Episode 55 - The Continent of Potential with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji
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Today's show is a great reminder that Faith Driven Investing is not limited to North America, nor is it limited to any one part of the globe at all! And our guest today is living proof of that. If you've been following along with the show, you know that Africa has been a recurring theme, and it is again here today.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (or E, as he goes by) is an entrepreneur from Nigeria who has founded several startups—one of which received funding from Mark Zuckerberg and another which has processed over $1.2billion in transactions—all of which he's going to tell us about.
E is also a great example of why investors need to know about what's going on in the continent of Africa. Listen in to hear him tell you why.
Episode Transcript
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Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is a special episode for us. They all are. I know. But this is one where we get to say that Faith Driven Investor and of course, is not a North American thing only. In fact, of course, we think that some of the very best investment opportunities to participate in what God is doing in the world are overseas. And if you've been paying attention to this podcast over the course of the last several months, you'll know that I have a renewed interest in Africa. Sovereign's Capital has been an investor in Southeast Asia, which is very clearly not Africa, and the United States for a long time. But it was a trip that I made to Africa last summer, first time having been to East Africa in oh gosh, almost 40 years where I came to understand and just really impressed by the amount of economic development and the extent of the Christian community in Nairobi. I had spent quite a bit of time in South Africa over the last, say, 15 or 20 years. But God really pricked my heart, if you will, just led me into really being excited about the continent. And then I read this book called The Prosperity Paradox, written by Clayton Christensen, who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma. And his last book, right before he passed away was Prosperity Paradox, talking about the investment opportunities in Africa. And I'm looking through and I see that he's got two coauthors. One is the editor, the Harvard Business Review, and another one is a guy by the name of Efosa Ojomo. And as I'm reading this book on a plane, I'm thinking, oh, my goodness, I wonder if Efosa is a believer, if he's serious about his faith. And as it turns out, of course he is. And we had him on the podcast several months ago. He was a featured speaker at our Faith Driven Investor conference, and he was kind enough to introduce us to our podcast guests today.
And it is how we know him. He's got a much longer name that he'll share with us here in a second. But E Aboyeji has been identified by Efosa as one of the young leaders of tomorrow in Africa. And that's apropos because Africa is such a young continent with so much potential and really, from a demographic standpoint, has more people that are going to be entering the workforce over the next 20 years than the rest of the world combined. And so it's really something extraordinary when you consider the fact that India and China are not in Africa and South Africa is a continent that's on the rise. And as we just as I sit this kind of frame before we welcome to the program, I do think about this great presentation that Finny Kuruvilla gave at the Faith Driven Investor conference. And if you attended the conference, you'll know what I mean. If not, you'll see a link to the Finny presentation in upcoming newsletter. And when he talks about Christopher Columbus and he talks about the fact that as he went off and to sail into the new world, he did that with investment from not the Italians and not the French. No, of course, people in Argentina and in Mexico would be speaking Italian. Today, if he had been able to get his financing from Italy, his home country, but instead he got it from Spain and of course, the new world, speak Spanish. And it does make me wonder and hopefully will make us all wonder what might it look like if Faith Driven Investor us are the ones that come behind African entrepreneurs and African investors? What might the continent of Africa look like over the course the next 20 years? If Faith Driven Investor is more specifically, Christian investors are able to come alongside of bring an encouragement to the entrepreneurs and the building out of everything from infrastructure builds all the way through to software as a service and everything in between. So we're going to look at that and we're going to talk about the opportunity for that with E! Who is the founder of Future Africa. And welcome to a program on Africa. Thank you very much for being on the show.
E Aboyeji: Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.
Henry Kaestner: Well, as I mentioned before, we've had some episodes on the show dedicated to Africa and something we're going to be talking about a lot over the coming months as well. But before we do that, I want to get personal. I promise that you'd say you're much longer name and pronounce so perfectly, much better than I. But who are you? Where do you come from? What was it like growing up and going to school in Nigeria?
