Episode 30 - Faith Driven Investing in Africa with Sid Mofya
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One of the things we love about the Faith Driven Investor movement is that it isn’t limited to just one corner of the globe, rather there are faithful men and women all around the world letting their faith guide their investing.
One of those people is Sid Mofya. Sid helps steward the Draper Venture Network, a global alliance of over 20 independent venture capital firms investing in outstanding entrepreneurs across the globe.
Their team is the coordination hub for the collaboration between the funds and provides post-investment support to a portfolio of over 800 companies. His insight on investing is Africa is one you won’t want to miss.
Episode Transcript
Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
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Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven investor podcast. We've got a special guest with us today, Sid Mofya. Sid, am I anywhere close to the pronunciation of your last name?
Sid Mofya: You're as good as it gets.
Henry Kaestner: Which means not exactly. Didn't completely get it. But I met Sid through a friend, maybe nine or 10 months ago and connected with him. And if I'm honest, I didn't know much about the country that he hails from Zambia. I surely had never heard of the Zambian kwacha, which is their unit of currency. But it seems that since I met Sid everybody I meet and that's an exaggeration, of course, has something to do with Zambia. And so we're actually getting ready to make our first of investment out of our family to Zambia. I've been meeting people in ministry in Zambia and now I can point it out on a map, and I'm very proud of myself for that. But Sid one of the things we're trying to do in getting the background of every one of our guests is to understand where they hail from, what formed them. And we've got a unique opportunity with you before we get into what you're doing at Draper to understand this country of Zambia. What's unique about it?
Sid Mofya: Great question. It's great to be here. Thank you so much. So I was born in Zambia in the late 70s. And I say the time because it's about 20 years after Zambia had been independent from the British and after the British had been basically ruling Zambia for, I guess, close to hundred years, depending where you come from. So I was growing up in effectively post-colonial Zambia. So I grew up in a small town, which was a mining town. We mined copper and that's the main product that comes out of Zambia and that's the mainstay of the Zambian economy. My parents both worked for the mining company there. I went to the mine school and my whole schooling in Zambia was through the schools that were put on by the mines to train more Zambians to come and work for the mines. So that, for me, meant I got a better education than the regular person who went to a government school because that those schools were well resourced. So I grew up speaking both English and my local language, and I think in both languages. I'm one of four children. I'm the oldest of four. And all my brothers and sisters also went through that whole school system in terms of how we grew up. I guess our parents were, I would say, middle class. So they had decent jobs. They lived in a decent neighborhood. But Zambia is a poor country. It's at least in living memory has always been a poor country. Lots of infrastructure gaps that need to be filled.
And when I was a kid, I felt that because there was I think when I was about 10 and I didn't know this is what was happening, but the government had defaulted on some big debt. No, you don't do that. And there was a time when everybody around us. My friend's parents were losing their jobs. And my biggest fear was that my parents would lose their jobs and then we would have to move from our house and go live somewhere else. It didn't happen, thankfully, but I remember that time being a very difficult time for just getting the basics like sugar and salt and so on and having to line up the big, long lines to try to get those basics. And then we kind of got out of that. And since then, it's been a period of growth for the country. There's still a lot of gaps to fill, but there has been a tremendous amount of growth in the last thirty years. And if you go to Zambia now, it looks a different place to what you'd have seen in, say, the 80s.
So that's kind of where I grew up up until college age and then I left Zambia and went to the UK again. I was privileged to have a scholarship from the mining company to go and study in the UK, went and studied chemical engineering. And the goal was for me to come back and work for the mining company. But while I was in the UK, the mining company was actually sold to a different owner. And the new owners did not want anything to do with the people that they are paid for to study. So I got a free pass to then go to a lot of different things, which I've been doing since.
Henry Kaestner: So you could've been working in the mines now?
Sid Mofya: Absolutely. Yeah, that was my destiny.
