Opinions

Africa’s young trailblazers in commerce and innovation

STATISTICS have shown on the one hand that Africa’s youth bulge coupled with massive youth unemployment, is a ticking time bomb for the continent. On the other hand, there is in existence ample evidence that Africa’s youthare blazing the trail in commerce, innovation, and agriculture. Also noteworthy is the fact that nineteen of the world’s youngest nations are in Africa. On Sunday, the 15th of March 2021 in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, the Director General of the World Trade Organization made these remarks “ Nigeria has a lot of many young people with a lot of talent, our young people are on the internet producing and creating value, doing so many things in services, I was very heartened when President Muhammadu Buhari spoke about investing in young people’. Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who was twice Nigeria’s Finance Minister and is a former Managing Director of the World Bank gave a ringing endorsement of the prowess of African youth in the areas of commerce and innovation. The World Trade Organization Director General singled out Flutterwave, a Nigerian fintech company valued at nearly $1 billion for mention.

Flutterwave is making huge strides in Nigeria and globally. It recently signed a deal with PayPal to get back into the Nigerian market. In the words of its Chief Executive Officer, Olugbenga Agboola, ‘for Africa to leapfrog we need to have three things, logistics, payments and commerce” Olugbenga also stated that Africa’s payment types are different and diverse, but they work. Flutterwavehas built a common payment infrastructure that connects everything together and makes it easy for a business to accept payments online or in-store through Flutterwave’shead of compliance is a former employee of JP Morgan. The company has built an enviable track record and a good book of blue-chip clients such as Safaricom and Airtel. In the agriculture spaceAlley Capital Group’s Chief Executive Officer, PiwaiChikasha Chief Operating Officer (CEO), and TakudzwaChapadza, Chief Operating Officer (COO) are Zimbabweans specialising in crop spraying services using advanced precision drones’ services to farmers especially small farmers. Though from Zimbabwe, they started as strangers at an aeronautical engineering college in Ukraine. There, Piwai and Takudzwa developed a mutual interest in development, as well as a friendship, which quickly turned into a business partnership. After graduating and moving back to their home country, they started toying with different project ideas in earnest. No idea was off the table. We always had this idea of transferring all the knowledge we gained in Europe back to Zimbabwe. They decided that the agricultural industry, with its ubiquitous, polluting diesel-powered tractors, was a valuable starting point. After extensive research and a thorough market analysis, Piwai and Takudzwa co-founded their smart agriculture and engineering company, Alley Capital Group. It primarily provides crop-spraying services for farmers via drone.

Jobberman was founded on byOpeyemiAwoyemi (33), Ayodeji Adewunmi(37) and Olalekan Olude(37) in their dormitory at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria to help connect people looking for jobs with companies hiring. According to Ayodeji Adewunmi, Co-Founder and Chief Visionary ‘we were all students at that time and on the 9th of August 2009, I struck gold while reading the making of Naukri.com in the book Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal. Jobberman.com is West Africa’s most popular job search engine and aggregator. Jobberman went live in August 2009, and today it attracts over 50,000 unique users each day. Through simple, yet cutting -edge technology, Jobberman helps link qualified personnel to the right job opportunities.In 2011, Tiger Global became a Jobberman investor. In 2012,Jobberman is the single largest job placement website in sub-Saharan Africa. In February 2012, it was named number 8 in Forbes magazine Top 20 tech start-ups in Africa. In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg named Olalekan Olude and others as examples of young Nigerians using digital technology to make impact across Africa. Stripe, a US company valued at $32 billion acquired Paystack a Nigerian start-up company for $200million in 2020. Paystack like Stripe provides a quick way to integrate payments services into an online or offline transaction by way of an application programming interface (API).

Paystack was founded by Shola Akinlade (34), Chief Executive Officer and Ezra Olubi (34), Chief Technology Officer. According to Akinlade, ‘ For us, it is about the mission. I am driven by the mission to accelerate payments on the continent, and I am convinced that Stripe will help us get there faster, it is a very natural move”. Stripe had earlier led an $8million funding round for Paystack, with others participating including Visa and Tencent. Paystack currently has around 60,000 customers including small businesses, larger corporates, fintech companies, educational institutions, and online betting companies. ApiweNxusani-Mawela (37) is the first black woman in South Africa to own a micro-brewery. Her company, Brewster’s Craft, trains students in the science of beer-making and provides beer quality testing services to professional breweries. Brewers Craft has a one thousand litre contract manufacturing brewing facility where it also offers laboratory services to other microbreweries to ensure the quality of their products. Brewster’s Craft launched their own beer and cider brandTolokaziin 2019. According to ApiweNxusani- Mawela‘our competitive advantage is that we use indigenous African ingredients in our beer and ciders’. A major revolution is also evident in Africa’s entertainment sector led by the Nigerian trio of Burna Boy (29) Wizkid (30) and Davido (28) who are without doubt Africa’s biggest three.Master KG, (25) a South African is another African music success whose song Jerusalema became a worldwide hit in 2020. In the recent Grammy Awards Burna Boy won the Grammy for the best African musician while Wizkid won an award for featuring with Beyonce in the musical ‘ Brown Skin Girl”. The huge strides made by these artists is evident through collaborations with their counterparts in the United States who value the talent they bring and welcome afrobeat.The views of official videos of these artists on YouTube and their social media following on Twitter and Instagram is in the millions.

Master KG’s Jerusalema tops the log at 348 million, Burna Boy’s on The Low racked up 198million, Davido’s Fall -198 million views and Wizkid’s Joro -107 million

It is patently clear that for theseyoung business superstars,technology is the game changer and fintech is where they are finding the big opportunities. Their businesses are scalingquickly, and they are attracting major investors from around the world. Africa’s youths are on the move.

Twitter @tunjiomotola