E Aboyeji: That's awesome. So my full name is actually Iyinoluwa. So it's like I am, you know, like I am. And it's not spelled that way. But basically, you know, when I moved to Canada High School my last year of high school and university, my teacher couldn't pronounce my name. So just started calling me E and that's been my name ever since. So you can just call me E and save yourself. Well, who am I? I mean, at the end of the day, I consider myself a child of promise. A child of grace, really. My parents were pastors. They were very big in the student movement, used to be called the SU movement scripture union movement back in the 70s and 80s. And so my parents basically were entirely committed to service of God for the longest time. My dad actually currently leads the Foursquare Church in Nigeria. It's a very popular global church. He leads the one in Nigeria specifically. And basically, I think, you know, one of the stories that my parents taught me was basically, look, what we heard from God when you were born was basically, you know, I will reward your faith when that's to me by giving you a son who will become a glory for me to the rest of the earth. So, I mean, that's kind of the prophetic quality that I operated, essentially, which is really about how do you give glory and honor back to God. Right. All the amazing things that he does, just as a matter of course. But by way of profile, I mean, I went to school in Nigeria. I had the pleasure of going to having an incredible education at a Catholic school achievement school, for that matter. And that really, really shaped the kind of person that I am today and what I consider useful for me to do with my time. And then after I graduated from high school and I was going to Anglican primary school, by the way, I went to university in Canada after I finished high school, did a gap year, went to university in Canada, University in Canada, went to a specific Catholic College of the university, even though it's a public university that's called St Jerome's University, so also a faith based university education. And then through that period, I mean, when I graduated, I had started a company. I graduated and immediately sold the company I was working on throughout my university education. I think from about the third year of my university education to the last year. I sold it year after I graduated. And then I moved back home because there was a lot of work that had to be done to rebuild the country and I felt called to do that work. So I went home. Even though most people tend to go the other way, people typically immigrate from Nigeria to Canada, not from Canada to Nigeria. But I went home and then, you know, I built a company that ended up morphing into Idella, which was a home run. And then I built another company called Flutterwave afterwards and then after basically retired from active entrepreneurship to become more of an investor. I thought that's what I'm focused on today.
Henry Kaestner: Tell us about some of these companies. Most, as I know Flutterwave, of course, Efosa had introduced me to it, but most of our listeners probably aren't familiar with some of these very successful startups that you've been involved with in Africa. Where are these companies? What do they do? What are they selling?
E Aboyeji: Absolutely. So with Andela, which was really the breakout startup I got involved in, what we did was we recognized very quickly that. Africa had a massive, you know, talent pipeline, and like you just said earlier, more than half of the world's working population is from Africa. It's going to come from Africa over the next 20 years. And we realized there was no dedicated system for identifying that talent and helping them grow to their full potential. So specifically, if you think about it, in the US, I think schools right. In India, you have I teach in China, you have the major university exam, which kind of distinguishes the most talented from everybody else and that, in fact, the most talented to help them get to wherever they need to be for the betterment of the country in Africa. I mean, you could have a very talented young man or woman hawking oranges in the street, which is just a travesty to, you know, what God has put in that young man or woman and what he expects of that young man or woman over the long term. So what we decided to do was we would identify exceptional young people who were extremely talented. We'll put them to a very high pressure training program over a period of four years during which after the first two years, they start to work for global technology companies from Nigeria. And then at the end of the four years, they kind of have the freedom to go work with other companies or build businesses or, you know, do whatever they like, really, after the four years is kind of like a pseudo university education, but extremely talented. And that's what we did. We built that business from 2014. It's still going strong today. We raised one hundred and eighty million dollars from all sorts of folks from Spark, which backed Twitter, to Mark Zuckerberg putting in some money as well. Al Gore also put his money and the business is very strong. I mean, last year you get about 50 million dollars revenue. We have about two thousand plus engineers on the platform and we serve roughly about two hundred technology companies from across Africa. So it's now expanded beyond Nigeria, where we started to. It's in Kenya. It's in Ghana. It's in Egypt. It's in Rwanda. It's in Uganda. So we've now expanded across multiple different African countries to bring things back to Nigeria a little bit.
