With a rising youth population eager to join the workforce, African markets are positioned to lead the global green economy. What will it take to build a future that is sustainable, equitable, and climate-positive? “Bring everyone to the table,” said public sector leader Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr at the 2024 Skoll World Forum. “We co-create, and we co-finance.”
At the Forum, Aki-Sawyerr joined a panel of leaders and innovators to explore inclusive forms of economic growth that also safeguard the environment. They discussed sustainable jobs for Africa’s youth through a value chain approach and energy access for rural communities. Speakers emphasized the need for affordable debt and equity funding, commercial capital attraction, and product availability for economic growth in Africa. The conversation also turned to the Just Transition, with a focus on the intersection of climate and gender.
Watch this session or read the transcript to learn more from Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Freetown and co-chair of C40 Cities; Alloysius Attah, co-founder and CEO of Farmerline; Sellah Bogonko, co-founder and CEO of Jacob’s Ladder Africa; and Ifeoma Malo, co-founder and CEO of Clean Technology Hub. Moderated by James Mwangi, founder and CEO of Africa Climate Ventures.
Transcript for “Green Futures: Youth and Climate Positive Growth in Africa,” filmed on April 11, 2024 at the Skoll World Forum.
James Mwangi: Thank you all for joining us this morning for a conversation about Green Futures: Youth and Climate Positive Growth in Africa. If you were looking for the conversation on the future of AI, this is the pause. Okay, good, you’re all in the right place. I usually find sometimes on planes, they just check, because sometimes you may find yourself going to the wrong place. And once we’re in the air, we can’t turn around.
So I think Liz really nailed it. Oh, so firstly, who am I? James Mwangi, I invest in Early-Stage Climate Ventures in Africa that are dedicated to the prospect that Africa’s pathway to economic transformation is going to be through leading in the climate transition. And secondly, that the world, in my view, has no chance of meeting its long-term climate goals unless Africa unlocks its climate positive possibilities. So just nailing my colors to the mast in terms of where I come at this from is that this is a big opportunity. But it is also true that Africa has done the least to cause the current climate crisis. And as a result, has built up the least wealth from despoiling the earth, which means its people very often face the worst brunt of the climate change that’s already banked.
And I don’t want us, as we enter into what I hope will be a positive, forward-leaning, and generative conversation to ever lose sight of the fact that it is also true that climate change must be stopped because it is an injustice against future generations. And particularly, the people of Africa, who are predominantly young and have a low emissions profile. Let’s bank that.
Let’s also recall though that they’re not victims alone. It is possible to have suffered from an outcome and yet have within you and with you the tools to both survive and thrive in the new condition, but then also be part of solving the condition. And the world’s largest workforce equipped with a wealth of natural resources and a super abundance of renewable energy potential can’t help but be a part of any equation for the future of this planet.
So, to help really flesh this out and give you a sense of the ways in which young Africans, and frankly, when you say young Africans, you’re talking about the continent, because what’s our average age? Like 20, right? So young Africans or Africans in general are both responding to and beginning to deal with and tackle and hopefully address the challenges of climate change and climate action.
I have four amazing leaders here. So that is about as much as you’ll hear me say other than directing traffic for the rest of the conversation today. And rather than do the whole read everyone’s bio in advance, I will let you get a sense of the unique perspective each one of them is bringing in my first question to each of them. And then from there, we will open it up and invite you all into a conversation. And unlike me who has clearly already gone on too long, hopefully, we will all keep our initial inputs as short and conversational as possible so we can keep firing back and forth.
So with that, I wanted to start at the best possible place, as we think about the continent as it sits right now, the challenge of leadership in the face of climate change and the opportunity for climate action. And that is with you, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown. You are a Member of the C40 Leadership Group of Cities, C40 Group of Cities. You’ve really been at the forefront of both experiencing some of the impacts of climate change and seeing your city really marshal itself in new ways to tackle both the challenges and the opportunities thereof. Please share some reflections on the current state of play and where you see some of those trade-offs, challenges, and opportunities.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Thanks. Thanks a lot, James. And good morning, everyone. As you said, you already hinted the fact that we have an incredibly young population as a continent. We’re also the most vulnerable. So that sounds like a crisis on one level, but if you put the two together, it really is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to address the challenges of climate change through investment in climate interventions, particularly adaptation because of where we stand. And in doing that, in making that investment to provide opportunities for the youth. Failure to do this is actually a disaster.
So this is a really pivotal moment, and one where it’s good for us to talk about this, but it’s also really important for us to realize that failure to act is going to spell destruction, because of the climate vulnerability and because of the consequences of social unrest, et cetera, with the youth. So where do we go? In Freetown, as the Mayor, I’ve just been reelected to a second term.
James Mwangi: Congratulations.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Well, thank you, thank you. In my first term, and I’m not a politician by background, I actually ran for office because of climate. So I came from the private sector into the space because of climate. So in the first term, we looked across the city at what the major challenges were, and we saw this with climate eyes. So we had Transform Freetown, #TransformFreetown was our four-year development plan. It covered resilience, human development, healthy city, urban mobility. And jobs were like a byproduct of what we did. We focused on investing in environmental management. So Freetown the Treetown. Planting a million trees and growing them and ensuring that that created jobs. Through our work with sanitation, that created jobs.
But now, in my second term, just with what you’ve just said in mind, I, we, have taken a deep breath, and when Wanjiru was in the room, when we made the announcement, and I’m going for this time, we had 19 targets last time. This time, a single target, to create 120,000 dignified jobs for women and youth by 2028.
James Mwangi: Wow.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: And that, we’re putting our feet to the fire, and that’s our green futures. And I’ll stop now. We’ll talk more as we go along.
James Mwangi: Wow, okay, so. No, by all means. 120,000 jobs–
Ifeoma Malo: Dignified jobs.
James Mwangi: Dignified jobs, crucially–
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Dignified jobs.
James Mwangi: and targeted at bringing the city in harmony with its environment, with nature, and with climate. It’s an amazing ambition. And more importantly, building on momentum, so you’ve already proven that these are not theoretical constructs. There’s momentum and you build on it. And listening to you as a public servant with experience in the private sector taking on this challenge of creating opportunities gives me an interesting segue to you, Sellah, right? You’ve worked in public service.
Sellah Bogonko: Right.
James Mwangi: You’ve been in government in a range of ways. And now, you’re helping organize young people through Jacob’s Ladder to seize opportunities arising from the climate positive growth narrative in Kenya and across the continent. What do you hear, and in particular, there’s a tendency for all of us to say, “Okay, now here’s what innovative social entrepreneurs and private sector leaders are going to do.” But there’s a real role for innovative leadership in the public realm as well. So we’d love to hear you tie some of these threads together for us.
Sellah Bogonko: Absolutely. Thank you, James. And it’s an honor to meet and to interact with you today, Madam Mayor. Having worked in, about seven years ago, I transitioned from a private sector job, well-paying job and I went to work in rural county in Kenya. And that was my first face-to-face reality with the assumptions that we make when it comes to the thinking that politicians or those in government know what they’re doing as far as addressing the issue of climate is concerned.
