Dr. Lulu Gwagwa is CEO of Lereko Investments, a black-owned investment firm in South Africa. You can connect with Dr. Lulu at http://www.lulugwagwa.co.za. Born in a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal, Dr. Lulu came from a large family that included 25 family members. Growing up, she wanted to be a doctor, but there was no math teacher in her village, which halted her future medical career. She studied at University of Fort Hare, a historically important black university. Encouraged by a...

Karan Singh is the founder and CEO of Yegomoto, Rwanda’s motorcycle taxi ride-hailing startup. You can connect with him @yegomotoafrica on Twitter. Karan is a successful entrepreneur who grew flourishing businesses in both India and Singapore. In 2015, he travelled to Rwanda on business and saw an opportunity to use tech to organize the informal motorcycle taxi sector, which is prone to road accidents and associated with theft and crime. The Rwandan government had even banned, albeit briefly,...

Akin Sawyerr is the Managing Director of Feleman, an investments and consulting firm focused on payments systems, remittances, and blockchain solutions to catalyze growth in emerging markets. You can connect with him @akinsawyerr on Twitter. Akin is also the co-founder of RocRemit, a blockchain remittance company, and is a director of Splash Mobile Money, a mobile payments company in Sierra Leone. Akin is a fount of knowledge on mobile money and payments in Sub-Saharan Africa. We chatted...

Leo Stiegeler is the general manger of Ringier Africa, publisher of the popular Pulse media brand. You can connect with him @LeonardStiegeler on Linkedin. Leo is passionate about Africa’s digital media and marketing. For the last five years, he has led the expansion of Ringier, a 200-year old Swiss media giant, into Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya’s booming digital media markets. Leo is quickly establishing Ringier as one of Africa’s leading digital media brands. In July, Ringier reached a total of...

Mira Mehta is the founder and CEO of Tomato Jos, a tomato paste company based in Kaduna, Nigeria. You can connect with her @ShoutsAndMiras and @TeamTomatoJos on Twitter. Mira was born and raised in New England in the US. Fresh out of college, she landed her first job at BlackRock, a large asset manager. Driven and ambitious, Mira quickly realized that she’d never have a leadership role, as her department was just a “line item” in the company’s P&L. She was looking to make more of an...

Nnamdi Oranye is the founder of Disrupting Africa, an open platform promoting Africa’s innovators. You can connect with him @Nnamdi Oranye on Linkedin and @nnamdi_oranye on Twitter. Nnamdi is passionate about Africa’s tech innovation. He is the author of Disrupting Africa and Taking on Silicon Valley. Nnamdi is also the former host of a weekly show featuring African innovators on radio station PowerFM 98.7 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He’s a regular contributor on African tech innovation...

Manuel Koser is the co-founder of Silvertree Holdings, a South African investment firm. You can connect with him @ManuelKoser on Twitter. Originally from Germany, Manuel started his career as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG). During an assignment in South Africa, he fell in love with Cape Town. Looking to relocate there permanently, he left BCG and co-founded Zando, South Africa’s e-commerce fast fashion platform. After he stopped running the day-to-day operations at Zando, he...

Joanna Bichsel is the CEO and co-founder of Kasha, East Africa’s leading e-commerce platform for women’s health and personal care products. You can connect with her @JoannaBichsel on Twitter. Born and raised in Canada, Joanna worked as a software developer at Microsoft in Seattle in the US. Disinterested in climbing the corporate ladder, she changed careers and moved into development. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she learned that women in Africa faced real challenges in buying...

Addis Alemayehou is the founder of 251 Communications, Ethiopia’s leading communications and branding company. He’s also the co-founder of Kana TV, Ethiopia’s first TV station to dub international content into Amharic. You can connect with him @addisale on Twitter. Born in Ethiopia, Addis left when he was a child after the socialist Derg came to power. He grew up in Kenya and later moved to the US and Canada for his university studies and work. But, he always felt restless and out of place in...

Bram Fudzulani is the co-founder of Angle Dimension, Malawi’s leading software developer. You can connect with him @ Bram Fudzulani on Linkedin. Bram is passionate about developing in-house software solutions to problems in Malawi’s finance and insurance sectors. Bram is passionate about developing in-house software solutions to problems in Malawi’s finance and insurance sectors. While he worked full-time at Malawi’s leading ISP, he and his co-founders would meet up in their spare time –...

Will Hunnam and Lanre Oloniniyi are the co-founders of Orbitt Capital. You can connect with them @OrbittCapital on Twitter. Close friends since business school, Will and Lanre were veterans of Africa’s private equity world. They crisscrossed the continent in search of great companies needing capital for their yield hungry investors. But, this matchmaking process was fraught with difficulties and inefficiencies. For months, they’d work on a transaction, which was on the verge of closing —...

Florida Uzoaru is the founder/CEO of Slide Safe, Nigeria’s first STI self-testing kit delivery service. You can connect with her @dasexlady on Facebook and @slidesafeng on Twitter and Instagram. You can also find her on LinkedIn @Florida Uzoaru. Despite coming from a commercially minded Nigerian family, Florida grew up hating sales. For her, it was like begging. In her 20s, she entered the public health profession and became passionate about promoting safe sex in Nigeria. While Nigeria has...