Henry Kaestner: And I'm going to mention something. We're going to get out of the way because a number of American investors have been invited to participate in investment opportunities in Nigeria before. This is not the first time they've heard of it. And I'm going to presume that these are not ones that you would all endorse. Correct.
E Aboyeji: Which ones?
Henry Kaestner: Well, there are a number of you might know of the emails that will come in saying listen, I've got an opportunity for you in Nigeria where some money...
William Norvell: This is Henry asking if you are a Nigerian prince I think.
E Aboyeji: I am not a Nigerian prince. But, yes, I understand what you mean. But, yeah, basically, you know, I mean, the reality of those emails is that the screen and under utilization of talent, because those young people imagine what they could do if they knew there was a better way. You know what I mean? I mean, if they could figure out without infrastructure how to send emails like that that were just stupid. And to be honest, most people don't even open emails. So it's actually much harder work than most people give them credit for. Imagine if you could teach them how to do software. You can teach them how to do business or teach them how to be content with that same skill set. I mean, it's incredible. Yeah, that's what you see here in Nigeria.
Henry Kaestner: I think by 2050 it's going to be the sixth largest country in the world. Lagos is going to be a city of 32 million people. And I don't want to talk about just Africa, although the different investments that you're involved in are all over the country, as you just talked about. But they help us to understand Nigeria because it's a misunderstood country, obviously, one that has a whole lot of promise. Make the case for Nigeria, but help us to understand what Nigeria is about.
E Aboyeji: I think, you know, when you look at Nigeria, what you see is. What happens when a human being is actively denied the human dignity that God has given to them? Right. And there is almost like a concerted effort to drown your potential, right. Just keep it under, you know. Let me give you a picture about Nigeria. Nigeria was essentially created as a corporate entity. It's the first charter city in the world. Right. The Royal Niger Company arrives on the shores of Calabar. Right. And establishes itself and creates a protectorate from which it was supposed to be shipping all power and doing trade, ultimately kind of slavery, perverted that original purpose. And while the British government stopped it, a lot of people conspired to maintain the slave trade for way too long. I think according to some research, over a fifth of all the slaves in the world came from Nigeria. Right now, what has happened over the years is Nigeria has shown itself to be the best of black people and also some of the worst, as you can indicate by the emails that you see. Right. And what's the differentiating factor? What's the water column? The moment you get a Nigerian out of these circumstances and you put them in a position where you are valued for who they are as a human being and for the talents that God has given to them, it's life and death, right? The same group of people who can't get infrastructure right in Nigeria, the same country produced somebody like Occulus, who's the general partner of global infrastructure, is one of the largest infrastructure investors in the whole world. He owns Gatwick Airport, owns trains and all that. The same Nigeria that can't get the right kind of leadership, currently has a candidate in the running for the World Trade Organization and the person Engozi Okonjo-Iweala, right. And did an impressive job out of the other women and other leaders that have done impressive jobs all over the world.
Henry Kaestner: You know, I've heard, by the way, that of all the expat groups, the Belgians that have moved to the United States, the Swedes that have moved the United States, the Vietnamese, the Chinese of all the expat groups, the expat group that is doing the best in terms of earnings are the Nigerians.
E Aboyeji: This is very true. Very, very true. And so you can just see that contrast where it's usually like taking somebody like fish out of water. And look, I wouldn't believe it, Henry, if I hadn't seen it myself. So in our program, right, we get this young people and some of them were earning like maybe one hundred dollars, right. Hundred one hundred dollars a quarter. Right. We're just doing our jobs and all that stuff. In four years, some of them are earning one hundred thousand dollars a year. Right. Many of them have left the country, unfortunately. Right. Because they're just so wealthy and so well paid that it would be a security risk at the time, at least for them to continue to live in the circumstance. Exactly. But looking for better quality of life or maybe starting a family elsewhere. I mean, perception is reality. I'm here and I think I'm OK, but to each their own, you know what I mean? But that is the case for Nigeria. You know, it is just a country that's so full of exceptional talent that if you can just create the right kind of environment for that, I can only imagine how the world benefits from the presence of the people.
