Writer and founder at Week of Saturdays
Originally published on True Africa. Tress is a hair inspiration app targeted at black women. It was created by Priscilla Hazel, Esther Olatunde and Cassandra Sarfo in Accra where they came together due to their shared love for dreaming, learning, building, traveling and innovating. This June Tress, which was founded at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), was accepted to the Y-Combinator fellowship, […]
Originally published on Bella Naija. Things are hard in Nigeria, no doubt about that. Our industries and government work suboptimally, and we’re used to it. New and old graduates face the anxiety of trying to fend for themselves with limited options. An advantage of living in a country like ours, however, is that we learn […]
Providing transparency where there was none, and moving forward.
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. On November 8, 2018, MEST Africa and Innocircle organized an Airbus Bizlab Aerospace Challenge Meetup in Abidjan to spotlight the budding aerospace industry in Francophone Africa, answer questions about launching a startup in the space, and introduce the Africa4Future initiative by Airbus to aspiring entrepreneurs. We were lucky to have Marouane Jebbar, Founder […]
Published on iAfrikan, TechNova and Top Farmer Kenya. I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no organic food. Do you? Listen, We will need to produce 70% more food than we do today to feed 2.3 billion people that will be added to the world’s population by 2050. And we will have to […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Mercy Orangi is the Technology Evangelist at Andela. Here, she talks about Andela’s pan-African expansion plans and platforms they’re building to support more female technologists on the continent. Earlier this year, Andela held its Women In Technology (WIT) Summit in Nigeria. What was the motivation behind that event? This was the first WIT […]
“Nigerian (tech) entrepreneurs need to show traction”…. I hear this all the time and whilst it is true, it still irks me when I hear it. They compare Nigeria to America and forget the myriad of problems that exist here. This diagram below shows a little bit of how tech entrepreneurship works in America. The […]
Published on Techpoint and Tech Nova. Too many times, when we speak about the future of Africa or the future of technology in Africa, we do so with an air of ignorant homogeneity. We speak of Africa like we speak of one country, and in so doing we [sometimes] forget that there are 54 countries […]
Published on TechNova, iAfrikan, Business2Community. While population growth determines the socio-economic prospects of a country, the age structure of the nation is just as crucial. By 2025, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will be home to almost a quarter of the global population aged 24 and below. And by 2035, SSA’s population will become the youngest in […]
Anyone who has tried recruiting Nigerian graduates would have dealt with immense frustrations only similar in severity to using slow internet to watch pornographic material — Yes I said it.But no… this is not a “bash young Nigerians” post. This is a collective problem that needs solving by us being brave and unorthodox. The terrible […]
I wrote this piece (in quotes below) a while ago and didn’t have the guts to share it. It was an expansion of a social media conversation I was having and I must say it was undoubtedly a difficult conversation to have. However, after recently being the only male on CNN’s #MeToo panel at social […]
Bowing Out It is not a secret that I spent most of my entrepreneurial life within Nigeria at the front end of the electricity industry. However, Nigeria’s power problems are complex. The solutions appear simple to me; but re-engineering our “system” to address the solutions is where most of the problems lie. I am not […]
Published on EzineArticles. Warpath Strategy On The Workplace of the Future In 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, Faculty at the University of Oxford, published a report titled ‘The Future of Employment’. The study presented in the report examined the susceptibility of 702 varied occupations to computerisation. According to their estimates, about 47% of […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… Frieda Demor Nwokolo, owner of Eastgate Hotel Ghana and a hospitality guru who has spent the past decade honing her craft, exploring her passions and making herself a force to be reckoned with in Africa’s boutique hotel industry. In this interview, she shares her experience of setting up a boutique hotel […]