And for me, I’ll give an example where, back then, there was a lot of investments. $6 million were put into a huge dam in the highest-producing, rice-producing county in Kenya, area in Kenya. Now, that’s a great investment and when it’s announced you understand that there’s a lot of jobs, only that there was one problem. It was going to translate to doubling the amount of rice produced, but also doubling the amount of rice husks produced.
Now, for those of us who are in that space would understand what that means for the environment. And one of the challenges that I noticed is that there’s a very uni-dimensional approach when it comes to policy being implemented, especially from a government perspective. And that’s where we come in as Jacob’s Ladder. And in the last couple of, in the last year actually, what we’ve decided to do is work with local governments to go in and say, “You’re investing this much in this amazing project, which is going to help the farmers, for example, but do you realize the ripple effect as far as the environment is concerned?”
And so, we go in, and in this case, I’m talking about biochar. We go in, we design a project where we take in the biochar, or rather, the rice husks and translate it to biochar, which is then used to produce fertilizer, which then goes back to the rice farmers, which means you’re almost like answering or filling in that gap that the policy makers will not be able to see. And the investors or private sector who just go in to do one aspect of the value chain would not be able to see.
And so, as Jacob’s Ladder, we see ourselves as an ecosystem builder, where we see the gaps and we’re able to come in and fill in those gaps to make sure that we have a value chain approach to addressing the issue of job creation. Because there are many opportunities in the value chain, but then someone else has to be able to think around how to design those jobs and how to be able to make sure that they’re not just sustainable in terms of addressing the environment, but that they’re sustainable in the sense that they will be there long after the project is finished.
James Mwangi: Yeah, fantastic. So again, please go on. I’ll make clear, this is when you’re getting to know the people on the panel. So to the extent that we want to appreciate their work, by all means, I will not stop the applause from coming in. I will thank you for that. And the idea of thinking through the linkages that allow for a positive feedback loop, where jobs are being created and so on, and being the social innovator that’s working with the public sector, with communities and so on is really, really powerful.
And in the spirit of good segues, it brings us to Ifeoma Malo, founder, CEO of Clean Tech Hub and really working at the intersection of energy access and productive use in Africa. You’ve been in Nigeria looking at how to bring energy access to people, and I know that you have applied yourself a lot in particular to how is it that energy access translates to incomes. That critical question of, we don’t just provide a social good and say, “Okay, it’ll be sorted.” Really thinking through how it actually translates to livelihoods. Maybe share a little bit about that journey and where you see that space going.
Ifeoma Malo: Sure. But before I answer your question, I want to piggyback to what Madam Mayor and Sellah has said, because I think the way that we look at it at my organization is that we look at the green jobs and the green growth in young people in three ways. The first one is looking at the innovators. You see a lot of young people who are now startups and starting up their own businesses, especially in the green space and climate change, climate tech, renewable energy tech. And you see this being enabled by a lot of the incubation and accelerator programs that you see proliferating all over the continent.
Then the second one is, I read recently that the Mo Ibrahim forum said that we have about 12 million youths, 12 to 15 million youths getting into the job market every year. Those are scary numbers. And so, these are people who have graduated and are looking for work, right? And there isn’t that work. So this is where that opportunity is, where we have this opportunity to transition to something. And then we have a workforce that is sort of looking, and it’s how do we match them?
The third and the most important one I think is the communities that are usually left behind, the young people that are usually left behind. There’s another data set from the World Bank that came out recently that said that a lot of Africa’s youth population is rural. They’re in the rural communities, so they’re not the innovators, they don’t get all the startup funds, they didn’t go to school and don’t have the sort of skills that would help them get work in this space. And so, where do they go? What happens to them? And that’s where my organization comes in, because we work a lot in rural communities, we work a lot in deep rural communities, and communities that people don’t really want to go to.
And so, yes, at Clean Tech Hub, we’re an energy access climate tech and sustainable entrepreneurship firm. And what we do is, we are looking at young people and women, women are a huge part of our demographic, and looking at how to bring them into the green growth sector. I’ll give you a practical example. We do everything except build mini grids. We do not build mini grids. We work with those who build mini grids. So we have partners who want to build mini grids, they’re going into communities, and we go along with them because we do all the softer things they don’t want to do. We do the demand simulation, customer enumeration, community entrance, all of the things that would help their work be easier, because these are engineers who just want to go and build their mini grids and leave the community. So we continue to sustain that relationship between the communities and the mini grids.
And by doing that, what we then do is that we look at the young people and the ecosystem there and think about how we bring them into this asset that has been built in their community. How do we get them to own the asset? How do we get them to operate it? How do we get them to build up small and micro businesses? And that’s where the productive use comes in. And you see them starting up little things, micro businesses, you see them starting up cottage industries because there is now electricity. You teach them how to use it, you make them understand it has to be paid for, and you help them think about how they can protect those assets. And in that way, you’re building out an ecosystem of people who would continue to sustain that asset for their own productive views for the long term.
And I’ll just say this lastly and stop. Very often, this kind of work takes time. To do this sustainably and be able to leave that community and make sure that things are running, you’ll need at least a minimum of four to five years. And this is where the catalytic funding is needed. You can’t do this in one year and leave. The mini grids or the assets will fall apart. So what we then do is, we make sure that if there’s any other money, any other projects that’s coming our way, or they’re friends of ours, organizations that are partners with us, like Solar Sister, who I think in 2018 went to about 12 states with us in Nigeria, we make sure that if there are projects that they’re doing, we partner with them to say, “Here are communities we’ve worked with. Please go back there.” And it gives us an inroad into continuing to work with those communities for the long-term, but the minimum is five years. And if there are people who are funding programs, please think about long-term funding in this regard. Thank you.
James Mwangi: Wow. As you were speaking, I was struck by something I heard someone say last week, which is, if it takes 10 people to move a big rock, it makes no sense for one person to try, then the next person, then the next person. You actually need all 10.
Ifeoma Malo: Yeah.
James Mwangi: All of the different actors acting in the same place in concert to actually move this heavy rock. And I think we can all think of the spaces when we are trying to do systems change, where you see 10 people either pushing on the same rock or each pushing on a different rock and then swapping places to push on. So each of them rotates around the different rocks, because they’re like, “Oh, you can’t go into that community. That other organization is there or that intervention is there.” That idea of what it takes to move things forward really resonates. Iffy you also set us a challenge of scale and the sheer challenge of the numbers as well as, in some ways, the scale of the opportunity.
Alloysius Attah, you have built Farmerline as an example, and the importance of working in rural communities. You have built a business that is getting to scale, working with farmers in rural communities, and also working in supply chains. Talk a little bit about what you see as the role of a particular lens of entrepreneurial power in this kind of ecosystem of climate positive activity.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah, thank you. Alloysius, Farmerline. You mentioned something. A lot of young Africans are in rural areas and they want jobs, they want to survive. So anytime there’s a conversation around green jobs, climate action, if you want to engage them, the conversation should be connected to wealth creation, economic progress. They don’t want to move from drinking porridge only in the morning and then having bread, but they want to move from drinking porridge in the morning to owning houses and creating wealth and taking care of their family. So if there’s any conversation around trying to engage them and creating jobs, that should be the primary lens, because that’s what will help them, that’s what is going to help us to engage them.