William Norvell: As you're telling that story, I can't help but think of the famous play, Les Miserable and Jean Valjean's character of, you know, someone who when he was given the opportunity, what he was able to do. Right when the priest gave him a small opportunity, something so small as grace and forgiveness and some seed money. If you look at it from an entrepreneur perspective and what he was able to turn that into in the lives he was able to change, including his own. And that story just rings as you're talking and so on, that I want to switch back to Andela a little bit. I think I can tell you're our first guest that's taken a big round of funding from Mark Zuckerberg that we've had. Tell us what that was like. How did you get his attention? How did that come about? What was it like working with him? What lessons did you learn sort of having him involved at that level? Walk us through that a little bit.
E Aboyeji: OK, I wish I had a more interesting story to tell, but for the most part, I mostly dealt with his money manager. And it wasn't just me, it was kind of me and my team. That said so the story around how we came together was, you know, we wrote an article myself and my co-founder, Jeremy Johnson, whose father, Marty Johnson, is another amazing social entrepreneur based out of Trenton, Near Princeton, New Jersey. We wrote an article about I think the article was, Will the next Mark Zuckerberg come from Africa? And we wrote an article just talking about what I just explained now. There's so much beyond energy and potential, this continent, but no one's interested in mining any of it, and the world needs more of these entrepreneurs that are going to change people's lives and bring people out of poverty and create all this microcredit for the patients. So how do we square this together? Well, we need to create these opportunities for young people so that they don't all devolve into violence of war and all these other evil. And they see the light that can come as a result of the creative power that got just passed through entrepreneurship. And that article, I think, got to him somehow because within The Wall Street Journal got to him somehow and he reached out to my co-founder and I started a conversation. And after that conversation, those other conversations, I met him once when he came to Nigeria. We showed him around the facilities and we had a town hall with a lot of young Nigerians. We also had a meeting with the president. So we met. But as you can expect, with a lot of this stuff, a whole bunch of our relationships, really to kind of his money management. But that said, you know, his investment really did bring an incredible amount of focus to Nigeria. And over the last you know, it's been four or five years since he visited. His visit has so transformed the landscape, you know what I mean? In Africa brought so much attention to what people are doing here that, you know, I would give him that credit, could really use him to put Africa on the spot, like, you know what I mean? Because he was a real validation, like if Mark Zuckerberg got on a plane to Nigeria then who the heck are you, you know what I mean? So that was that what it was.
William Norvell: That's amazing. It's an amazing story. I love the way you put that of how God uses people to shine lights on places that people aren't paying attention to. So that's amazing. And to transition a little bit, it sounds like that's where you're heading now in your career. Could you talk a little bit about the lessons you learned at Andela and Flutter Wave as well, but how you're transitioning those into an investor? Tell us a little bit about the vision for your investment fund and what do you hope to accomplish?