Today’s guest is Henri Nyakarundi, the CEO of ARED Group. You can connect with him @henrinyakarundi on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram and at his website www.henrinyakarundi.com. Henri grew up in Burundi to Rwandese parents. A self-described indifferent and rebellious student, he was expelled twice from high school. Henri only stumbled upon the world of entrepreneurship after he moved to the US for university. He launched several businesses which all failed before he set up a...

Sam Gikandi is the CEO and co-founder of Africa’s Talking, a pan-African mobile technology company empowering developers across the continent. Prior to Africa’s Talking, Sam worked for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, in the US and Hong Kong. In the Asia office, he helped build the high frequency trading platform and led a team trading hundreds of millions of dollars per day. In 2010, intrigued by the burgeoning tech scene in his home country of Kenya, he set up with a co-founder Africa’s...

Gregory Rockson is the founder and CEO of mPharma, a digital healthcare company present in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe. You can connect with him @Rockson2 and @mPharmaHealth on Twitter. MPharma is a digital healthcare company that is helping Africans access high-quality medications. When Greg left for the US to study at university, he wanted to be a doctor. But he quickly realized that he could have a greater impact by studying the business of healthcare on the continent. How often...

Neil Gordon is the founder and CEO of Global Agricultural Exchange (GAEX). You can connect with him @gaexcocoa on Twitter. GAEX is a Blockchain-enabled platform that provides liquidity to cocoa farmers in West Africa. Neil is a former bank having worked at JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and KPMG. Neil is probably one of the most ambitious people I’ve met in a while. His goal to disrupt the Ivorian cocoa sector is a breathe of fresh air. It’s uplifting to meet someone who isn’t scared of dreaming...

Today’s episode is going to be a different from my usual long-form interview with an African entrepreneur. Today is a special “best of” episode where I’m going to highlight the top ten tips, advice, hacks for cultivating an entrepreneur mindset. Since the podcast launched, I’ve interviewed a dozen amazing entrepreneurs with thriving businesses in Africa. They’ve candidly shared advice, tips, and insights into how they persevere in the face of challenges. What’s remarkable is that all of these...

Wiza Jalakasi is a serial entrepreneur and current head of international expansion at Africa is Talking. You can connect with him @wizaj on Twitter and via his website http://wiza.jalaka.si. By 16, Wiza had already founded his company, Mwtunes, an online music distribution platform that was ahead of its time in his home country of Malawi. At university in Nairobi, he and his cofounder set up Djuaji, Research, a market research company that paid survey participants via mobile money. It held a...

Technologist. Blogger. TED fellow. Serial Entrepreneur. Passionate advocate and patron of Africa’s tech startups. Erik Hersman is a well-known elder of Kenya’s tech scene, having helped to found some of Kenya’s leading tech companies and ecosystem institutions. In response to the outbreak of post electoral violence in Kenya in 2008, he set up with three other co-founders Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing mapping tool deployed in crisis situations. In 2010, he founded the iHub, Nairobi’s innovation...

This episode is a slight departure from my normal YAE interview show. Episode 010 feels like a mini milestone. Young African Entrepreneur has been live for six weeks, but I’ve been preparing this show for six months! And, I thought it would be interesting to share some reflections on my podcasting journey, especially the difficulties of creating an Africa-focused podcast for an African audience. Podcasting is an exciting medium that has taken off in the US and Europe. But, Africans are new to...

Sean Keough is the managing director of Ethiopia Investments and executive director of EQOS Global, Ethiopia’s first outsourcing company specializing in data entry, digitization and contact center solutions. Before that, Sean was an investment banker in San Francisco. On the verge of burnout, he decided to move to Ethiopia in 2014 where he worked as a volunteer for the NGO TechnoServe. Sean planned to take a 3-month sabbatical, but he ended up never leaving. In this episode, Sean shares how...

Daniel Yu is the founder of Sokowatch, Kenya’s fast growing supply chain management and fulfillment tech company. If you travelled anywhere throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, you will have noticed the tiny Mom and Pop shops that dot the continent’s large cities. Even though these informal shops represent well over 80% of African retail, the large wholesalers and distributors for major consumer goods companies aren’t interested in this fragmented and unorganized sector of retail. And, this is...

Today’s guest is Aboubakar Diaby, founder of Perform World, Côte d’Ivoire’s leading local cashew exporter. Today’s episode is a little different from my past conversations. Whereas most of my past chats have been with African technology entrepreneurs, Diaby -- Ivoirians tend to call each another by last names -- is archetypal of an old school entrepreneur. He’s a trader, and a trader of a very specific agricultural good – raw cashew nut. Côte d’Ivoire is best known for being the world’s...

Episode 006 of Young African Entrepreneur features Nivi Sharma,  Managing Director of BRCK and co-founder of eLimu. You can connect with Nivi at @AmkaKenya on Twitter “You can do hard things” is the motto painted on the main wall of the famed iHub in Nairobi, Kenya. And it’s a message that Nivi has taken to heart in her impassioned quest to use technology to improve education. She got the idea for her first edtech startup after bumping into a government official outside an elevator. He had...