Henry Kaestner: More proof that God loves you. I know. Presumably there are lots of great careers in the mines, but the mines losses clearly are...I want to get back to Africa here in a bit because that's been much of what you and I have talked about in the past. But fast forward, if you will. What do you do right now? Tell us about the Draper venture network, because actually that doesn't have a lot to do with Africa necessarily. But once you explain what you do right now for your day job and then let's let's talk more about that and let's talk more about Africa.
Sid Mofya: So I work for an organization called the Draper Venture Network. It's a pretty unique organization in the venture capital ecosystem, because what we are is an alliance of different firms around the world that are all investing in early stage technology companies. So we have currently I think it's 20 for now. We brought on some new funds, funds that are investing all the way from seed stage through late stage venture capital. They all have their own investment thesis.
They invest independently, but they are part of an alliance that looks, I guess, similar to the airline alliances where, you know, sensitive times we talk about airlines, but, you know, the airline alliances, those shared codes, they'll share assets, but they are still independent companies. They have their own key now and we're similar. So I work for the team that's based in Silicon Valley that basically coordinates collaboration between all these different funds.
Henry Kaestner: And so there are advantages of some of these small firms getting together and some of medium size. But in terms of technical expertize or relationships or deal flow, it tell us more about what it advantage is when you're part of that larger network.
Sid Mofya: Yeah. So the big reason that smaller funds, for example, would join is because the bigger funds and the whole network as a whole provides them a stronger connectivity to the centers that they want to be connected to. So, for example, as part of my job, I spend quite a bit of time in Silicon Valley talking to large corporations that either are native to Silicon Valley or have set up operations in Silicon Valley with the goal of working closer with the technology ecosystem. So they have people whose job it is to go find companies to invest in or do pilots with so they can learn more about where are the next threats coming from. So I build relationships with these folks and then these relationships become our network relationships. So a small fund in, say, Chile doesn't need to do that because the network has those relationships and because the network has a big critical mass of relationships we had where attractive to the corporations for wanting to work with us, because when they're looking for solutions, they can come to an organization like us that has thousands of companies that we're invested in globally.
Henry Kaestner: So you're working with, say, a venture fund that's in Chile. And they've found brilliant young entrepreneur who's invest in storage devices. But because they're in Chile and while there's a lot of great commerce going on in Santiago, it's not Silicon Valley. They call you and say, we've got this new investment and they could benefit from getting some counsel. They could benefit from having maybe some supplier relationships. And then you go to work for them.
Sid Mofya: Yes, absolutely. So we would plug the entrepreneur into our portal, which has all the information that we have access to. So it shows them all the people that we know that we can connect them to. It shows them resources that we negotiated on behalf of our entrepreneurs for them to be able to get no preferential prices on some of the things that they need for their business. And it gives them a way to connect with other entrepreneurs in our network. And the fund or the company can call us at any time and say, hey, I'm looking for a connection at company X. Do you know anybody? Can you help to connect us? And we do that.
Henry Kaestner: Got it. Do you ever share deal flow? You know, when I think about running a venture fund, the most important thing for somebody running to fund isn't fund raising, is not negotiating the deal. It's not LP. All those things are important. The most important thing is really getting deal flow. If you can get great deal flow, all the other things seem to happen. Do you ever have some of your member funds who say, gosh, I got this interesting article or came across this and it's not really in our space, but maybe somebody else in the network has some expertize here?
Sid Mofya: Yeah, absolutely. We do that quite a lot actually, and we do syndications among the network members. So there are two types of sharing deal flow. This is not a fit for me, but it could be a good fit for somebody else to share that deal. Or this is a fit for me. But I really want to bring on other network funds to invest with. And we do both of those with the kind of co investing. Sometimes it's limited by geography because our funds, each of our funds, has a geographic footprint. And so it depends on the company. And, you know, whether, you know, if it's a Singapore company, which you may or may not be interested unless that companies may be doing business in Chile. So there's all these combinations and sometimes, you know, lightning strikes and we get more funds investing together.