E Aboyeji: Absolutely. So, you know, when I was done with Andela, you know, I had a revelation on my 25th birthday. I was praying. I usually go and pray on my birthday. So I went to a secluded cabin and I was praying and fishing and, you know, literally Mark had just invested. And I heard a voice very clearly, basically your work here is done. And I'm like, wait, calm down, right, like he just invested was about to get really interesting. I can have a nice salary, maybe find a nice girl to marry. Let me just leave with a little bit of stability. It's like, no, the work is done. I have another assignment for you. And I went back really, really troubled and I wasn't sure what the assignment was. So I kept praying. And one day, you know, I had a friend who was a client of the company and there were only local client. So we never took local projects because for a whole bunch of reasons, including many times, I couldn't really afford to pay what foreign clientele will pay. And we really wanted to be able to pay well and give these people the kind of exposure that kept them right. So we didn't really take local clients out like Nigerian clients, but we took this one. And one day he reached out to me, asked for advice about how to build a company. And I was like, yes, I think about it is what I've learned. And he said, look, I'm going to have a meeting in Dubai. I don't mind paying for your ticket. Why don't you come with me? And I wasn't doing much at the time. I was technically already thinking what that message meant, business school. So I was starting to prepare to go out to business school and that just started as the journey with flutter waveh. And it became clear to me what it was, was we had built talent, but we had not built a way for that talent to be able to turn get talent into money, into something that you could actually live on. So what was happening was we would build talent. The talent would leave the country with new talent. The talent will go work for somebody else. But it could have become entrepreneurs because we had to build any platform that allows people who build software to be able to accept payments from all over the world. So that was what led me to flow. It was basically that realization that the job isn't done. We built the soundboard with the people. Right. And so that was basically how we got into Flutterwave. And I was there for two and a half years. It was very stressful because with flutterwave you were battling the depth of Nigeria's very corrupt financial system. I mean, the financial system in Nigeria. I don't mean this. I mean, it's just what it is. It was it was basically the foundations of the system is on a lot of blood. Like I told you, Nigeria was the original charter city, you know. So I think about all that money compounding over the years, blood, violence, money. It had a spiritual undertone to it. And I had to deal with that system and work through that system as a man of God and honest person every day. And that takes its toll on you. So when I left in twenty eighteen, I was just tired and I was like, I'm done with Nigeria, I'm moving to Fairfield, California, to be right next to Henry. I'm just kidding. So that was really what it was for me. And I was done. I wanted to be with my daughter and my wife and that was it. Right. We just got married. I was happy. But you know, I had I've lived in America for a long time. I've never had it as hard as I did in America those couple months. I felt like Jonah running away from Nineveh, you know, because I would open bank accounts and they would shut them down. You know, a lot of very weird things just happened. Right. And one day I was praying and I just heard a voice basically say, look, this place where you are is just not where I sent you. Right. Like, you have no ministry here. What are you going to do? Right. What are you going to do? You can't even find a church close to you. Right. You know, so just go home, go home and do the work. And the specific word was, I will preserve you. There's a person, Jeremiah where God says you know, I formed you. I created you and I formed you. And I sent you for specific purpose. Right. And I will preserve. And so that was the faith on which I basically decided right before covid broke out to just move back to Nigeria and take on this whole investing thing full time. Now, what are we doing now? What we're doing is we understand where the country is and where we go. And we understand very much like Efosa probably said on this podcast that we need more micro creative innovation in Africa to be able to drag Nigeria out of the doldrums of government failure and all that stuff and really get it to a solid spot where everybody has access to prosperity and purpose. Right. How do you ensure that all these young people that we just spoke about can live a life of prosperity and purpose? They can make money doing what they love or whatever God has called them. Right. And hopefully they love it.
Henry Kaestner: As you bring this up, this is the book title of what Efosa wrote with Clayton, some number of people have heard about the prosperity gospel has been just a type of theology that. Seems to be most prevalent in Africa, although it's not just Africa. It happens very much in the United States and it happens everywhere. Yeah, but to us, just a little bit about that, because some people hear, oh, Africa prosperity, you know, walk us through a little bit more about what you mean about prosperity and is there or do you see the prosperity gospel at work in Nigeria and maybe talk about some of how Faith Driven Entrepreneurship might be misunderstood or misapplied?