So the start of Farmerline, we started a business about 11 years ago, $600. That’s my first job from school. I got my first computer in 2009, created Farmerline after college, $600, went out to become an Echoing Green Fellow, got some money, but we built the business to now where our software is being deployed across, in 50 countries around the world. And we’ve supported 2.2 million farmers, and 3,000 organizations are working with us. But how did we get there? In my view, there are three ingredients.
The first one is education. Education in the language that people understand, education in the language that is on top of mind of people. So when you take young people, wealth creation is number one. Like if you’re trying to get them into sustainable agriculture, renewable energy or conservation- I switched, I have a degree in natural resource management. I switched to computer programming, because I didn’t want to work in conservation. At the time, I just didn’t see a path between working in wildlife and guiding the forest and making money, because I’m like, so I switched, and many of my colleagues switched too.
So if we are able to share a lot more example of how people can make money, specifically in agriculture. Like getting you know solar irrigation to people is a very simple way to make money. West Africa alone, we import about $3 billion worth of rice. We eat so much rice a day, but rice also grows in West Africa. So that’s like a massive opportunity. So even when you’re trying to design programs around green jobs, that’s one. Like how can you support young people to create businesses, sustainable businesses that feed the market? That replaces the import that we have right now.
The second one is also, affordable financing is key. Patient and affordable financing. All financing is important, right? So grant funding and affordable debt equity for us is very important. In the very early years of our existence, we’ve been around for 11 years, very early years of our existence, getting like fellowships and all that like really, really helped. But now, we are at a point where we can be able to attract like commercial capital to grow.
And then the final thing is just in availability of the products and services. So for instance, we all want small scale farmers to use organic fertilizer. The demand is huge, but there are not a lot of like factories that are producing to meet the demand. So even though there is education, we put all these farmers in groups and train them, go use organic fertilizer is not readily available. It’s almost like three X inorganic fertilizer. So it makes business sense for people to use, for farmers to use inorganic fertilizer than to use organic.
And the reason why it’s very expensive is cost of financing. If we’re able to work together to bring cost of financing down, and there are many mechanisms that can be used to bring that down, it goes a long way to make sure that the products and services that are needed are available, to the people who need it the most to create the jobs that they need to create, but also to create wealth as well.
James Mwangi: Yeah, and something- There’s enough Kenyans, Tanzanians, East Africans in the room that I can say, makofi tafadhali. That means “applause, please” in Kiswahili. Something that struck me, Alloysius, listening to you is you very clearly put in the center what economic empowerment means to a young person, which, yes, to someone looking from the outside in is dignity. But what they’re saying is, “I want to do well. I want to build wealth. I want to build assets.” And I think it’s important for us, as we are embarking on this work to really center that idea of ambition and eagerness that a young population brings and talk to them in a language, the language of ambition, the language of aspiration.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah.
James Mwangi: Mayor Aki-Sawyerr, I’m going to come back to you, because you are building an ecosystem in Freetown around opportunities in this space. And you’ve set yourself a huge goal, 120,000 jobs over the next few years. It can’t be easy and yet the rewards are so big. What is difficult about it? Because it all sounds lovely from the outside, and I’m sure that there are trade-offs and there are battles in the trenches to be fought. We’d be really curious to get just one layer down.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Okay, so I’m going to start with your analogy with the rocks and having all the people pushing the different rocks. And I’ll take this more as an opportunity. I’ll come onto the challenges. The challenges are numerous, but let’s focus first on the opportunity. The opportunity one has as a public sector leader is to make sure you bring everybody to the same table. So that’s how we’ve done it.
I mean, when I came into office, and again, I think I had the advantage of coming from the private sector, working in management consulting for decades. So being able to say, “No, no, no, no, I’m not having any NGO go off over there and then the development partner over there. No, no, no, no, no, we’re not doing this. No silos. Everybody come to the table. We co-create, and then we co-finance.” And that’s been incredibly effective.
So in Freetown, everybody works on Transform Freetown. And now, everybody we work on, working on the new one, which is called #TransformFreetown, TransformingLives, because it’s about the lives at the end of the day. What are the challenges? Where do I start? I was in South Africa, Cape Town a couple weeks ago. No, two months ago now, actually. It feels yesterday.
James Mwangi: Time flies.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: With 14 other mayors and governors. And our contexts are all different. And you know we’re talking about green futures in Africa, there are similarities, but there are vast differences across the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. One of them is, from the perspective of governance, is resource budget allocation. I did a comparison between myself and those other 14 mayors and governors.
Your governor, Nairobi, I think he gets something like, if I remember the numbers correctly, $58 per resident. Windhoek, she gets $879 per resident. Dakar, $78 per resident. Freetown, $2.53. So coming in, my first objective was to grow revenue. We grew our revenue, local revenue five times, but then currency depreciation wiped it out totally against the dollar. So we’re still in that stage where we’re having to use external financing to bridge, because we’ve got to build sustainability.
There is going to be no future, no jobs, no real jobs. I’m not counting those three-week jobs that get ticked off by some agencies. I’m talking about dignified jobs, which lead to wealth creation and are intergenerational. So that means, that means we’ve got to invest in the economy. What are the things we’re doing? Let me give you an example.
As you’re talking, the thing about not linking the pieces, you’re right. That happens a lot, but doesn’t happen everywhere. One of the advantages we have is taking this ecosystem approach. So we go, for Transforming Lives, it’s now four clusters. Climate action, which is where we’re doing a lot of work. We’re building Freetown the Treetown. We’ve moved from a million trees to five million trees by 2028. And we are now built, because we have got every single tree individually tagged and linked to a grower who gets paid based on the monitoring of the trees, and we can give you the URL and you can click and you can see each grow and each tree, the species where they are, the geo code, we are now able to market that as a carbon offset for investments.
So by the end of this year, we’re expecting to be able to go to market. That means regular income, that means more trees, that means more growers, that means more jobs, but it also means reduction in landslides, cleaner air, reduced temperatures. So all the co-benefits that come with that. That’s just one example.
If I go to sanitation, we built the first ever wastewater treatment plant. It’s hard to believe. Sometimes I feel embarrassed that in 2020, we did not have a wastewater treatment plant in Freetown. As a citizen, as a resident, I never thought, “Where does it go when I flush the toilet?” When I became mayor, I found out and it wasn’t nice. It just went on the ground. So we built the wastewater treatment plant, but what’s important is that wastewater treatment plant, we’ve now introduced technology, which allows us to convert this sludge to compost. So for the farmers to biogas and to briquettes for clean cooking.
We have, as the enabling body, I’ve just met Ifeoma, I’ve met Alloysius, and I’ve met Sellah, I’m bringing them all on board. We don’t do this on our own. Our job is to make the linkages, to join the dots, to build the synergies in order for us to do more. So the challenge is that you’re not working in a vacuum. You’re working within the context of national government, national priorities, other policy decisions. So for example, Freetown was incredibly green.
I sit on the Board of the water company and we don’t manage them. They’re managed by the Ministry of Water. But about two years ago, we had a technical presentation, and we were told, and not that we didn’t know it anecdotally, but to get the data was really scary, was that in the last two years, we had lost more tree cover in the water catchment area for the dam than in the last 20. You’ve got construction, you plant an area, and then the ministry can then sell that land.
