The Africa Playbook

On a very special episode of The Africa Playbook podcast, Lewam Kefela sat down with Tidjane Deme, General Partner of Partech Africa (the largest Africa focused VC with $450M+ in assets under management), to discuss all things tech, finance, life and of course, Africa 🚀🌍 ✨.

In this episode, we talk through what it means to raise debt in our market: what to plan for, the challenges entrepreneurs face, and the role DeFi can play in moving things forward. We are joined by Sam Eyob, Chief Investment Officer at Goldfinch, Umulinga Karangwa, Founder of Africa Nziza Investment Advisory, and Jesse Ghansah, Founder & CEO of Float.

The Africa Playbook is a series of newsletters and conversations focused on telling Africa's growth stories. Join us on a journey to discover, learn, and build a blueprint for what African success stories could look like!

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This month, at The Africa Playbook, we’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes for businesses to build trust in a customer base, especially in the early days. Lewam Kefela had the pleasure of interviewing two amazing African operators that have built strong brands in different industries, Babajide Duroshola and Odunayo Eweniyi. In this conversation, Babajide recalls what it took for customers to trust SafeBoda (a motorcycle taxi ride-hailing platform) with their safety, and drivers to trust them with their income. While Odunayo recalls what it took for customers to trust Piggyvest (a savings and investment platform) with their financial future. 

They share lessons learned, mistakes made and advice they wish they had on day one.

Babajide Duroshola:

Babajide Duroshola is a Business Management Executive with extensive expertise in startups, technology, banking and consulting. With over 10 years of extensive transnational experience across roles, he has developed comprehensive competence in business management, strategy, marketing, operations, community and ecosystem management and engagement.  He is currently a General Manager at M-KOPA, and was a former Country Director at SafeBoda.

Odunayo Eweniyi:

Odunayo Eweniyi is the co-founder & Chief Operations Officer, PiggyVest, the largest digital savings and investment platform in Nigeria. She’s an award-winning fintech entrepreneur who is working for diversity equity and inclusion in fintech and technology as a whole. And when she’s not doing that, she’s tweeting or watching TV shows. Odun is also a co-founder of the Africa Playbook.

Lewam Kefela:

Lewam Kefela is a co-founder of The Africa Playbook. When she's not working on our content, she works as an Investment Director at Village Capital.  She's passionate about supporting founders building meaningful solutions to create access and transform industries. And when she's not doing that, she likes to write, sing, take ridiculously long walks and tell the corniest jokes. Lewam is Eritrean but was born and raised in Kenya.

The Africa Playbook is a series of newsletters and conversations focused on telling Africa's growth stories. Join us on a journey to discover, learn, and build a blueprint for what African success stories could look like!

Find more info on our Website

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Follow Us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Clubhouse

African capital markets are largely underperforming in creating access to capital for local entrepreneurs, and facilitating real economic growth. In this episode, we reflect on the current state of our local capital markets, the hurdles ahead, and the progress that's been made. To give us some perspective, we are joined by Gerald Gondo, a business development executive at RisCura. 

More about Gerald Gondo:

With a wealth of frontline investment management experience in Africa, Gerald serves as an Executive within RisCura Africa and is responsible for Business Development. Prior to joining RisCura, he was a founding partner of a specialist investment advisory and investment management business (Atria Africa) based in Mauritius. Gerald’s passion to have first-hand experience in investing in Africa led him to join a leading pan-African asset manager, Imara Asset Management, where he had dual responsibility of being lead analyst on listed equities in Egypt, Morocco, Zambia and Mauritius whilst also building the fixed income capability of Imara Asset Management in Zimbabwe. He started his career in private equity investment in Sub-Saharan Africa with Business Partners and has also worked as a credit analyst for Futuregrowth Asset Management.

About RisCura:

RisCura is a purpose-driven global investment firm that offers investors unique insights and guidance to help shape the future world we all want to live in whilst still achieving and exceeding financial goals for its clients.

Impact Investing: RisCura is applying its extensive institutional investment experience to impact investing and has launched South Africa’s first Impact fund of funds series in line with the globally recognised definition of impact investing “to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact” within South Africa while still delivering competitive investment returns. The impact funds in this series focus on unlisted debt, unlisted property and unlisted equity. Using a fund of funds structure enables us to create a pooling mechanism for long term impact capital that can provide a stable source of funding for commercially competitive impact and development projects that align to both South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Africa Playbook is a series of newsletters and conversations on critical issues facing emerging market startups, and proposed solutions. Join us on a journey to discover, learn, and build a blueprint for what African success stories could look like!

Find more info on our Website

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Follow Us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Clubhouse 

An introduction to the Africa Playbook by Lewam Kefela and Odunayo Eweniyi. Join us on a journey to discover, learn, and build a blueprint for what African success stories could look like.