Henry Kaestner: OK. So I want to go back to Africa. But before I do that, I know you well enough to know that you're really motivated by your Christian faith. And clearly that has applications in some of the things that we've talked about in Africa. But how do you see your faith manifests itself in the work that you do right now at Draper?
Sid Mofya: Good question. I think for me, it's. More how I do my work. My approach to my work.
Henry Kaestner: Tell me more about that. What does that mean?
Sid Mofya: I think for me it means I wanted to do well by people. So the people that I work with, I'll make promises that I keep. Yeah, I will try to do my best. Yeah. Basically trying to be a good person. And I'm not sure I don't do it all the time, but that's my goal. I really kind of go into relationships with trust. Trusting the other person to hold their end of the bargain. And sometimes that doesn't pay off. But I think I'm naive like that.
Henry Kaestner: So you're in a space you're in Silicon Valley where I characterize this particular geography as having a God complex. There's this famous scene, by the way, for our listeners from the movie Malice, where Alec Baldwin talks about this God complex, your back on vid clips or YouTube, and you'll find out. But when firms out here are working on things like Khalikov, the initiative to end longevity or we're talking about sending people to Mars or we're talking about hyper loops or all these different things, or quantum computing, you know, just amazing the strides that are being made in technology, those that are in it can almost get a God complex, especially entering longevity. This last final frontier between us in immortality. Do you get that feeling that Silicon Valley is a godless economy or do you get a sense that God is at work and are you hopeful? Tell me about your experiences, as a Christ-follower and investor in this kind of larger ecosystem?
Sid Mofya: I think God's at work, even in people that do not profess God. You know, anybody who sets out to try and find an all time cure for cancer, in my mind is doing God's work. Whether they say I am doing this because God told me to do it or I am doing it because I want people to be healed of cancer or even if they say I'm doing it because I want to make a lot of money. I believe God is at work in all of that because I think God is so brilliant and works in all those situations.
Henry Kaestner: I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I found another guy that's living out here and trying to process it. You know, I think that's actually a really interesting take. I go on runs in the morning and increasingly I've been listening to books on audible, on articles and things like that. But right now I'm reading or listening to the book. The Future Is Faster Than You Think. By Peter Diamandis. And he's got a coauthor whose name I can't think of right now. But he also wrote Bold in Abundance. And Reading and Listen to these things gives me the sense of just the amazing work that is being done. And a lot of times people aren't giving credit to the author of all these things and seeing how God is at work in this technology. And I get a lot of sense of that in Peter, his work in particularly as we talked about how he spends a lot of time talking about Chalco. One of the things that I was really interested in that got me on a run yesterday was talking about in 1844 when Samuel Morse invented the Telegraph. And the first words that were broadcast over the telegraph wire were, what hath God wrought?
Which does speak to this concept that you're talking about, of course, which is God using us to accomplish his work for his aims. And as you have this broader sense of where he's working and what is the meaning of all these things, I think that the scientists out here are increasingly saying, you know, everything can't be explained by science. Actually, the more complex things get, they actually speak to something greater than just a finished. Kind of like walking out of the ocean. There's something more at play here. And what is it about the human brain that is uniquely human? And how did it happen? So I'm getting my sense when I'm talking to folks that they're starting, even though they're actually answering all these questions and kind of confronting these final frontiers. They're also, at the same time, more open to faith. And there have been and that's why you see these emergence of faith driven employee resource groups, which, by and large, if from Apple, didn't really exist out here until two or three years ago. But now you're going to Google. You got them a Facebook, you got them a salesforce and Intuit. I understand that they're doing praise and worship music in the Dropbox lunchrooms on Fridays. So I'm hopeful, as you are at seeing God work through all of these things. And I think that more and more people are trying to understand how is he working and investigating the faith in it, maybe for the first time in a long time. People in Silicon Valley, as they're inventing or understand, they're really co creating and are open to what does it all mean? So, okay, let's get back to Africa. You and I connected over Africa with this heart towards faith driven investing. What does it look like when we as investors might understand we can participate in the work that God is doing in the world, bringing about his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven? Some of those things that we're seeing maybe in so many technologies. But how does that work in a continent that is going to count for more job creation and growth than any other place in the world, more than India and China combined over the next 20 years? My hope is that as the listeners podcast will say, gosh, you know, Africa seems like it's very far away. It is. And yet there's so much hope and so much potential and our sense that I got from some of conversations before that. You also have a hopeful expectancy of what is it look like to invest in a ecosystem and entrepreneurial ecosystem providing capital, but also hope through a hope in jesus. Talk to me a little bit about that. And how much of you is still in Africa and how much of your hope and your spirit is still there and what are your hopes for the continent?