But I would say, in short, my biggest challenge would be the fact that as the city leader or as the city, legislatively, we do not have control over land use planning, no building permit issuance. That’s a killer. That is the basic urban management tool for any city. We have it on paper but not in practice. And so, whatever we’re doing, as long as it’s climate, it’s green, not having those powers means that you are being very reactive and very responsive. You need to go 10 times faster, but we’re doing our best. We’re doing our best for the 10 times faster.
James Mwangi: Mayor Aki-Sawyerr, I’m just going to make a confession. You gave three invitations to Treetown. I’m going to be sneaking in there and just like, I’m here. I’ll invite my myself.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Oh, James, James, James. No, no, no, that’s four. That is four.
James Mwangi: You know lobbying works. A couple of things, as you were speaking, I was thinking, we’ve increasingly centered the role of systems orchestrators in the work of really bringing long-term change. And the point you’re making is perhaps the most powerful role of any public leader, particularly in the African context where you know, to take a phrase from hip hop, you’re trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Correct.
James Mwangi: One of your biggest assets is the table around which you can bring actors. But the actors then need to come, and they need to bring what they can bring. I wanted to open it up, because in each of your different ways, Iffy, Alloysius, Sellah, you’ve each both had to try and do the work of systems orchestration in partnership with public leaders and sometimes, in the absence of that partnership. And we’ll be curious to hear examples of how it has worked out or not worked out in your respective views. Sellah.
Sellah Bogonko: So James, I’ll give two examples. One of where it’s worked out or is working, and then the other one where it’s not working. So I’ll start with the positive one. We recently got the mandate of mobilizing different actors, like what Madam Mayor is saying. And as Jacob’s Ladder, we are bringing together the development partners, the government, the academia, because we always leave them out, in many cases, when it comes to design of these programs. And then the youth of course. And we are developing a legislative framework, leading the process of developing a legislative framework for Kenya on green jobs and green skills development.
And when we brought the actors, the initial exercise that we did, and we brought different actors in the room, you realize how it’s true that we are all pushing on different rocks. I mean, the academic institutions, like universities and TVETs that are doing amazing work, but the enterprise has no idea. Or they’re designing programs that are not responding to the actual needs or not moving fast enough. For example, in Kenya, it takes about four years to get curriculum adopted in the universities. Now, we are talking about carbon sequestration, we’re talking about DAC Solutions, technologies that is really moving fast. And yet our institutions are not even at the point of even having green curriculum or dedicated curriculum that are addressing the issue of even carbon markets or just the emerging areas that are coming up.
And so, in the work that we are doing, on May 3rd, we have the first national workshop where government came on board and rubber stamped and said, “We are going to work together to get this legislation in place.” Because we realize that when you just design an idea that is captured in regulation or policy, or rather in policy, it’s just suggestive. But when it’s entrenched in the law, for example, I know like in Kenya now, we have climate change units in every state department to mainstream climate in every state department. And all those are part of the team that we are bringing together as Jacob’s Ladder to make sure that we’re translating to tangible outcomes, and making sure that we are actually resulting to like job creation.
Now, an example that’s not working and has not worked for a long time. I grew up in Kibera, the largest slum in the world, or in Africa, the third largest in the world. And the idea of environmental projects used to be every other Saturday, or every Saturday in six weeks, we’d get NGOs come and we’d clean the environment. You’d be given a T-shirt and 150 shillings for the work that you’ve done. That’s equivalent to a dollar or two at the time. And they’ll take pictures, and then of course, show the donors that the work has been done.
And to date, I was checking the stats today that you have about over 600 NGOs working in Kibera alone to address social issues. And if you look at Kibera, it’s only growing as a slum as opposed to decreasing. If the work is actually being done, there should be evidence over this year, that there’s been an impact in terms of movement.
So one of the things that I needed to say that needs to happen is, especially on this Skoll Forum, is that there has to be a way where we should be able to link the funding to the impact. There has to be a way of measuring. For example, if you’re creating jobs, the translation back in terms of reporting should be, how many jobs have you created? If you’re saying that you’re raising in terms of entrepreneurs, for example, how many have you been able to get, so that there’s movement. Because the reality is, well, there’s a lot of activity, and in Kenya especially, there’s a lot of activity around climate, around NGO work in general, but not much is happening, or at least not fast enough.
James Mwangi: Yeah.
Sellah Bogonko: Yeah.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Can I just say something?
James Mwangi: Please.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: I have to say this. So, Sellah, I couldn’t agree with you more. When I speak to NGOs and they tell me, “We’ve been in Sierra Leone for 30 years,” I’m like, “Really? So what have you got to show for it?” Because truly, that is the point.
James Mwangi: Yeah.
Ifeoma Malo: Yeah, but can I just also say–
James Mwangi: Please.
Ifeoma Malo: something, Sellah? Don’t you think this is because of the way that some of these grants and funding are structured where people are expecting immediate results? And part of the reason, I mean, I have a non-profit. We run a non-profit, but we also have the for-profit arm where we’ve had some VC say they want to offer us money. But when you look at the terms, you just know it’s impossible to make the impact that they’re asking for in that period of time.
You’re giving me $2 million, and then you want me to give you all sorts of ridiculous numbers in two years? That’s not how development works. At least not sustainable development. So I think it’s one thing to say it’s the NGO’s fault, but I also think we need to, to gently call out the investors and funders as well–
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Oh, yeah.
Ifeoma Malo: To say please put respectable targets and impact numbers. Like I said, it takes five years to do, impact change. Behavioral change is the hardest part of the work that we do. So asking me to work miracles–
James Mwangi: Which you do.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: But Iffy, presumably, I’m guessing you said no.
Ifeoma Malo: We say no all the time.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Exactly.
Ifeoma Malo: And it’s okay to say no.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: So if others said no, then we would actually get the message across. But if others say yes, just to be able to get the dollars, then we will continue to perpetuate this.
Ifeoma Malo: And that’s the conundrum that a lot of non-profits face in Sub-Saharan Africa, because they’re always the ones who are going to say yes, and they get all the funding. And then you that are struggling to keep onto your values, you continue to struggle even to pay salaries, right?
James Mwangi: 100%.
Ifeoma Malo: And so, that’s why it’s very important that we’re having this conversation about what this means for young people and the kind of change that we’re trying to see in the communities that we work with. It’s not going to be sudden. And it’s also something we need to communicate to the young people that we are working with, that this is not going to be sudden as well, so that they don’t have false expectations about what this work is.
And then the last thing I would say, just to solidify what Sellah just said, is that we have to learn to codify our success stories and our data. I think there needs to be a lot of, and James, maybe this is a call out to you, because you do this so well in all of the organizations that you run, train NGOs on how to mine data, report data, use data, right? Because it’s this data that will tell the stories.
In our own organization, I used to work for government for a long time and then when I started Clean Tech Hub, I said, “You know what? We’ll do this irrespective of governments.” We found that that’s not very helpful. So we now work with governments, especially at local and municipal levels, not much at federal, but we find that the data stories that we bring to the table is what makes all the difference. Let me stop there.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: And let me just, sorry, I should let Alloysius speak. I wanted to jump in, but I realize we’re dominating the conversation.
James Mwangi: We’re going to come back. This is all Treetown. Because as we discover, you’re not just the mayor of Freetown, you’re now the mayor of Treetown, and Treetown is the planet.
