain international experience and expertise to help me come back and give back to Africa.”



She joined the NHS in the UK after passing her exams as a stroke physician but her reputation as a leading medical practitioner in Nigeria meant that she was still providing consultation services to people back home.



“People used to ask me for second opinions because they probably didn’t believe what their doctors were saying and it was coming quite often. I had a case where a child was misdiagnosed and died. Ihad an uncle who suddenly died because he was not aware he had high blood pressure and he got to the hospital, there were no doctors in sight. So, things like that is what spurred me to look for an innovative way to make an impact,” says Adewara.



“When I started, telemedicine was not popular. I remember when I was trying to mobilize the doctors and whenever I got into a room and asked if anyone knew about telemedicine, it was immediately less than one percent of the audience. It is very interesting to see where we are four years on.



“The first challenge was technology. I was looking for a solution that wasn’t just going to be a cut-and-paste from the West. We have our peculiar problems and challenges in Africa and unless you understand that, you will not be able to make an impact,” says Adewara.



She created a solution that spoke to the real challenges on the ground and addressed issues like the lack of health insurance to millions of patients in Nigeria.



“The solutions that already existed on the market were too pricey and I couldn’t find the perfect match and the viability of it in Africa. You are speaking about a continent where 95% don’t have access to health insurance and it is a problem that leads people into poverty,” says Adewara.



The challenge was that most of the solutions that already existed on the market from a telemedicine perspective did not see a compelling reason to expand their offerings to Africa. The only



According to the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigerians spent a staggering $39.66 billion on foreign education and healthcare-related services between 2010 and 2020. The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) asserts that over $1 billion was spent by Nigerians yearly on medicare abroad, leading to an adverse effect on the nation’s health system. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 24% of the global burden of disease is in Africa with only 3% access to health workers.



This makes Adewara’s Mobihealth a much-needed reprieve for those needing urgent access to quality medical professionals.



“Because I was already consulting with people on the phone, I saw this as an opportunity to use technology to make a difference. I did my research and found out that Africa is one of the fastest-growing markets in mobile technology adoption. So, why can’t we use that to create a solution where people can access these diaspora doctors and be able to get instant care and that was what led to founding Mobihealth,” says Adewara.



With a background in bioscience enterprise from Cambridge University, she had the know-how to bring scientific innovation at scale to the masses and that is what Mobihealth is all about.



But it has not been an easy journey to get the fledgling startup off the ground. solution for Adewara was to create her own solution. After its beta test, Mobihealth was launched commercially in 2019 and deployed immediately to support the Covid-19 response.



“People were scared to go to the testing centers and we used the platform to deliver contactless Covid tests. We would screen them on the



platform and provide remote consultation and we would dispatch our drivers who deliver the test contactless. We also have a video call to discuss with the client and with that intervention we reduced the turnover time for results to 24 hours instead of three to four days. And this was published in the ‘International Medical Journal’,” says Adewara.



Nigeria’s healthcare budget is less than 5%, according to Adewara. This means that more than 70% of the population have no access to healthcare and that, compounded with the critical issue of shortage of doctors, means there has to be more innovative solutions to reach those in vulnerable conditions.



Her solution has currently been deployed to seven states and in remote areas where there are no doctors, Mobihealth provides computers that enable patients to immediately see and speak to overseas doctors in their local language.



And her solution could not have come at a better time. Over the past few weeks alone, Adewara asserts that over 200 Nigerian doctors have been registered in the UK, with Nigerians topping the list of migrant NHS nurses in the UK.



Not much has changed in the Nigerian healthcare sector since Adewara left some 15 years ago and with the WHO’s estimation that it will take about 10 decades, even if all things were right to get to the doctors-to-population ratio, her work is more vital than ever.

Screenshot 2022-11-07 at 19.27.27

Doctor’s Orders: The Nigerian Changing The Narrative Of Healthcare 

Onyinye Anyaegbu, the London-based co-founder and CEO of African art trading platform ARTSPLIT, sees art as an alternative investment.



The global art market is estimated to be worth a staggering $65.1 billion according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 and Nigerian artists are finally gaining praise. With paintings of renowned artists like the late Ben Enwonwu, considered by most collectors to be the father of Nigerian modernism, fetching over $1.4 million at Sotheby’s and another going for $1.5 million at Bonhams, Nigerian art is in high demand globally and collectors and investors are actively acquiring works with the view of cashing in on the increasing demand.



According to figures from Bonhams, about 90% of the value of their auction sales in 2017 came from Nigerian artists. And poised to disrupt this new art economy is ARTSPLIT, a trading and social app providing users with an interactive space to participate in live auctions, bids, trades, portfolio management as well as access to invest and lease African artworks. According to the London-based co-founder and CEO of the platform, Onyinye Anyaegbu, this solution is a timely answer to an issue most collectors face.



“My brother came to me with this idea about Art. He just started his art journey and got introduced to being a collector and he was really enjoying it and he started collecting art as a great investment. And I was really fascinated by the whole African art space because of him. He told me the problem he had was that right now, as a collector even though you may have about $300,000 worth of art sitting at home, when you take it to the bank, you cannot leverage the art for anything financial,” says Anyaegbu.