E Aboyeji: Yeah, I mean, I would say this much, right. Like the whole idea that God exists to meet your needs. And that's the reason why you should accept to it has an appeal in an environment where a lot of people are poor. And a lot of people are in need and they do need things, you know what I mean? So, sure. You know, if I come to you and tell you when you're poor and you need things that God is here to provide for your needs. Right. And that's all you hear, you know that God is bound to grow in leaps and bounds. But, you know, here's the thing, right? As an entrepreneur in this country, you don't have the same mechanisms as an entrepreneur in the US, just like every single thing is a struggle of faith and grace. You know, from getting a license to even getting your company incorporated, there's just so many things that can go wrong. I was trained this morning and I was thinking, God, we just had a little bit of unrest in Lagos and none of our portfolio companies were affected. That's a fair point. You know what I mean? That you don't have to worry about that in America because you've got insurance. But in my case, insurance by that actually paid, you know what I mean? So you're essentially working by fiat because you don't even have the infrastructure that folks on your side do. So I guess, you know, a lot of it is misunderstood because every action is an act of faith when you're an entrepreneur. That's right. So you really live and die by. But, you know, sometimes people might look at that and be like, you know, it's an offering and this and that. But, you know, at the end of the day, the principles of sowing and repeat become even more important. Can I just say this small story for me? It is a testament even for me, right? Because when I moved back, I started this other company and I lost all my money, basically because I didn't get the right on the treat approvals to do that business, which was basically selling online courses into universities. I didn't get the approvals, so I lost all my money. I had one hundred dollars left in the bank and on this day there was a preacher. I moved home. That was how bad it was. I moved back to my parents home after a very expensive foreign education. My parents were getting laughed at and there was a preacher who came and he ministered and had a world of knowledge which was basically, you know, you're basically down and out, right? You don't see a future for yourself. You have hundred dollars. You put it on the altar and lived there. And I did. And honestly speaking, since that time, I've just been like this. Right, just on an up and up. So I think it's really a very personal thing when it comes to prosperity gospel, because I think it's like sometimes deep acts of faith can be mistaken as just moneygrubbing. And I think this is where the spirit of the segment really plays a big role. Right. Because you've got to understand for yourself, you know, is this somebody I should be listening to? Because these are the end times and there'll be a lot of false prophets. But, you know, then you've got to listen for yourself. But I'll tell you, every entrepreneur I've spoken to in this country has a story like mine because it is a miracle to build things here. And that's what makes it fun.
Henry Kaestner: Tell us about kind of the infrastructure in the Faith Driven Investor community. Are there people of great faith that are investing back into the community. Generally is the capital that's being used to spur on faith driven entrepreneurs is it coming from Canada and the US? Is it coming from inside the country? Help us to understand the ecosystem?
E Aboyeji: So, yeah, I mean, there's some attempts, right? So for example, all and I think it's important to kind of understand the demographics of a country like Nigeria, like most people are building tech startups like me. Right. You know, most people are kind of doing they're penetrated or, you know, they're doing their, you know, like just small business and all that. And what's amazing about Nigeria is that the churches do aggregate their capital and try to be helpful to members who are trying to start up small businesses. I don't think they wrap their head around market creating innovation just yet. And I think I'm a little bit. But like, you know, you can expect that this company capital, my church has capital. We just try and just come together and support young entrepreneurs in our country who are, you know, trying to make a change in their lives and trying to do stuff. And sometimes we provide them our facilities, give them the ability to leverage it for other purposes during the week when we're not having a service. So I think there's some support and that's the level to which it is. What I'm really looking forward to is more participation in the. Innovation ecosystem, more building of platforms, more building of investment outcomes, and I think that's one of the areas where I think Faith Driven Investor I'll share this with my dad, you know, he's excited. He listens to it sometimes. And I think there's probably a community to build here because they are Faith Driven Investor us. But the bulk of the money in the system, like I said, is not necessarily driven by the same level of ethics. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of it may not be the kind of money, which is why we're very careful about who invests and who doesn't invest, particularly at specific levels. On the whole, you know, we think about ourselves as a service. So, you know, so long as we know they're not criminals, we do try and put their money where we can. But we are also very cognizant of the ethical considerations when it comes to backing businesses. Lots of great businesses that we see. And we refused to back because we just aren't convinced that they're actually good for people.
