Episode 93 - Sparking Global Change Through Catalytic Capital with Tsitsi Masiyiwa
Subscribe to the Podcast:
“How are we using the platform that God has given us to influence decision-makers and our communities to do good?” This is the question that drives Tsitsi Masiyiwa. One answer is by utilizing catalytic capital—a patient, flexible, risk-tolerant form of financing. Sometimes it accepts lower returns to accommodate the economics of high-impact organizations that are profitable but not profit-maximizing, whether due to an early stage of business development, tough markets, or a focus on impoverished populations. Tsitsi draws on her years of experience in philanthropy and as a social entrepreneur to share how Faith Driven Investors can leverage their capital to solve global challenges.
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.
Jacktone: Faith Driven Entrepreneur Africa spotlights the stories across the continent, which is why you will mostly hear distinctively African stories on this podcast. But we are also part of a global network, so we'll mix in some of the best stories from around the world to hear what God is doing in other areas as well. Today's episode with Tsitsi Masiyiwa, what was originally recorded on the Faith Driven Investor podcast, and we are excited to share her story with you. Tsitsi is a philanthropist and social entrepreneur, she is executive chair and co-founder of Higher Life Foundation, whose primary goal is to invest in human capital development to thriving individuals, communities and sustainable livelihoods. Her work has garnered global recognition. She has received honorary doctorate degrees from Morehouse University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Africa University in Mutara, Zimbabwe, as well as the prestigious Champions for Change Award for leadership from the International Center for Research on Women. I. C. R. W. More recently, Tsitsi has pioneered impact investing in Africa through the establishment of Delta Philanthropies in 2017, which seeks to unlock and catalyze innovative solutions to the elimination of poverty by convening strategic partnerships and incubating new development models. We are excited to share her story.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor Podcast Special International Edition today with a special International Edition co-host, Reuben Coulter. Welcome to the program.
Reuben Coulter: Thank you. Delighted to be with you Henry.
Henry Kaestner: Reuben, you and I have known each other for years, and you've been the director of international strategy here and faith driven for what, about a year now? Something like that. And we've talked about all sorts of different really cool things going on in the world and projects that we get a chance to work on together as we look to encourage a global movement behind Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, which is the topic we're talking about today. And yet most of our listeners probably don't know who you are. So, Reuben, who are you? Where do you come from?
Reuben Coulter: Well, as you may hear by my accent, I'm originally from Ireland, but based in Bristol in the U.K. and I'm married to a wonderful Polish lady. And we have two children, five years old and a three years old, the first born in Switzerland and the second born in Kenya. So we're a truly international family, and I guess we've been called by God all over the world to serve him. I originally started off really wanting to understand how do we tackle poverty and help alleviate poverty around the world. And more recently, I realized that the question needs to be changed and needs to be flipped. How do we create prosperity and how do we help communities flourish? And so that's taken me from working in the refugee camps in Darfur and Liberia for many years as a public health specialist. Then to the corridors of power at the World Economic Forum, where I curated the Davos event and the Africa Summit, and worked with business leaders and governments, helping them think through inclusive economic policies. More recently, I've become passionate about the role that entrepreneurs can play and how they are pioneers and changemakers and at the forefront of really tackling some of the big problems in our world. And some of the most incredible entrepreneurs I've met are from the continent of Africa, from Kenya, from Zimbabwe, from Nigeria. And they're basically there isn't a legacy infrastructure. And so they've had to build things from scratch in the area of financial technology, in agriculture, in health care. And it's been just so exciting to be on that journey together with you. Henry over the past year.
Henry Kaestner: It has been and as I'm listening to you, it's strange, of course, that we've waited a whole year to have you talk about it, and yet you've been behind the scenes. You've been helping us put together guests. And I'm so encouraged about doing this our first time, and I look forward to doing many more. And for this first time, we've got a very special guest that you have known now for a while and admired and had known that she would be a perfect guest for the podcast. And I'm hoping that you can introduce Tsitsi to us help us to understand what about her story really brought you in and then of course, we'll ask her to tell her story. But Reuben, why don't you introduce our guest and then I'll ask her some questions and and then we'll have a good conversation today about the balance between giving and investing and how to think about sub-Saharan Africa as a Faith Driven Investor.