Sid Mofya: Well, what a big question. A lot of me is still in Africa and I still do quite a bit of work with folks that are working in Africa, mostly from a distance that I work with an organization called Lions Africa, whose main task is to bring exposure to ways to give investors exposure to African entrepreneurs for them to see what's happening. So they host an Africa wide competition which results in 30 finalists, and then a big conference to have those finalists present and then choose five winners and then bring those five winners to Silicon Valley to basically go tour everything. Google, Dropbox, they come to our Draper offices and they get exposure to how entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are working and those entrepreneurs get mentorship. So that's kind of one way of connecting the ecosystems.
I also work with a venture fund called CRC Venture Capital. So I'm an investor and an advisor to the fund. And CRT in venture capital is one of the leading lights as far as early stage investing in Africa goes. So they invest very early stage seed stage and series A companies and some of the tech successes to come out of Africa. Companies like Andela, you might have heard about who are training young great Africans to be developers for large Fortune 500 conglomerates, but still based in Africa and every, you know, a lot of money. And I think they've given the Proofpoint that there's potential for building companies in Africa that can compete at a global level by tapping into the African human capacity. Another company that Sciarra invested in is a company called CPS in South Africa who are similar to Thumbtack, but specifically for domestic work. So it's connecting homes to domestic workforce and they've created 15000 jobs with that company. So, you know, things like that give me hope that, you know, entrepreneurs who apply themselves and work with others, they can do pretty remarkable things. I also work with a fund in Zambia called the Kaleena Education. And this one is a play on microfinance. So the question is, can we use microfinance to fund education and have like an insurance kind of a product which helps families manage their cash flow so that typically in Zambia and many other African countries, school fees are paid on a three monthly or semiannual basis. And typically, for most households, they're living hand to mouth.
But they. So even when they have enough cash overall to pay for the school fees, the cash doesn't flow at the right time. And this creates an insurance like product so they can manage their cash flow and pay for the school fees for their children without having to worry about it. So that's an experiment to see if something like this could work. And I know the entrepreneur is doing that, actually went to school with him and is a brilliant entrepreneur. So I have a lot of hope. I guess the flip side of that is I have hope in the human capital that's available in Africa. And you alluded to that this is where most of the jobs in the world are going to come from. The flip side of it is that the infrastructure lags everything from, you know, just roads and health care, infrastructure, financial infrastructure, even, you know, to support all these businesses.
That's lagging. And that's where I think connecting capital that can help develop that is really key. And I think for investors that are thinking about Africa, I think that's an interesting place to be investing in. I would say if you're looking at investing in the continent as a small to medium size investor, move towards infrastructure, you know, build factories. Because when you build a factory, factory means roads. Factory means power systems. Factory means the water systems being built around that. And that builds an ecosystem around them. But not only that, it also builds the capacity for value creation to remain in the country instead of going outside. You know, typically for the African countries that are creating raw materials that they export. We capture, I think, 10 percent as generous of the value generated by that industry. You know, for example, the chocolate industry is 100 billion.
And I think the African countries that export cocoa don't make five billion from the exports. So there's a ton of value that's simply being exported. But an investor who brings that value creation and keeps it in the country. That's huge things for the economies. I think I kind of went on a wondering.