Alloysius Attah: Treetown is a free town.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: We’re going continental-wide. We’re actually doing a blueprint for–
Sellah Bogonko: James, can I just say that one line, right?
James Mwangi: One line.
Sellah Bogonko: The other thing I wanted to say is, if there are models that are working, let’s replicate the models instead of trying to come up with a new brilliant idea. If Freetown is working, Nairobi should just adopt.
James Mwangi: Yeah.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: And likewise. But the other thing I wanted to say very quickly, sorry, on what Ifeoma was saying just now about the funding and the NGOs, we often think about social innovation and change as being something in the space of the NGO community, of the systems leaders, the systems change leaders. I need us to realize, like you said, you won’t get very far without government. So why aren’t you guys in government? Why aren’t there more people who are change leaders who are in it because they want to make a difference and recognize that they can be the partner with their colleagues on the other side by sitting on this side of the table? So I just want to just plant that seed.
Everywhere I go, I say to people, “Don’t sit on the other side. Come and be on government side,” because we need more people in the government who are thinking about systems change and putting their, it’s not easy. It’s not easy being here. It takes sacrifice.
James Mwangi: Yes.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: It takes sacrifice on your side too. But yeah, just a quick one on that.
James Mwangi: So surrounded by powerful African women like this–
Alloysius Attah: Yes.
James Mwangi: Alloysius, I’m going to have to protect a little bit of space for you, my brother.
Unknown Speaker: We see you, brother.
Alloysius Attah: Yep, yep, yep.
James Mwangi: Something that struck me, something that struck me when we were preparing in our first conversation, when I knew this was going to be a fun chat. Alloysius, you pointed out, and we’ve talked about the problematic aspects of funding. Something you said about how much money goes into technical assistance and capacity building that involves flying people to teach people things in Africa, and how little is available to African entrepreneurs to just start something and learn by doing in their context. I’ll let you just take it from there.
Alloysius Attah: Oh, yeah.
Sellah Bogonko: Presenter’s will.
James Mwangi: No pressure.
Alloysius Attah: I actually want to share more about the partnership opportunity like types.
James Mwangi: You can do that too.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah, I want to do that. So sustainable agriculture, I think one thing that we sleep on is working with private food companies. I know people give them a lot of like, they’re like, cocoa companies are making a hundred billion, only farmers get two billion. They really want to do the right thing. They want to invest. They slowly move away from CSR to sustainability, and now, governments are mandating it to invest in your supply chain. And all of them are making all these promises, like on CNN and everywhere, but they don’t know how. And I think the development community, we should engage them to help them, because they have budgets, right?
So for instance, the largest retailer in America, I met the CEO and she’s like, “We want to buy $10 billion worth of food from small scale farmers around the world. And we’re trying to find partners to make that happen.” Like that’s a massive opportunity to develop markets where they don’t exist. And they do have the budgets. Those budgets are connected to their businesses. So if you create something that works for them, they’ll work with us.
Keeping in mind that most food companies play in the margins of 10 to 15%, and they have to pay for all the overhead and cost of da-da-da, cost of capitals. If you’re trying to design products for them, just keep in mind who you’re talking to and where their money comes from. The second, so far, that worked well for us. We work with Hershey’s, Mars, and all these big food companies. They kept us afloat for the last decade and we encourage more development people to work with them.
Another example of collaborations that worked with us is, I know NGOs are getting heat now, but we benefited a lot from working with companies like AGRA and MEDA. Like they gave us, like they helped us develop markets where they don’t have like patient capital, and I think that’s where it comes in, right? Patient capital helps like TA. All these things really, really help. There’s a company called MEDA. It’s an NGO, it’s a Mennonite NGO which, they gave us our first contract, but their sole model is like, instead of going into the country, setting up a team, flying out people into the country and implementing projects, they only work with local partners. So if they’re going to work in energy or agriculture, they’ll find local entrepreneurs doing that work, and then they’ll create programs around that.
So for me, I think that’s one of the ways to get around. Like that’s one of the ways we got around challenges in funding, because you’re right. Yeah, that’s a very deep part. I don’t want to go into the challenges in funding, because it’s just going to suck me into a dark side. So I want to stay on the bright side, but like that’s how we navigated it, because people don’t trust from the beginning. As Africans, our science language, you’re supposed to say all these things in eight words. Like all these things–
James Mwangi: The greetings alone is 20 words.
Alloysius Attah: And the premium that the people put on like what is going to work, right, and how to make those decisions, I think, is flawed. And as a result, many people are taken out of like in the funding cycle. One other partnership that we are struggling with that I think is very critical is government. And for us, we stayed away from government for so long because of obvious challenges. But when COVID happened in Ghana, when all the NGOs packed up and left, food companies shut down, they’re not buying food from farmers, the government of Ghana was the only entity that had the balance sheet and then the credibility to go to the IMF and raise a billion dollars, right?
So if you’re trying to create systemic change, like for me, that was like the biggest lesson. And also, when Trump came in, he was like signing all the good things that happen our way, I’m like, “Oh, wow, governments are really powerful,” and we have to innovate.” We as innovators, we have to engage. We knew that we’re not great at government relations. So we started engaging. AGRA, for instance, is very good at helping government to develop policies. You know, the Tony Blair Institute, they are like embedded at all levels of government, and we try to leverage them to teach us how to work well with government. We have a policy of not taking government revenue, but we want government to use our technology and scale our technology. We have like a 911 for farmers, which we think the only path to scale is government taking it and making it a free public resource, right?
So those are some of the three examples of partnership for us. The issue of food security green jobs is a team sport. It’s not a winner take all. And everyone has a role to play, development role to play to develop markets where they don’t exist. And commercial capital also has like a role to play as well. So you have to find harmony in all of them.
James Mwangi: So unlocking climate positive growth and jobs through a three-legged stool. We need a new generation of leaders in government, as Mayor Aki-Sawyerr is saying. We need a private sector that’s now increasingly recognizing its need for value chains and supply chains that are in harmony with the planet and with community. And we need a generation of social actors that are trying to orchestrate, because you have the smallest pool of resources, and your job is to lever everyone. Make sure that we all agree, this is the rock we are going to push first and then this one and then that one. It sounds like that’s a message from here.
Now, the reason I’m summing up a little bit is traffic is going to slow a little bit, allow more people to merge into the lanes. So welcoming more questions, conversation, provocations from all of you. Remember, this is a conversation so ideally, make it a question. Or if it’s a comment, make it a short and provocative comment. We would love to hear your life story, but maybe afterwards in the cafeteria. But please, come on in. We will go there, one, two, three to begin with.
Zolelwa Sifumba: Hello, everybody. Dr. Zolelwa Sifumba here from South Africa. I wanted to start off by saying what a fun conversation amongst Africans. I’m enjoying it. I enjoyed the laughing, and it’s so lovely to be speaking about something so serious, but having fun and also empowering each other. And so, I’m just reminded of the words “Africa unite.” Can we please come together to do this? And I’m speaking here as an unemployed youth.
I’m a youth, I’m unemployed, from a country that has a very high unemployment rate and I just looked up the stats now. And I’m a doctor. I’m a doctor, I’m a graduate. I spent many, many years studying. I took time off because I got sick, because of what I was exposed to as a doctor. And I want to tell you all about the pain of unemployment, where eating becomes difficult, where a place to stay becomes difficult. So I don’t know how you can think about a future when you’re still thinking about today.
