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There’s nothing like being around a bunch of really sharp students. This summer, I got to hang out with the participants in Reach, Inc’s summer program and share lessons I have learned building Afara Global. Reach, Incorporated is a DC-based organization that trains teenagers to teach younger students. As a result of this training, the…
Tayo Oviosu and the Paga team are pushing their dominance in Nigeria’s mobile payment space to the next level with the $13 million Series B round of financing they announced earlier this week. A couple things I need to look into: Now that the Central Bank of Nigeria is implementing its cashless policy, how is…
This piece on Jack Dorsey being named as CEO of Twitter while keeping the CEO reins at Square is pretty poor. How do you give recent examples of folks successfully running multiple companies without discussing what is enabling them to get this done? Yet, you reach back to 1990 to pull out a worst case…
It’s an advertising company! It’s an infrastructure company! It’s, it’s Google! What doesn’t this company, now a portfolio company of Alphabet, do? Google is trenching around 1,000km of fiber optic cables to connect Accra, Tema and Kumasi. Through Project Link, internet service providers will buy capacity from Google to offer to consumers, unlike Google Fiber…
Aly-Khan Satchu, one of the most respected equity investors in Kenya, discusses briefly how US-China cooperation would be a benefit to African countries. This aligns with comments Bobby Pittman, managing director of Kupanda Capital made at a session discussing the Electrify Africa Act. More on that sometime later this week. There are rumors of Anheuser-Busch…
You’ve probably seen the news of Martin Winterkorn’s resignation from his CEO post at the Volkswagen Group. Rough year for this guy. Earlier in the year, VW Group supervisory board chair Ferdinand Piech publicly stated that there was distance between him and Winterkorn. I wonder if anything related to this discovery of VW vehicles emitting…
Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance landed a senior advisory role with the asset management firm, Lazard, in their sovereign advisory practice. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala faced a good bit of criticism the last few years of her tenure, with the perception that she was quiet on corruption issues,…
I couldn’t see oncoming traffic as I tried to make a left turn after picking up my daughter yesterday evening. A car slowed to a stop to give me space to pull out and the driver waved for me to come through. Typically, people wave at you to let you know that they are giving…
Take a look at the tweet below. If you follow economic development across Africa, you have seen the referenced charts. All I will say about the paternalism in this tweet is that the reasons for optimism about Africa go back further than 60 years. Moving on. Scott Galloway, a professor at NYU, said that the…
I opened up my Pocket to develop my latest “Reads” post a few minutes ago, and got the message you see in the image. For five seconds, I felt like my world had fallen apart. That’s not good. There are so many different ways I can access the news, but have built the majority of…
The African Development Bank (AfDB) will be receiving the swagger Dr. Akinwumi Adesina brought to Nigeria’s agriculture sector, as he begins his term as president today. He takes the helm in times that are significantly different from when his predecessor, Dr. Donald Kaberuka got his start, and present their own set of challenges and opportunities,…
The woman pictured above changed my life. Mrs. Jones was my 7th grade social studies teacher. My class was slightly rowdy, yet she always remained in control of the room. I started off underperforming in her class, more concerned with my pursuit of coolness. She pulled me aside one day and told me she knew…
What a jump! That last phase looks like it hurt, but was so worth it! The world record in the triple jump is 60′. So close! That is the third time Taylor has jumped beyond 18m, equaling the number of times Jonathan Edwards – the world record holder – jumped beyond the 18m mark. He…
Alice Walker wrote a beautiful poem about Julian Bond. Nas continues to make waves with the launch of the Opportunity Fund, a General Assembly scholarship program focused on getting more women, veterans, African-Americans, and Latinos into programming and engineering. Here’s an interview with Justin Gatlin after he won silver at this year’s World Track and Field Championships.…
1. After highlighting how problematic it is being labeled the first black woman head of South Africa’s Insurance Institute, Delphine Maidu, CEO of Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty for Africa, discussed women leadership styles, what the insurance industry could do to better serve customers, and the low insured rates in South Africa. 2. Ushahidi executive director…
Kwame Som-Pimpong 