Reuben Coulter: Yes, I'm so delighted to have Tsitsi Masiyiwa with us today. She's an African philanthropist and a social entrepreneur and she's a pioneer. She is someone who has been working for decades as the executive chair and co-founder of the Higher Life Foundation, whose mission is to build thriving individuals, communities and sustainable livelihoods. And with a particular focus on her home country of Zimbabwe. I had the privilege of meeting Tsitsi and her husband Strive at a conference a number of years ago where thought leaders in the UK came together to think about how do we use our talents for the common good? And the reference for that conference was the small group at the Clapham Circle who met a few hundred years ago in this little suburb of London, headed by William Wilberforce and many others. And they said, How do we use our influence, our gifts to change slavery, change the labor laws in the country, and bring about what we now understand as reformation during the Victorian era. And that conference was asking how do we do the same? And Tsitsi has been asking these questions for both our home country and of course the continent of Africa. Tsitsi is also a founding board member and the chair of the Africa Philanthropy Forum, as she's the trustee of the Legatum Institute, the End Fund, UNICEF's Gender Unlimited Initiative. And on the boards of many other organizations, the list goes on. And we're just delighted to have you today to share a little bit about your story and your journey, both on the philanthropic side and on the impact investing sides.
Henry Kaestner: Indeed. Indeed, that's an incredible background with amazing depth. And yet Tsitsi you have not yet been on the Faith Driven Investor podcast.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: No, never.
Henry Kaestner: Never. We're humbled and honored that you're with us. You've got an incredible life story. Give us an overview of that journey. Who are you and where do you come from? Please.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So I am a Zimbabwean born in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a beautiful little country in southern Africa, population 15 million, very tiny GDP in comparison to the United States, around 21 billion. 70% of our population lives in the rural areas. And also it's a very young population like the rest of the African continent. So 62% of the Zimbabwean population is under the age of 25. Primary economic activity is around agriculture, mining and a little bit of tourism. And with COVID, of course, tourism is not really making any headway. And I'm sure people have heard of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Victoria Falls. So that's what Zimbabwe is famous for. In terms of me personally, you know, I trained in business not with any intention of going into business. And I also didn't come from an entrepreneurial family background by any chance of the imagination. It was purely because I started studying agriculture and then discovered too much chemistry and moved to study business, which was a lot easier. But how we got into philanthropy was very much through the business door. So my husband used to be in construction buildings and his main customer was the government. And he decided after having come across an exciting new technology called mobile telephone technology, decided to set up mobile network service in Zimbabwe. So he applied for a license and the government said no private citizens cannot carry communication on behalf of the government and the public because of this sensitivity of information. And when he looked at the Constitution, what he read was that everybody had the right to access to information. So he decided to take the issue to court because he felt that the position the government had taken was contrary to our constitutional rights. And of course, I asked him he wasn't a believer. I was a Christian then. And I looked at him and I said, Do you want to sue the government? He said, Yes. I said, Well, I have faith, and if it were me, I wouldn't do that. What's the basis of your confidence? He said, No, no, no. It's a very straightforward case. I would take them to court. It will take three or four months after that will be done. And I would have my business. I believed him. And guess what? It turned out to be like a five years legal battle where we ended up literally losing everything we had. But in the process during that period, Zimbabwe was going through a pandemic, just like we're going through a pandemic right now, and it was HIV and AIDS. And when I saw just firstly members of my own family die, I had an aunt who lost eight children from HIV and AIDS. And these are people I loved that I grew up with. And I began to question myself as a believer that what can I do? What role can I play? And it was in the process of that. Plus I was going to taking the government to court and ending up losing literally everything we had that I began to ask God, what is the purpose? What is my purpose? And if we went to have a business, what would we do with the money? Because. You can only sleep in one bed, drive one car, live in one house. So for all the pain and suffering. What was it all about? And I connected the dots between the terrible, heart wrenching experience I was going through and seeing communities just decimated by HIV and AIDS. And then also that opportunity, that intersection was about. Use the resources that you have to do what you can. And for Strive and I an obvious choice on how we could play a role in alleviating the suffering was to go into philanthropy and use our resources to give scholarships to orphaned children. So in a nutshell, that's how we started the business and how we went into philanthropy.