Henry Kaestner: Well, not at all. And I have no idea what question I ask, but I really like where you're going. Because when we think about when you get to experience with this, of course, by being associate with the mining industry in a country where mining has been a big deal. Mines have traditionally been thought of as exploitative. And with this new wave of investment, it is interesting to think about, well, what is a redemptive lens for the guys from Praxis that I'm such a big fans of? Talk about a redemptive lens to investing. What's a redemptive lens toward putting an investment capital to work? And your suggestion here is that something as basic as factories. So a lot of us in Africa that are thinking about being serious about investments, think about this whole concept of leapfrogging, leapfrogging over the traditional telecom infrastructure into mobile and thinking about how Safaricom got started in mobile payments and things like that. And yet you're suggesting something that I don't think a lot of us have thought about, which is, yes, there's probably opportunity jump for 100 years and think about software as a service and how the digitization of the economy is going to matter in places like Africa. But let's not lose sight of the fact that we need to have roads and electricity in a way to think through redemptive investing is something as basic as a factory that spins out chocolate bars that are fully wrapped and branded and put in a case and then delivered right to the market in London or New Yorker or San Francisco. And so I hadn't thought a lot about that. I think that that's super interesting.
Sid Mofya: Yeah. And the other thing that that does for an economy is bring control in the economy. So right now, a lot of the African countries, you know, they go where the wind goes and there's very little control in determining. So what do we do with our resources? So what tends to speak is the money. So the money says, oh, you should just keep digging and keep digging. But if we have agency, then we would say, no, we're not going to dig some more. We need to preserve this for our children. But right now, there's not a lot of agency, but something like that brings a lot of agency, which in turn, you know, circles back to governance and all that, all those good things that. We weren't on the continent.
Henry Kaestner: So a lot of people, when they think about investing in Africa, they think about South Africa or they think about some places in maybe North Africa. My heart's been drawn to East Africa and South East Africa or Zambia's. And I love for you to comment just a bit about what that region looks like. I see each of those different countries having its own type of economy, own type of system. There seem to be some things that have worked well in Kenya. I wouldn't say it's the be all and end all. And yet some things seem to work there and other things don't work in other places. In Rwanda, of course, they had a genocide and yet there seems to be some stability coming out of that. Was it that makes different countries work or not work in Africa? And if we're thinking about the larger geopolitical context, what needs to happen in order for there to be joint progress?
Sid Mofya: I guess there's several things that immediately come to mind. And I just mentioned them now so that I remember to come back to them. One is leadership. One is geographical integration. And the third is probably education from a leadership point of view. It's pretty clear that countries that have had strong leadership towards growing economically and Rwanda is a good example. Kenya is actually a good example as well. They have grown leaps and bounds because they've strengthened governance. Then when the government is strengthened, I think the human capacity is amazing. Amazingly resilient entrepreneurs, they work hard after they've been living in the UK and they returned to Africa. We were living in Tanzania. I would go to the big open air market and I would just go speak with people because I just wanted to know, you know, what's the entrepreneur locally about? What do they think about what are they concerned about? And I'd go to the open air market at this point. I'd learned enough Swahili that I could pass as a local person and I'd go speak, just ask questions. What do you do? How long have you been doing it? And it quickly became apparent I had gone with that initially with a little bit of a savior complex. You know, I've learned lots of things that I'm going to come and work with entrepreneurs and teach them.
And I quickly learned. There is very little teaching you can do with somebody who actually understands the lay of the land that are playing in very, very well. And I quickly learned, well, I don't have a lot to teach. There may be some things that, you know, I could help with, but not a lot. You're smart, you're driven and you work so hard.
There's really no big difference between you and an entrepreneur elsewhere that I've seen in other places that I've lived, except you're working with different cards that you've been dealt. And part of that is governance, which allows the entrepreneur to then be able to raise capital and know that, you know, they'll be able to pay that capital back. And the financial infrastructure allows them to basically operate a business. But that is lacking. And in countries where that has been built, Rwanda has done a lot. And, you know, you can argue about whether or not Kaigama style is good or bad. I think net net, it's good because basically it drives the economy to a goal. He has a goal and he drives great grades towards it and he unites previously fighting parties towards that goal.
