The Narrow Path

Pikin whe e toe e foot wen e di climb hill no fall and pikin whe e toe e foot wen e di go down hill fall ; them no dey de same

Breaking News!
__GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize winners announced on Sasai Moments!

The Moment has arrived!! Do you want to know who won the GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize and Impact Awards? Six winners were just announced (Friday 11 September) at the (mostly) online AGRF Summit in Rwanda! Just go to my page and find out. It should have happened around 6 pm tonight CAT. I myself don’t know who won and can’t wait to tune in, right this .

Every day people around the world read, look, watch, travel, but yet they don’t “see” the opportunities around them – whether in the streets, the soil, the trash, our tiniest creatures (flying or underground), the sun, the indigenous fruits, the animals we raise, the music we listen to… and of course, how many times have I asked you: “What is in your hand?”

Reminds me of this verse: “But blessed (happy, fortunate, and to be envied) are your eyes because they do see, and your ears because they do hear.” [Matthew 13:16]

Agrifood is soon to be a $1Tn business in Africa, and these 12 finalists that you watched here on my last post giving their pitches have launched all kinds of new businesses: earth-saving earth worms, high protein insects, locally grown and processed sunflowers, affordable cassava products, highly nutritious indigenous turkey berry products, vertical and micro-gardens for urban residents, a variety of innovations, digital tech and apps (for both Smart and feature phones, plus a crowd-funding platform for investors and smallholders to meet), precision drones, solar-powered portable freezers…

Some of these business services also give the inventors all kinds of data to help their agribusinesses and customers be more profitable. Nearly all of them benefit Africa’s smallholder farmers in some way. And none of them is older than 35 years old! Wow wow wow!

Who did the judges choose to win? I have no idea, but I am going to go look right now. But let me say before I do, just because someone didn’t “win” an award today, I guarantee you they are all winners and they ALL make us proud.

__If they didn’t let a pandemic slow them down, what can stop them?

Times as tough as these right now really show the true character of each and all our entrepreneurs. I am so thrilled that so many of our young people got involved. Ventures from 10 countries in the top 12... Wow again.

Like my dear mentor Norman Borlaug wrote: “Everything can wait. Agriculture can’t.” These young entrepreneurs and the thousands of others who applied to the GoGettaz Prize will feed our future generations in Africa and eventually the world...

Congratulations to all of you. I look forward to speaking with you in the days ahead. Maybe we can organize a call soon when some of my COVID responsibilities have shifted. I was so sorry not to see you during this week but we will catch up soon. Thanks to my dear friend AGRA President Agnes Kalibata and others for standing in for me this week during this pandemic crisis facing most of Africa, and the planet.

Homework to everyone: We have talked about pitching for years on this page... After you see who won today, go watch their pitches again. Study to learn!



End.

Image caption: If you don’t have the Sasai App yet… it’s not too late, and it’s free. Just go to your App Store and download it!

The skills of the future (Part 6)
__“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity, not a threat.” Steve Jobs

Last Thursday Cassava Fintech International, the company in our group that controls our highly popular mobile money service, EcoCash, released a new super App called Sasai under the tag line: “Pay, Chat, Explore". I want to discuss this with you as an entrepreneur, not as a potential customer.

You might be asking yourself the question: “If you have a very successful business called EcoCash which enjoys 90% market share, why would you launch another business in the same segment?”

This is a good question, which I believe is best answered by one of the most admired CEOs in the world today, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, who said the following:

__“Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future”.

The technological platform on which services like EcoCash and M-PESA are built was for feature phones, but now more and more phones are Smartphones. These new phones are powerful micro-computers which drive sophisticated services using algorithms, that we have all come to know as “Apps”.

The mobile networks themselves are evolving from 3G to 4G, and now 5G is coming! 5G will open the door to the most powerful computer programs the world has ever seen, which we are now calling Artificial Intelligence.

By launching Sasai -- which combines Messaging, Media and Payments into one simple, secure, reliable (and awesome) App -- we are hoping to do five principle things I wanted to see achieved:

#1. “ReInvent” ourselves;

#2. “Disrupt” ourselves (even if you don’t have strong competitors, you must always act as though you do!);

#3. “Invent the future” by migrating the services we have onto a smarter, faster, more powerful platform that uses Smartphones that will be able to run on 5G, and AI! We have created a to AI driven services. This means we will be able to seamlessly go into the future.

#4. We also wanted to build a platform that we can take anywhere in Africa, without having to own the mobile network. EcoCash operates on Econet networks, but Sasai works on any network, anywhere in the world, just like the popular WhatsApp, Instagram or even Facebook. When we are done you will be able to use it from anywhere in the world. I believe and hope that Africans in the diaspora will eventually use Sasai as their link back home!

#5. We wanted the platform to be inclusive, and yet global in look and feel. It must be vibrant, reflecting the youthfulness and diversity of Africa.

It must also be able to accommodate local languages, an exciting feature that will emerge by Christmas.

__Every day you must innovate or die!

Now let’s look at our pathway briefly:

The team that developed Sasai is not the team that run EcoCash. Do you know why? There is a profound reason for that!