And I’m an ambitious youth. If you look me up, you will see my ambition. I’m eager, and I’ve been working for a very long time, but this is the last, this is the end of my short comment. Our elders are refusing to employ us. Our elders are refusing to empower us. Our elders are refusing to mentor us. Our elders are refusing to educate us. So please make me understand how we continue, how we can even imagine that one day, when you guys are not here, how we’re going to take over, or not take over like in a bad sense, but how do we continue the relay race and hand over the baton to people that will be our youth? We need you guys to show us how. Thank you.
James Mwangi: Thank you. We’re going here next, but I did want to take a moment just to thank you and honor you for sharing your story just making this real. In a sense, as I was listening to you speak, I heard myself earlier saying, “Now is not the time for our life story,” and that was exactly what we needed to hear. So thank you for that, and thank you for sharing.
Zuki Mqolomba: Is it afternoon? It’s still morning, right?
James Mwangi: It’s morning somewhere.
Zuki Mqolomba: Good morning. It’s morning somewhere, it’s afternoon somewhere.
James Mwangi: Yeah.
Zuki Mqolomba: So my name is Zuki Mqolomba. I’m a doctor, and I’m also South African and I feel your pain. And I think for me, my question for the audience, I’ve just got two questions for the panel. So one is about, what do you think of the notion of the just transition? I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, but basically, what argues it is that, because we are on the backend of development, economic growth, and progress in our societies and we never got an opportunity to make use of coal and fossil fuels to spearhead our development, should we then abandon fossil fuels for more organic forms of energy production, and then give up on the opportunity to develop and progress economically? So just the notion of the just transition.
And then secondly, I was thinking about this question of youth and African youth from the diaspora. How do we make sure that, what are the incentives can we introduce to attract African youth from the diaspora to take advantage of the growth that comes, the green growth, the green jobs that come with climate-positive economic growth pathways? Because at least we can be guaranteed that African youth from the diaspora do have the skills, the education, and the experience to try to forge ahead and to drive ahead and take advantage of the green growth pathway in Africa.
James Mwangi: Thank you, indeed. And there was a third one here. Thank you. The third one, we’ll take these three, and then we’ll do a sweep and then we’ll take another three.
Diana Sierra: I’m going to be- Let’s see. Is it working?
James Mwangi: We can hear you.
Diana Sierra: Okay, cool, cool. So my name is Diana Sierra. I work in menstrual health, and I just wanted to give a quick shout out at why menstrual health is important and the links between menstrual health, youth, and climate. I need to take the opportunity that I have at this amazing panel and let them know menstrual health is critical, because menstrual health comes with products and education. So in everything that you do, always keep in mind that we need to make sure that girls are educated about their bodies, that they know how they work, so they can make informed decisions in the future.
And when it comes to products, the sanitation economy is a huge opportunity, because we’re going to be having all these girls joining the workforce, because by 2030 is when we are going to, for the first time in humankind history, we’re going to have the same acquisition power. So that means that we’re going to be working, and we need to make sure that the products and services that we women need also can keep up with all these youth that is enrolling. And I close it here because I want to make sure that a lot of people have the chance to enjoy this amazing panel.
James Mwangi: Thank you so much. So open to the floor, I think three themes here. Generational justice and giving the young people a chance to use the talents that they’ve deployed, the diaspora and their role, the just transition, how to think about that. And I will broaden that question to that intersection of climate and gender and the various opportunities it creates. We’re already seeing, this was not an attempt to like, we just went and found dynamic climate leaders. You can see what the sampling gives us already. But let’s talk about, more broadly, what does that mean? But I’ll open it up, take it in whichever order. And I might exercise some moderator’s privilege and also for an answer or two.
Ifeoma Malo: Maybe I’ll do the gender one and start with that. But I think my sister here who told us that short story of her life really spoke to us. Our elders have refused to empower, employ, educate, and mentor us. How can I think about the future when I can’t eat now? Those will stay with me for a long time. So thank you. When she comes back, I thank her for saying that.
But we work with women. At Clean Tech Hub, we do women, and we do women deliberately. And this is because when I started my career in the energy sector, I was usually the only woman in the room on panels. Simbo is here. She is my sister from Solar Sister. So there were four of us in Nigeria. If they were ever having an energy panel, it was one of the four of us. Me, her. No, really, it was like a revolving table.
James Mwangi: The manual antidote.
Ifeoma Malo: Yes. So it was one of us that had to be with five men. So that’s why I completely understand what Alloysius is going through, but we all sat down together. We had a meeting, I called them, I said, “Listen, this is ridiculous. There are other women who are in the energy sector or who we can bring in to be part of this conversation.” And we immediately agreed that if we were invited for a panel and we’re the only woman, we refuse. We have a list. We created a long list of other women we can suggest to them. And you could see how, between 2017, 2016, 2017, when we had that conversation, Nigeria is one of the places where you’d find a lot of strong women in the energy access sector.
Now, what has that done? It means that when we’re working with policy makers, when we are working in communities, we center women. Women are the core of a lot of the things that we do. And when you break it down to menstrual health or women’s health and climate, you will see that this is one of the most important things you center when you’re going into communities and you’re trying to make women champions of climate change or climate action.
If you do not talk about the things that concern them, which is their children, their welfare, their health, every other thing you’re saying about climate flies over their head, because these are the most important things for them. How am I going to feed? How are my kids going to live a wholesome life? Will they be able to go to school? So these are part of the conversations and these are part of the training that we do. And it falls back to what we said. When we go into those communities, whether it’s in Nairobi, whether it’s in Lagos, whether it’s in Marrakesh, whether it’s in Freetown, wherever, we look for organizations that are working with women in communities. It could be on menstrual health, it could be on gender-based violence and those mostly are our entry points. Let me stop there.
James Mwangi: Thank you.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Thank you.
Sellah Bogonko: I’ll take the–
James Mwangi: Please.
Sellah Bogonko: So I’ll take the just energy transition. Again, just to echo everyone’s response to the earlier one, the earlier person who shared her story, really, a reminder of what we are working on every single day, because she’s a representation of a significant portion of the continent.
So as Jacob’s Ladder, one of the things that we run is what we call the Africa Climate Ambassadors Program. And I’m proud to say that Iffy is actually one of our ambassadors. She was in last year’s cohort. So you can see the caliber of people that we have. And the idea behind this program is where we get mid-career professionals who are young people, vibrant, already working on different issues around the climate space. And these are strategically positioned, either running their own enterprises or strategically positioned in government to influence policy or direction of government. And that group, we have found, is very instrumental when it comes to directing in very subtle ways, where the continent is heading on certain subject matters.
For example, today, we have an X space, former Twitter space, this evening, on the very same subject, asking, just how just is the energy just transition in Africa? And I’d encourage you to log into that this evening. But when I think about just energy transition, I actually hear two things. One, the potential loss of jobs, on the one hand, for those who already have jobs in the fossil fuel space. And then on the other hand, it’s the sense of loss of opportunity, economic opportunity for the countries that are thinking we already have oil and other countries have developed on the same fossil fuel. So what then do we get in return for foregoing this opportunity?