“If you ever wanted liquidity you have to sell it out completely. As we spoke we realized that this is such a big collector problem and as Nigerian collectors are probably a bit more sophisticated and really that’s where it started from. As a collector, you collect all this amazing work and you don’t even have enough space for it and you cannot leverage the art for any financial instrument.”



The art trading platform for African art is providing collectors a way to get more out of their work by providing the opportunity to own shares also known as splits of prestigious African artworks that can be traded by collectors in real time.



“So, we figured what if you create a platform where you don’t lose your work but you get other people to invest in your platform and ARTSPLIT was born. The first milestone was the beta testing and seeing all our thoughts come to life in terms of the app technology. We spent a lot of time talking and mapping processes and experiences of how it should feel for a user. How do you trade, where do you trade from, and having a tech partner come in and take that and flip it into an app was amazing and that was a huge milestone for us,” avers Anyaegbu.



The app offers the community of collectors the flexibility of either co-ownership or full ownership with further opportunities for actual tangible ownership of these art works for a period of time.



“It does not end there. ARTSPLIT also provides opportunities for owners of investment grade African art to list their works, have them evaluated and sold to members of our community. You can decide to sell your work in full, or in splits (minimum of 10%) which will enable you to keep the ownership of your work and still benefit from trade of your work,” says Anyaegbu.



Five Nigerian artists took part in ARTSPLIT MOCONA, their split-and-lease online contemporary arts auction in July with bids amounting to $57,000 and with an average growth value of 14%. The auction profiled prominent Nigerian artists paving their way in the contemporary art scene including the likes of Abiodun Olaku, Duke Asidere, Edosa Ogiugo, El-Dragg Okwoju and Oliver Enwonwu.



Anyaegbu and her team are already on their fourth round of funding raising $2.5 million against a $5 million benchmark. ARTSPLIT with its team of art lovers is on a mission to raise the global profile of African art by building a community of collectors and investors as well as providing advisory and management services for art collection.

Screenshot 2022-11-01 at 07.59.31

App For Art’s Sake: Building A Community Of Collectors And Investors In Nigeria

Ekene Ngige discovered art in a cup of cappuccino and then used coffee as a medium to tell important African stories.



For as long as Ekene Ngige can remember, he has never allowed his limitations to dictate how successful he would be in life. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Ngige experienced what he calls “a medical error” that left him paralyzed by the age of one. Faced with a disability that meant he could not walk, Ngige got his confidence from his parents who helped him stand tall in any room he was in and perhaps most importantly, taught him the power of self-belief.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-29-at-10.39.05-681x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56709" width="411" height="618" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-29-at-10.39.05-681x1024.png 681w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-29-at-10.39.05-200x300.png 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-29-at-10.39.05-768x1154.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-29-at-10.39.05.png 994w" sizes="(max-width: 411px) 100vw, 411px" /></figure></div>


“They gave me that confidence. I have four elder brothers and one younger sister. I was able to join them in playing soccer on the streets or join them in dance competition and do crazy stuff like climbing trees etc. I couldn’t walk with my legs and I had scoliosis, but I didn’t feel like I had a disability, only except when kids were mocking me in school or my neighborhood. I always saw myself as normal and that is why I never separated myself from what other normal kids were doing. Even if I couldn’t do it as well as them, the way I would deliver it would be as good as I feel it should be,” says Ngige.



By the age of three that self-belief was already evident in Ngige’s ability to draw. From lesson boards to chalk boards or even in his textbooks, Ngige began to create remarkable portraits that started getting the attention of his art teachers and invariably led to him winning several awards at secondary school.



“My teacher actually gave me the nickname ‘Kene da Vinci’ like Leonardo da Vinci because I was his favorite arts student and I always won awards for the school. By the time I graduated from secondary school I knew I was going to be an artist,” says Ngige.



But the journey to becoming one of Nigeria’s top up and coming visual artists would take him on an interesting journey. First, came the love for animation. Ngige began exploring with several illustrations which led to him creating comic book characters. By the time he entered the Yaba College of Technology, that initial love for animation had evolved into the fine arts.



“I fell in love with oil painting, acrylic painting and water colors and from there, I had to choose which one to make a priority. It was difficult but I remember when I was in college, we had companies come to the art school to buy some of the art from us because it was cheaper, so the idea that I could actually sell my art in college and I could use that money to support my school fees and art materials encouraged me to be an artist professionally.”



A brief stint working with a television network in Nigeria after graduation followed where, Ngige would use the money he earned from his 9 to 5 to fund his real passion. Very soon he started getting noticed in the art community and was invited by an agent to take part in a joint exhibition to help him get more exposure for his art.


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“I had an agent that came to me to say they want some of my artwork to exhibit in joint exhibitions. So, by the time we had a series of exhibitions and I saw that my water color painting always stood out, I realized this is actually it, ‘Nigeria is beginning to appreciate art’ and so I decided to do more of that until I could do my own solo exhibition,” recalls Ngige.



In 2016 he realized his dream as his first solo exhibition sold out. But his real breakthrough happened when he discovered art in a cup of cappuccino.