William Norvell: That's great. And I want to pull out one piece of what you said because I thought it was so profound. And, you know, maybe somebody listening needs to hear that at some level, too. When you talk about Andela at the peak of let's call it success, you heard God tell you your mission there was done. And that he had something else for you and you followed that. I just want to sit in that for a minute. That's very difficult. And just for you to sit with the Lord in a cabin and hear from him. And that is something that I think so many investors, so many entrepreneurs need to probably work more and myself included, into a habit of, you know, you can't be able to have that level of discernment unless you give the time to listen and to walk away.
E Aboyeji: In a place like Nigeria, you're walking through a minefield, right. Discernment is everything because you could take the wrong money, you could say the wrong word, you could literally, just innocently do the wrong thing, and it blows you up.
William Norvell: And to be in tune with the spirit every day is so key. I want to move to future Africa a little bit more, if you could take us a little deeper into that. So how are you helping people go on that trip? I mean, you've got such a gift of experience. How are you helping people, maybe specifically sort of walk through that? What types of investments are you making? What size investments are you making? What types of companies? And of course, ultimately, how could we get involved, have our audience get involved?
E Aboyeji: Absolutely. For me, you know, with future Africa, what we try to do is and, you know, actually the inspiration came from a verse where it said, the stone to builders rejected, will become the chief cornerstone. And so for us, the way we look at it is basically Africa has a lot of challenges. In fact, that might be the only thing that has talented people and challenges. And for us, our mission, our mission is how do you turn these challenges into incredible business opportunities? How do you turn the fact that Africa doesn't have a landline network that can serve millions of people into making it the biggest mobile phone market in the world? Because it's one thing that happened, the other thing would be unnecessary, and that's what we do every day. So we do that by connecting entrepreneurs and investors that are essentially turning Africa's biggest challenges into global business opportunities. One of the biggest challenges, these capital, but is also a need for a lot of coaching, supporting entrepreneurs, helping them try and make new mistakes, not the ones you've already made, and then building communities around them that can support them and give them access and give them opportunity wherever it's necessary. So that's the work that we do at the fund. We basically identify ourselves incredibly. Our problems help them train those problems, those solutions into global opportunities, and then kind of marry the two together. By leveraging our capital coaching and our community. We focus on four sectors right now. So technology and talent, infrastructure, media and the environment. So just to give you a sense, you know, technology and talent, like you were talking a lot about applied research. So someone does something really cool in a lab somewhere. I want to take it out and help it scale infrastructure. It's hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure. So hard infrastructure. We're building a city right somewhere in southern Nigeria. In Lagos, we're building a cable car system because there's no subway. That's not going to work. Right. So we have to build in the cable car system that employs people around. Media. We invest in new forms of media that can keep business owners and government officials informed because we invest in new forms of youth, media, youth focused media. We're buying a radio station, stuff like that. Then we have the environment, which is how do you do better on sustainable agriculture? You know, we are a nation of smallholder farmers. We don't have plantations, we don't have big commercial farms. And we don't think we can because, you know, land is so cultural, so traditionally out, you know, in small families. So you can't really have that culture of a big plantation with lots of people because this is not how the country works. So how do you make that sustainable for people to continue to live that way despite the challenges with economies of scale? So that's what we do on a day to day. We certainly see investment opportunities in those areas. We such that present them to our community of investors. And if you want to join, it's really simple just for a future that Africa's collective you fill out a form as an investor and then we reach out to you and send you a nice email. Thank you for joining us. All we do we don't take fees, but we take a thousand dollar membership fee a year, but we don't take like a typical two percent. Or a 20 percent cut. So when your investment is realized, we will wait for you to get back to capital and then we take a 20 percent target on that. So that's how it works.
William Norvell: Super, super helpful. Thank you for walking through that. And I'm sure we'll link to that in the show notes as well. People want to jump in and go deeper there. And as we unfortunately have to come to a close with our show, we love to invite our guest into a couple of things to share with our listeners. First of all, we would love to know where God has you in his word. What may be inspiring you today could be something you've been meditating on for a while, could be something he spoke to you this morning. And then second, if you could just share how our listeners could be praying for you and the work gods called you to do.