And the idea is, I love the fact that it’s a transition, meaning that we cannot do it overnight, even if we want to, but we have to be able to find strategic ways of making sure that it does happen as soon as possible. And that is why there are definitely different interventions around renewable energy. And of course, as Kenya, we do have the highest, one of the highest percentages in terms of renewable energy, and I believe that especially within the continent of Africa, there has to be more investment in that space, because we hold, I think about 40 or 50% of the world’s renewable energy potential. But the reality is only 2% of the global climate finance when it comes to renewable energy comes to Africa.
So to echo Mary Robinson’s words yesterday when she said, “What we are facing in the climate space is actually not solutions. The problem is not solutions. The problem is leadership.” We know what to do. The question is, why is it not being done? And that’s where we need to focus our energies on.
James Mwangi: So I’ll come in a little bit on that particular question of the just energy transition to say, because I think it’s really important to separate those two things. There are people who already have jobs in what I think of as sectors of the past, and we need a transition for them. I’m going to say something bold here, and I’ve spent about four or five years looking at this, and I genuinely believe this now.
The second category of feeling like Africa is missing out on our fossil fuel wealth is a misnomer and a mistake. It’s actually not true. If you look at Africa’s endowment of fossil fuels, proven fossil fuels and divided by our population, where actually, the poorest, either the second poorest or the poorest continent per capita in terms of fossil fuel resources, right? We think of Nigeria as oil rich, not because Nigeria has a lot of oil. The United Kingdom actually produces more oil per capita than Nigeria does. It’s not that Nigeria is oil rich. It’s just Nigeria’s other economic sectors are so poor that that looks like a big sector. It’s not, right? Nigeria’s not even the top 10 of global oil producers. If it disappeared from global oil production tomorrow, the markets might notice for a day or two, right?
On the other hand, Africa as a renewable energy player is a true titan. And the best example I can give you is South Africa, right? You have more than 100 times the renewable energy potential of the fossil fuels that you’re currently stuck on. And what has happened is, if you’ve been living through load shedding, you’ve seen that over the last year and a half, private sector money has been flying into renewables, which are just cheaper, better, and more reliable than fossil fuels in this particular instance, because you know what? Coal and coal plants need to be maintained. The sun comes every day, right? And so, I think as Africans, we do need to separate those stories, and we need to realize that if we want those big opportunities that will rush people into our productive sectors, we need to say, “We have an unfair advantage in renewable energy.” Ignoring our unfair advantage in renewable energy is to say, “Well, let’s do the thing that you all have done,” just because you’ve done it is actually deluding ourselves.
Alloysius Attah: Yes, sir.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: I think that’s I guess a very powerful way to present it. And I still though feel it’s important for us to face the elephant in the room. And I’m going to say, when it comes to the word just, I’m piggybacking on what Sellah said about finance, but at the same time, I want to overlay it with what we saw some two years ago when everybody was saying no fossil fuel. And I support that. I’m the Co-Chair of C40 cities. We have a commitment to the ending of fossil fuel investment. However, I cannot help but notice how decisions of countries changed dramatically when Ukraine-Russia war happened and gas supplies were threatened. Then the pronouncement suddenly changed that way.
And I think we as Africa need to be very, very conscious of that. Because it’s one thing for us to know we have the renewable energy, but it’s also another thing for us to be able to exploit it, for us to be able to have the investment. And those figures on finance are really true. And it’s even worse when you come to city finance, access to finance at the city level. So our voices need to be raised. The action needs to be had. Those of us who are at COP saw the announcement of the loss and damage fund. We saw the peanuts that went into it, and then we’ve seen that even now, it’s moving so slowly. So how do we bring the two together? We cannot lose sight of that. Our good news story needs to be–
James Mwangi: And 100%.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: It needs to be operationalized. We need to take leadership. Our governments need to take leadership. We need to stand and we need to call the shots and have our own rules about who is investing and what we’re accepting when we talk about just energy transition.
I want to quickly speak to doctor. Doctor, thank you. Thank you for being real and for sharing your story. And what we cannot afford to do is to allow that to continue to be your story. 70% of our population in our countries are you. That does not give, what’s the future if that’s your today and how you feel? Our responsibility, I’m going to come again, because the reality is, I was in the not-for-profit part-time private sector, but investing in not-for-profit, doing my thing, like many people do. And I got to a point when I realized that I could take 10 steps forward, but government could take me 20 steps backwards in terms of all of the investment that we’re doing as social entrepreneurs.
Those policy, being able to affect policy, being able to affect laws, being able to write legislation, we’re passing a law now. It’s going to the attorney general in the next two weeks. And we’re changing the landscape of sanitation in Freetown in order to unlock jobs. So we’ve created legislation which basically makes it compulsory for everyone to have their waste collected. I’ll just step back one second and tell you the story.
So when I came in 2018, one of the challenges that I saw was that only 8,000 of our residents’ households were registered for waste collection. We invested in young people, we gave them tricycles, we gave them training, we helped sort of police the market, but it wasn’t enough. They grew businesses. I have young people now who have finished university through those. And they say, “Mayor, the street is our office.”
They’re paying for their kids to go through schools. They’re building houses. And people look down on waste, but it actually is a job, and it’s one that they’ve grown through. But today, they come and they say, “I will work for somebody for a month. I’ll come for my payment.” And they’ll say, “Hey, I got somebody else.” And it’s very hard at that level for them to implement any sort of enforcement. So what have we done? We’ve made it a law.
Now we stand, we the city, we give you the demand note to every household. Private sector, you stand behind us. Youth groups, you stand behind us. We will be your face. We will make sure we use a digital system. It’s rolling out by the end of this year. But we effectively have moved from, we’d gone from 8,000 to 40,000. Now we’re forcing the city, we’re taking it up to 120,000. That is thousands more jobs. And we are being there as the police.
So why am I saying this? Because as the mayor, it’s not easy. There’ll be battles, but I can do it. Eventually, I’ll get there. There may be obstacles. We need more mayors, we need more governors, we need more ministers or whatever they are, more public sector actors, because the future of our youth will not, cannot, cannot be left to chance. And it cannot be, you guys are doing a great job as the NGO community, the development community. But you can’t act on your own, and you can’t pass the laws.
James Mwangi: Yeah, Aki-Sawyerr–
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: So we need to come together. I’ll stop, I’ll stop.
James Mwangi: I could listen to you for the entire time. And the power of the examples and the concreteness and reminding us that the game here isn’t just to say, “Oh, we’ve all these resources, let’s sit.” It’s go and demand the investment. Go and make the case for the investment and make it happen. But make it happen building for the future and not regretting a lost past, as we have discussed. Alloysius, I want to invite you into this space.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah, thank you. Speaking about investments, everyone needs money. Cities need money, companies need money. And someone asks a question about the role of the diaspora. I think that’s like international remittance into the continent from the diaspora is one way that we could, if we could be able to shape that money to invest into more green jobs, that’d be great. Because like I think we bring in about 80 or 90 billion a year like from like remittances, that’s one. Also coming to like, and if you’re in the diaspora, come into Africa and create companies, start businesses, because if you don’t happen, others will do it.