So that's governance. The second thing was geographical integration. And so each of the African countries are generally small countries, small economies. So Zambia. Twelve million people. Zimbabwe, about the same. Tanzania is bigger, 45 million people. Kenya, I think, is about 30 million. So they are reasonably small economies. So, you know, GDP per capita across the sub-Saharan subcontinent is about fifteen hundred dollars a year. So there are small, small economies. And what tends to happen is. There's a lot of trade happening within the country, but not a lot of cross-border trade, even between Zambian, say, Tanzania, which has no good road connection.
There is some, but not a lot, you know, compared to other economies like Europe, at least before Brexit, but probably still even now. But, you know, I think it's something like 70 percent of GDP that comes from cross country trade. In Europe vs. 10 percent, I'm not sure of the number, but it's really, really low in sub-Saharan Africa. So there's a big opportunity there with just the countries working together or folks creating companies that are geography agnostic and can work across different borders. An example of a company like that is one that CRC actually invested in called Floods Away and Fuddle Wave is an integrator.
So they're a glue. So if you're a developer in Kenya, you can have somebody in Kazakhstan paid by connecting their payment system to your payment system in Kenya. So they basically pull up all these different payment systems and create a glue which allows all that all those transactions to happen. So the more we can see companies like that and the more we can have the geographical integration between the countries to allow freer movement of goods and services across the borders. And that's going to be huge.
Henry Kaestner: So you mentioned something there that I want to campaign on a little is the savior complex. Many of our listeners are familiar with a book that Brian Fikkert wrote. That's called When Helping Hurts. I think a corollary to that might be when investing hurts. You're an investor in Africa. And Dallah, you've come across a lot of folks in America that would like to invest in Africa, too. What are some of the mistakes that are made there? And what counsel would you give to a faith driven investor that might be listeners podcast who wants to get involved in Africa?
Sid Mofya: I think some of the mistakes are thinking that Africa, or at least the economics in Africa are the same as the economics they understand so well in the economy that they work in.
Henry Kaestner: Give me some examples of that. Like somebody comes in from America and just assumes that it must work like this, but in Africa actually works different. Can you think of any examples?
Sid Mofya: So say you have, let's say, a factory that's not performing well. And you have 4000 employees at that factory. And efficiency is not that high. You know, in the 40 percent efficiency, capital efficiency or operational efficiency. And you can see as an investor that just cutting the workforce in half will. Improve efficiency to the point where the company will be solvent.
And that might work elsewhere. I mean, I think it's tough even in Western economies to do that. But it's tougher, even more so in Africa, especially if you factor in the fact that most people in Africa are not formally employed. Most people are running their own businesses. So if you have a factory that employs 4000 people, you're probably accounting for eight to ten thousand entrepreneurs that are working with that factory, their suppliers to that family, their contractors and so on. And each of those employees that you have is accounting for another 10 people in their household. So the decision is a bit more complex than just saying will improve efficiency by reducing our workforce by two thousand or by half or whatever. So I think trying to get to the root of the complexity of the decision making would be helpful. And that takes time and spending time with local people to really, really understand what is going on. The other confounding factor with those kinds of decisions is as Africans and I'm speaking as an African, we have incredible resilience and incredible flexibility.
And I also have to say, quite honestly, a lot of the times we don't feel we have agency in a decision that is being made. And so if the investor says, well, this is what we have to do, they may not get the feedback. If they don't dig deep enough, that tells them you've missed some major factor for your decision and I think your decision is wrong. So decision making, I would say, you know, have a good number of Africans and a good number of Africans that are willing to tell you the truth. And part of that is with time and training and with communication, they become comfortable doing that because sometimes the risk of telling the truth is so high that it's like, OK, now that's the decision.