A small team of people were put together that worked away from the glare of any activity. Some of these young people are super smart, with degrees from the world’s top universities. They were led by a proven leadership team that knew how to plan and develop a new product.

They had access to research and could travel to places like India, China and the US to study services, and meet potential partners. The type of computer programming required hundreds of specialists in the countries I have mentioned. You don’t buy something like this off the shelf. It also cost tens of millions.

We knew exactly what we wanted: Something similar to the “We Chat” platform in China, which has 1,2bn users, but it had to be an African platform. We could not go to WeChat and say, “Please give us your platform!” So we built it from observation. This is how Follow works. It is what Jack Ma did after seeing Yahoo, and went home to build Alibaba.

It was sometimes agonizing as months gave way to years. Yes, it was a number of years. We never talked about it, and 99% of people who work in Econet did not know about the project. It is hard to keep something like this going, when it is not making any money at all. This is where the entrepreneurship comes in: “You bet the farm”!

Once it was ready we unveiled it to staff members to try out for several weeks. Their feedback led to radical changes. Then we released it to “friendly customers” who began to use it and gave us further feedback. Again we went back to the drawing board.

By then rumors about it were flying around it. The teams were now working in overdrive to make changes coming from the feedback. Then finally we had a product for the market!

It is a good product, but it is not perfect. We don’t allow “perfect to be the enemy of good”.

Now that Sasai is launched we will continue to listen from the feedback of the people that really matter: the customers! Every few weeks or so we will release an upgraded version based on the feedback, including criticism.

# There are many features we want to have, but we will not add them all at once.

# There are many places we would like to be, but we will not go there all at once! Someone once said, “If everything is a priority, nothing is!”

The product is now in the hands of our awesome marketing and sales army. They must introduce Sasai to Africa and eventually the world, persuade potential customers to download the App for free, encourage them to all the cool things it does, and keep using it! If you're interested, you can check it all out here: https://sasai.africa/

You want to be an entrepreneur? How much risk can you, really take? Come on, be honest...

Sometimes it feels like you have jumped out of a plane without a parachute. I have felt that for 33 years.

To be continued. . .

Image caption: ! Sasai launch event last Thursday. https://sasai.africa/download/

The skills of the future (Part 4)
__Serious business, and some serious fun, too!

In the past few weeks I’ve told you about Muzinda Hub, the coding school we first launched in Zimbabwe in 2014. Today I want to tell you about “21CSkills”, a cutting edge initiative of Liquid Telecom built in partnership with Microsoft. 21CSkills (21st Century Skills) is a free online learning platform for African students, start-ups and developers specially designed to offer training and certifications in skills of the future like data science, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity, Internet of Things, game development (coming soon) and much more...

I want some of you especially in the to take a few of these courses and come back at the end of this year and tell me what you think, what you learned, and how these new skills helped you grow and your businesses! You can find out more here: https://21cskills.africa/

Now some of you may wonder how such amazing online training has become available in recent years. The short answer is: high-speed Internet connectivity.

Never before in history have people of all ages across Africa and the world been able to study and acquire cutting edge skills of the future from world class educators, without having to fly to distant lands. Young people like some of you may not realize how truly amazing this is!

__What is that in your hand? I have said it so many times and I will say it again: If you use it wisely, it can take you, your education and your business places like never before. Please don’t waste its power. Some of us have worked very hard over the years to make it possible...

I have told you on this platform since 2013 about my dream to create a Cape to Cairo by fibre network, and most of you know it completed late last year. That was amazing but building Africa’s digital future is an ongoing . Our Liquid Telecom teams are still busy connecting (countries, businesses and people) across the continent, as I write today!

Beyond Cape to Cairo, our “One Africa” broadband network now links many countries in east, central and southern Africa through 70,000km of fibre. The westward journey is also underway (you saw me in DRC and Angola a few weeks ago), with the cable being extended across Central Africa.

__When that link is completed, we will have built the first terrestrial network linking together all four corners of the continent!

This is what I mean by building Africa's century and if you acquire the 21CSkills you need, it’s great news for visionary entrepreneurs like you who want to use the Internet to build and scale your own businesses across the continent and the world. The rest is up to you. We've done our part.

: here’s something for you. Check out two cool competitions and tell me what you think. One is called “Data Hack for Financial Inclusion” (DataHack4FI) and the other is Zindi Africa. Both are initiatives supported by Liquid Telecom/21CSkills partnerships and focus on inspiring savvy young people like you to use the power of data to find answers and solve problems in ways never before.

Prepare to compete if you dare!

Liquid Telecom also has a great new partnership now with University of Johannesburg to launch a research and technology center focused on digital innovation that will offer 4IR courses like the ones I mentioned above. They will also award bursaries to support promising young students at UJ to learn the skills of the future there. There are a lot of great things happening and I'm really proud of the young teams in our Group who are putting all this together.

As I told a few of you here earlier, I ran into my dear friend Makhtar Diop of the World Bank a few weeks ago at a wedding in Rwanda. We had a cup of coffee and started chatting about, you guessed it... Artificial Intelligence. His parting words to me were:

“My brother, this is very, very serious. Do everything you can to get the brothers and sisters on the continent to get their minds around AI!”

You can see we ARE taking this very very seriously! What about you?

To be continued. . .