“I was working with a new coffee brand that was launching in Nigeria and I was working on creating their logo so we were having meetings and having coffee. In the process of one of these meetings, [coffee spilled] on my notepad and I saw a different texture that I had never been able to achieve before. So, it came to my mind that maybe I should try and achieve this. So, I went back to my studio and tried it out and it was amazing and I could perceive coffee all over my art work and I loved it, says Ngige.



Since then his growing fanbase cannot simply get enough of his coffee-infused paintings. Ngige has sold several paintings to international clients who buy his coffee paintings anywhere from $5,000.



“I have been able to give greater value to coffee than just a beverage. I am now using a medium made in Africa to paint and the only foreign material about my artwork is my canvas and brush but the rest is African. So, I try to portray deep African stories with my coffee paintings.”



From highlighting the plight of impoverished children, to depicting vivid drawings of female empowerment as well as putting a spotlight on the series of violent attacks taking place across Nigeria, Ngige sees his art as more than just paintings to be enjoyed but rather a way of telling important African stories and creating awareness as a form of activism promoting peace and unity in Nigeria.

Ekene Ngige’s work using coffee2

Coffee With A Purpose: The Nigerian Artist Blending It Well

Foluso Ogunwale, the Founder and CEO of I-Fitness, wants to make sure Africa’s most populous country is also a healthy one.



ANY FAST- paced city with an urban populace comes with its share of lifestyle diseases and the need for a well-defined fitness and wellness culture.



Lagos is no different, yet in Africa’s biggest economy, there is room for more.



“If you look at the US, the fitness adoption is somewhere around 18% but in Nigeria and most African states you have about less than 1%. So, there is a huge gap,” says Foluso Ogunwale, Founder and CEO of I-Fitness, one of the fastest-growing fitness chains in Nigeria, going by his ambitious expansion plans.



Currently in 16 locations across Nigeria, I-Fitness aims to close in on four more spots bringing the total number to 20 by the fourth quarter of this year. After this, the brand is still looking to open in another 20 locations in 30 months. Ogunwale is a man on a mission to get Nigeria and the rest of Africa fit and healthy again.



“When you look at health and wellness and life expectancy, Nigeria and most African countries rank very low, I think Nigeria was in the 163rd position the last time I checked.”



Ogunwale is serious about being able to contribute meaningfully to the lives of Nigerians.



He stumbled on the idea of a fitness chain a couple of years ago when due to his stressful lifestyle in the cosmopolitan city of Lagos, he wanted a healthy way to unwind. At the time, the loss of a friend to diabetes at a very young age made Ogunwale even more health-conscious.



“I actually thought it would be nice to join a gym and so I walked into a gym that was close to my office in 2007 and when I got to the reception I was told the fee was around N700,000, which was about $4,000 at that time. And I thought it was ridiculous and they didn’t give me an option to pay in instalments. It had to be a one-off fee paying everything upfront.”



That experience cemented the idea to create a much more competitive fitness offering for Nigerians. The goal was to not make fitness a luxury product but rather one that was easily accessible to anyone with a decent job. Having already started and sold his first business, a mobile electronics business specializing in the sale of laptops, mobile phones and gadgets, which at its peak was turning over about $20 million a year, Ogunwale was no stranger to taking risks.



He had pivoted from a career in banking before starting his foray into electronics and after the acquisition of the business decided it was time to disrupt the fitness sector in Lagos.



“The fitness industry in Nigeria at the time did not exist. There were probably only one or two gyms in the whole of Lagos that were fairly decent. In a city of 22 million people, I wanted to find out how can we make this common, how can we retail luxury and how can we make fitness affordable, enjoyable and useful and make it fun at the same time,” says Ogunwale.



The next couple of months would prove to be his most challenging.



“Even the bank did not understand what it meant to be in the fitness industry. They knew me from my previous business that got acquired and they were even surprised with this new business idea. They asked me ‘why will you leave a very successful business to go and open a chain business?’ It was very tough to get off the ground but I was resilient.”



He sourced his first equipment from the old gym he used to be a member of, which, as luck would have it, was remodeling.



“I needed to push on and I needed to show proof of concept so I took on some very expensive loans just to show proof of concept that the fitness chain could work in Nigeria and potentially even move in other cities within West Africa and thankfully that paid off.”



He started the chain in 2015 and has a loyal clientele in different parts of the city.



“I joined I-Fitness because the location is right next to my work so I can pop in after work to de-stress before I go back home,” attests patron Blessing Kuti, a 25-year-old bank teller working in Lagos.



Driven by the need to create something of value that could potentially touch a lot of lives and be meaningful to so many people, Ogunwale and his fitness chain have plans to expand the message of health and wellness beyond the borders of Nigeria.



“The lives people live in Lagos is very strenuous and you are not thinking about things that lean towards luxury. You are more thinking about survival and coping with day-to-day stress. So, this for me was a wakeup call to say how can we touch a lot more lives and create an enabling environment to get people in the gym,” says Ogunwale.



Beyond the 40 locations, Ogunwale is looking at building a digital platform that will help a vast majority of Nigerians and Africans also access fitness online.

Category: Entrepreneurs