Henry Kaestner: So I've seen that I went to a seminar that we did on Faith Driven Entrepreneur ship and future of universities. Two days in the Fairview Hotel in Nairobi is awesome if you ever do a conference, by the way. And we had a number of Africans that were there, but we also had a number of folks from America and Europe. And for maybe the first day or so, the conversation was erroneously focused on the Westerners who had different ideas trying to figure out how to deploy capital. And it wasn't embarrassingly until the beginning part of the second day, we said, hey, let's actually check in here. We've been involving Africans in the conversations, but we had thought that some of their silence on different things meant that they thought the ideas were good. And it wasn't till I said, listen, before we go any further, let's make absolutely sure. And then we were also present. He said, actually, there's three other ideas that you may have thought we thought were good are actually terrible and horrible, and here's why. But we had to really work on extracting that. Whereas a Westerner might otherwise, you know, just take by the fact that people are nodding their heads as they must. And so I've experienced that. So I want to ask you about this other dynamic that you talk about and just wonder if there's an inherent conflict in that which is so you have a factory that's not performing well in the West. We might go ahead and say, how do we think about streamlining this? How do we get more efficiency? How do we work in more automation in that the end result of if that implementation is done well is more efficient. Deployment of capital mean more innovation, more creativity, maybe more market validation in the economic divide which goes on. If in Africa. So much of the informal economy is there's more than just the two thousand players in the factory. There's all these other people. How does a factory owner in then in this type of conversation with investor? How does an investor in their factory acknowledge the informal work force and engage them, enfranchise them more earlier on? Because maybe there is a special thing there to harness that maybe make an advantage, because otherwise, if you say, well, you can't lay off some people, you can't find efficiencies in their factory, then theoretically then African factories won't compete on the world stage because they're never made more efficient. So you must have to you know, can you do a jujitsu move with that whole thing that you think would be this elephant on your back of all this informal workforce? Can you turn that into an asset?
Sid Mofya: That's a great question. And I think one that companies are trying to grapple with. I think that's the way forward. I don't know the answer. And I'm certainly not saying we cannot look for efficiencies and find efficiencies. I think we have to. I think what I'm saying is the answer might be different, too. Hey, I've seen the numbers for the workforce efficiency, so let's go there.
Henry Kaestner: OK, so I want to stop here in light of the most recent conversation and say I've been asking a lot of the questions so far. Hopefully you've gotten to know me well enough to know that I really actually do have a desire that I think that guy is put in to be involved in the African continent. But there's a very good question, just like at the Fairview Hotel, that I'm asking the wrong questions. Where I'm thinking about the wrong way. So let me stop. What are the right questions. How should we be thinking about it? What might I have missed? What might our listeners have missed?
Sid Mofya: Yeah, I think. Your willingness to engage with some of the difficult, intractable questions that we haven't found answers with. That's probably what we need more investors to be doing. Just an ability to just slow down and say, well, is there more that I'm not seeing here? You know, as you're making your investments in Africa, I think that's a great approach. Is there more that I'm not seeing? Because it tends to be more that we're not seeing.
Henry Kaestner: Thank you. OK. What in your quiet time or your devotions? Time reading God's word. What are you feeling that God is speaking to you about now? And it could be in a Bible. So you've done recently. Maybe it's in your time with the Bible this morning and maybe last week. What are you getting a sense that God is talking to you about right now?
Sid Mofya: Now, I think for me, the biggest thing right now is. Time and the battling of time. So our daughter was born a month ago. And that brings a very sharp focus on time and attention. One of my focus in my time on I tend to be the kind of person that wants to do everything.
And I can't I focus on the very few important things and for a time, you know, I just finished my paternity leave and that month just went by so quickly and could easily have been six months on paternity leave. But really just valuing those moments and that time with her and with my family, there's nothing more important.
Henry Kaestner: Hmm. Thank you Sid it's been great being with you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your investment in our relationship. As we try to wade into that awesome content. Thank you for introducing me to the country of Zambia. And God bless you and looking for your next conversation.
Sid Mofya: Thank you for having me. Great to chat with you.