A summary of my notes from the recent Women Techmakers Leads and Google Developers Groups (GDG) Summit held in Lagos, Nigeria. I woke up on Monday morning to an invite to the Summit from my friend, Aniedi Udo-Ubong, Developer Ecosystem Manager at Google (Sub-Saharan Africa). It was to a two-day gathering of Women Techmakers Leads and […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. He is referred to as an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, one with no intention of starting a business who saw a problem and set out to fix it. Introducing… Sesinam Dagadu, the founder of a Solutions Company called tinyDAVID. tinyDavid was set up to develop solutions for the developing world, and SnooCODE, their first […]
In this video, I share info on how to get equity-free seed funding for your business idea or startup. I also share a list of accelerators around the world to help you get started on your journey. https://youtu.be/1jnqvbZDgdU < p style=”text-align: left;”>List of Equity-free Accelerators Around The World Ready to take a bold step into […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… Kelvin Nyame, one of three Ghanaian entrepreneurs, (including Rashad Seini and Kofi Amuasi), who founded MeQasa after receiving US$90,000 seed-funding from Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in 2013. MeQasa went on to raise US$800,000 from Frontiers Digital Ventures, a global VC firm in 2015, and is rising to be the […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… One of the stars of Nigeria’s recent startup success stories – fintech startup Paystack. Paystack was admitted into Y Combinator’s (YC) accelerator programme in winter 2016, making them one of the first Nigerian startups to join the programme. This was no small feat and it ushered in an era of international exposure […]
Two speaking engagements in one weekend! I really am growing and sticking with my resolutions – doing good that benefits more people. At the beginning of this year, my mantra was “do the work and fall in love with the work.” And five months down the line, I’m still on it. 2017 plan: Fall in […]
Published on MEST Africa Blog. Popcorn, big screens, and good conversation afterwards! On Friday, 21 April, join us for a special one-time screening of this new empowering documentary on female entrepreneurship titled: She Started It. She Started It aims gives a new face to the popular image of the tech entrepreneur: a female face. This documentary / film follows […]
Originally published on AfricaBusiness2020 via Skrife. Introducing… Nana Agyemang Prempeh, one of four co-founders of Asoriba, a startup on a mission to revolutionise churches in Africa. Asoriba has been voted Best Startup in Ghana twice by Seedstars and Ringier/Pulse, Best Startup in Africa by Seedstars, and were participants in Techstars’ first cohort in Africa. How would you describe […]
Novelist Philip Roth: You get them [people] wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling […]
I am the kind of girl who gets a million good ideas in a day! My brain never sleeps, and I’m always thinking of new concepts and business ideas as I go about my daily business. As there are only ever 24 hours in a day though, I’ve never had enough time to work on […]
I spent last weekend at the beach with some friends. It was a much-needed break to unwind from the pressures of being adult, being human. Take as many breaks as you need to cope w life and adulting. But hey, come back from those breaks and participate 100%, when you're strong. — Irony (@kelechiudoagwu) April […]
Hello everyone! This is coming late but I still am pretty stoked about it. My presentation about MEST on the TEDx Accra stage went great. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I’d be. Here are a few things I learned while preparing my presentation: Practice makes everything better. It’s hard to flunk a speech […]
Originally published on the MEST Africa Blog. Dziffa Akua Ametam is one of MEST’s new Communications Fellows. She’s also an entrepreneur, founder of Dziffa.com, a social enterprise that increases the global reach of local businesses by providing them with branding, marketing, and distribution services. Dziffa was awarded the 2014 Entrepreneur of the year by African Youth […]
Originally published on True Africa. ‘There’s definitely no pampering’ – how women in tech drive each other to achieve more Beavly is an online platform that connects people who want to learn skills with professionals who want to teach these skills. Run by Ijeoma Oguegbu and Barbara Okoto, it is one of two African startups accepted […]
Originally published on Bella Naija. Ever wondered why we eat with forks and knives? Why forks go with the left hand, and knives with the right? Ever wondered who makes these random rules, why everyone lives by them, and why you almost-always predictably follow them? Doing things different, just to stand out, is a foolish […]
Originally published on Bella Naija. I recently read a story on James Altucher’s blog where he shared how a friend of his made $2million in one morning, without any physical effort on his part. See a short excerpt from their dialogue below: Dave: “Oh! I forgot to tell you. I accidentally made 2 million dollars […]