E Aboyeji: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I'm going through a really, really interesting time. And I'm just glad because the joy of the Lord is really our strength. You know, I don't know how many of you know what's going on in Nigeria, but, you know, we've had an incredible couple of weeks because the young people have been demanding from the government for the last four years that the government stop police brutality.
I've been a victim myself of police brutality. Young people in my network have been victims of police brutality. And many times we have to rescue ourselves, by paying the police, if you can believe that it kind of let us go for doing nothing, right. And, you know, young people have been asking for a long time. You know, it hasn't been working. So all of a sudden that was kind of a number of deaths associated with police brutality, very similar to what happened to us. And there was a big peaceful protest for 10 days. And then, you know, as the devil often does on the last day of the protests, right before it was supposed to be called off. There was one last protest and some young people went to it and they were shot by the military and then the whole place erupted. There were looting, those fighting those all sorts of a lot of people have broken.
And I think really like where the country is. It's an interesting moment because on the one hand, you know, this was a watershed moment for young people demanding to be treated with dignity. Right. Which is something that the country never really mastered. But on the other hand, there's all this pain of losing people and property and lives and families being torn apart because of this demand, which is. Right. Right. And so I think for me, I've just been learning how to mourn that. And, you know, I write on this verse in Revalation, 21:4, when I had to speak to my team about the issues. I need a bunch of young people in prayer about the issues. And the verse basically says, and the Lord will wipe every tip from our eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. But this was the part that really got to me and I'd never seen it before, even though I read it so many times. It says there will be no more death or mourning, when the old order of things has passed away. And, you know, normally when I read this first, I'm thinking about the order of things as like. You know, eventually when Jesus comes back for us all and we go up into heaven.
But I never occurred to me that the work that we do is shifting the old order. Right. The work that we do is essentially making way for this new order where there is peace and people are joyful and people that live in impactful lives and people will have prosperity and purpose. Right. So I don't know. That gave me a jolt in the arm that I needed because it's really hard to tell a bunch of 20 something year olds that, look, folks died and there might be nothing you can do about it because we can't go the violent route. So you just kind of you know, it's very hard. Right. But, you know, it was like, look, we got to work for change. We got to work for change our way because this morning and crying and that is all part of the old order. We got to work for a day when there's joy, dancing and rejoicing and newness. Right in whatever it is thatat we do. So I mean, that's just what God has been kind of laid on my heart the last couple of days.
Henry Kaestner: Thank you. That's a great perspective into a country that not a lot of us have access to. And yet it's a really important one, I think, strategically for investors that are looking to benefit from a growing market. And I think that that's what we all look at. We all wonder most of us aren't old enough to have been able to invest early on in the early days of the Asian tigers. And yet people who did did remarkably well. When we look at the demographics in Africa, there's so much that lines up to really think about population expansion and just innovation and Africa's ability to leapfrog, as you're talking about, over more traditional technologies. You're talking about telecom. Was it looked like you just leap out and leapfrog ahead into the next generation of communication. So much that's going to happen in Africa. And, of course, what a role for Faith Driven Investor, because not only do we see an opportunity to be able to make an investment into a green space, but we have an opportunity because of our belief that transformation happens in a marketplace to be able to do that in a way that's got honoring and to think about coming alongside Faith Driven Entrepreneur so that everybody in Africa speaks Italian, so to speak. Back. tothe Columbus analogy, right? For a faith driven entrepreneurs coming out, rather than having to go out and get capital from the Spanish, they might get some backing from the Italians. And what does that look like? A Faith Driven Investor and Faith Driven Entrepreneur team up with just a goal to to bring healing and restoration, to solve problems, lean into opportunities and to thrive and flourish towards that prosperity that brings people closer to knowing God. So what a great leader to take us through that. Thank you for that. And may God bless you. I look forward to meeting you on the ground in Lagos.
E Aboyeji: Same. Amen. Thank you so much.