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 is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“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.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" 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.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“We were so passionate about cinema and so passionate about film that not figuring it out was not an option.”
</blockquote>



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 is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“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 is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“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.”

Category: Entrepreneurs

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