China is buying villages, buying lands. They’ve given so much loans to like our governments, they own airports, stuff like that. They’re making strategic investments. People can criticize all they want, but these are opportunities that need investment. If we don’t take advantage of it, others would, right? So that’s one example. Also, just come and chill. Like in Ghana, for instance, we have a year of return and we are giving visas, visa on arrival to everyone that is coming between December and then March of every year. If you are African American, we give you free passport so you can come to your country. We’re trying to invite more people. So just come and spend money.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Do you do the DNA?
Alloysius Attah: Well, yeah.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: We do the DNA, you’re taking our people.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah. When we did that–
James Mwangi: That’s a loaded conversation.
Alloysius Attah: When we did that, within like a month, we got about a billion dollars into like Ghana just from people. It started as a party, like people come and chill, but now people are like investing in real estate and doing stuff, right? So that’s one way you can invest, participate in the economy. There’s money to be made. There’s wealth to be created. If you don’t get in on the ground floor, other people would.
And also finally, talent, right? So you guys have a lot of experience. You work in other companies. Bring those talents to join fast-growing companies, like Farmerline or others here and contribute your talent. You get to earn, but you also get to contribute to the creation, like the development of the continent, the economic development of the continent, right? So those are some of the ways that, that diaspora can contribute, and Ghana is like doing a great job on that. And I’m sure many countries can learn from that. Thanks.
James Mwangi: Thanks. So I’m struck by how time is flying, listening to the questions, the reflections, and so on. I think we are right at the end of our allocated time. I think we’ve got about five minutes now. Five minutes. I will take one more comment from the crowd because I promised to come back. I see my friend Peter was first up. And, oh dear.
Ifeoma Malo: There are four hands.
James Mwangi: There are four hands. All right, I will give you a sentence each. Really, no, seriously and I will be tough because we do not have time, yeah? Sorry? How are we doing?
Unknown Speaker: Yeah, we have 15 minutes.
James Mwangi: It’s 11:45, and we stop at 11:45?
Alloysius Attah: That’s good, right?
James Mwangi: All right, we’re not going to use the remaining time arguing about the time.
Peter Juma: Okay.
James Mwangi: Yeah.
Peter Juma: My name is Peter Juma.
James Mwangi: Yes.
Peter Juma: Thanks so much, James, my friend. So I just want to make one point is we need to massively collaborate and partner if we are going to address these challenges we are talking about, and we need to think about the role of the youth in agriculture in Africa. I want to fly in Africa and see covers of forests as well as food.
James Mwangi: Fantastic. Partnering for the youth in agriculture and forests. Next. Thank you. Thank you, a conversation for after. Please. I want to make sure everyone has a chance. If there’s a second mic, if it can be going to the next person.
Unknown Speaker: Yes.
James Mwangi: Please go ahead.
James Mwangi: Hi, I’ll be concise. Alloysius appointed to the 10 billion that a US-based retailer wants to buy from small shareholder farmers, and I’m not sure how we close that gap without investing in vertical integration, whether it’s local processing, whether it’s cold supply chain to actually get there, because we’ll continue to have that post-harvest loss, which in some of our supply chains is just six billion alone for planting.
James Mwangi: We need to add value in the continent to our produce and get it to where it needs to go.
Unknown Speaker: Yes, and I think there’s a huge financing gap, because even with these conversations here, Rippleworks is one of the only funders who actually looks at CapEx investment to do these things. And so, I don’t know how we look at facilities be able to do that. And there’s great work happening in Ghana with Fairafric that’s vertically integrating chocolate, Affiong Williams, and ReelFruit in Nigeria, and Tomato Jos, and all of these other players happening. But how do we actually accelerate that and get more young people access to the finance, access to the resources to do that. And yeah, so I guess–
James Mwangi: Lindsay, and keeping with the investment theme.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Yes. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker: So you guys have said we need a new type of capital, a new model of capital to finance the green revolution in Africa and climate jobs. And so, as people, as the bridge to capital in America, what kind of capital do you need? And can we work together to create that model and bring that to the investors? Because I think they want to hear from you. We need a new type of capital. And if we could come together to create one or two models and bring that to funders, we’d love to support that.
James Mwangi: Probably something we’ll need to discuss here after, but what kind of capital? And the last comment to be brought into the room.
Emily Wanja: Yes, hello, everybody. My name is Emily Wanja from Nairobi, Kenya. I would like, friends, I would like to extend an invitation to work intentionally with storytellers. We need stories that are reflective of everything that I’m hearing here today, of our aspirations, of our innovation, our potential, our strength, and the best of us. And we need to take the members of the public with us.
So I would like to encourage us, reach us with a storyteller that you know, not just to promote our companies and our organizations. That’s important, and it has its place, but stories that speak to the people that we want to carry with us in these visions and this change that we aspire towards. So my invitation is let’s work with storytellers, because that way, we can capture this complexity that’s reflective of our culture, our spirituality, and our contribution with agency.
James Mwangi: Thank you, amen. And so, we are going to end this chapter of the story with one sentence from each of our panelists that they would want to leave you with. And I will start, Sellah, with you, so that I’m not accused of favoring Kenyans by giving them lots of time to prepare.
Sellah Bogonko: All right, my punchline from today, both from learning and hearing the echo in the room, is that I think the missing link is leadership, that glue that will bring all this together. We know what to do, but we need to be more deliberate about actually doing it and boldly so.
James Mwangi: Thank you, leadership.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah, affordable capital, smart capital. Philanthropy is great for developing markets where they don’t exist. Cheap debt helps with like working capital. Countries need cheap debt. There are many ways to do that. Someone asked about the type of capital guarantee. It’s really crazy how giving like first loss guarantee to like a bank allows them to lend at 10% instead of 36%. Like those are very simple things that like in philanthropy can do to be very helpful. Long-term equity. Like long-term equity for both countries and companies, like very patient, beyond the five years. Most important business is like, we have to exit in five years.
James Mwangi: Longer-term, patient, catalytic equity that’s comfortable with some risk.
Alloysius Attah: Yeah.
James Mwangi: Mayor Aki-Sawyerr.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Mm-hmm. I think bring everybody together. What’s going to stay in my head is the stone, the rocks, us all putting our hands together and making sure we’re pushing the rock together. But also, time is not on our side. A youth is not a youth forever. And we can’t afford for youth to pass by without the opportunities meeting them. So that’s our obligation.
My final plea, don’t always look at government as a negative. Look at it as an opportunity, something you can go into in order to make more of a difference. Scale is what matters. I don’t do pilots. I don’t want to hear about pilots. I want to hear about scale. I want to hear about scale.
James Mwangi: Amen. Scale, putting together. Iffy.
Ifeoma Malo: Everything they said. No, but seriously, for me, it’s build communities, stay in communities, and scale communities. And the way you do that is this young people that we’ve talked about all of today, after you have built with them, unleash them, set them free to go out and build more. Thank you.
James Mwangi: Thank you. And so, what I will close with is you’ve heard from the panel, you’ve heard the comments in the room. By the strength of the round of applause, later on, I want to hear how many people here believe that Africa’s youth are going to be the shock troops of saving the planet through climate positive growth? Thank you so much, all of you. It’s been such a privilege. And thank you all for being an excellent set of conversation partners. And thank you, we’re done.
Ifeoma Malo: Thank you, James.