Henry Kaestner: So this is no small business that you all have started. It's got some level scale. Most of our audience are entrepreneurs and investors. Give us a concept to think about a business in Zimbabwe. Most people will have an image in their head. And yet what God has done through you all is something altogether different, a greater scale. Tell us about the business and what Econet Global has become.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Sure. So when we started, you know, we thought we'll probably get 100,000 customers and live happily ever after. Well, as you know, that technology just opens amazing doors for development on the African continent. But in terms of our business in Zimbabwe grew from literally 0 to 100000 customers and over a period of time to 11 million customers. So currently, you know, we are the biggest MNO or mobile network operator in Zimbabwe. But we also saw opportunity so around early 2000. My husband left Zimbabwe and decided to move to South Africa so that we could explore new opportunities in South Africa. And that led us to begin to build the business. And we expanded from South Africa to the UK and then built a footprint on the African continent. So currently we are in more than 19 African countries. The business has since gone beyond mobile telephony to building fiber so millions of Africans can have access to the Internet. So we have built undersea cables, we have built on land cables, and we've really opened up Internet access into areas that honestly, there was just no way of people communicating from village to village or town to town. So it's been incredibly fulfilling as entrepreneurs and also as believers to just see communities that would have no access to the Internet being used to open up these countries and build infrastructure. From DRC, Congo to Zambia to South Africa to Kenya, you know, the list goes on. We've actually built a connection from literally from Cape to Cairo. Yeah. So it's an incredible journey.
Henry Kaestner: That's incredible. And I recently saw a map of Africa and saw the United States in it, India in it, China in it, Africa. So when you're going from Cape Town to Cairo, you're not talking about a small area. There's a lot of customers. It's a lot of land. Tell us a bit about how your faith impacts the business you run and how you're able to do business as you're guided by your faith. That might be different than others that are in the same marketplace.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So I think right from the beginning, for me, it was important to be very transparent about my faith. So when we started our foundation, we just openly said it's a faith based foundation. And we also decided not to really look for funding from anybody so that we would remain true to our values, our mission, our purpose and our vision. So faith is central to what we do. We hire stuff that's come from all different religious beliefs. We have men who are not believers, who are not Christians, etc. but they come into the business and they come into the foundation knowing what our beliefs are, because that really informs the way we make decisions in partnerships, the way we make decisions in investments, and also the culture in the organization. So faith has been a central part of who we are and of what we do. And I think what has helped is just being very, you know, not everybody is able to do it, but for us, it's just been very easy to be very open and transparent about it and and to talk about it openly here.
Henry Kaestner: So you and Strive have this incredible platform and influence because of the size and scale of the success that God is giving you. You've been labeled Africa's power couple. How do you steward that influence and blessing?
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Well, you know, thank goodness. You know, we have the Bible to build context on what power is and the ways things could get very complicated. So when people say power couple, for me it is more about how are we using the platforms that God has given us to be able to influence decision makers to do good and also to influence our communities that we are very heavily embedded in. Our philanthropic work is we implement all our projects. So we are very embedded in the communities that we work in. So in that respect, I think we are very much, let me tell you, rely on the power of the Holy Spirit more than any other power. It's given us just the ability to be able to understand other forms of power that either affect what we do political power. Because a lot of the work that we do involves governments, regulators and [...]. So it's understanding the different forms of power, but knowing the power that moves us and informs how we do our business, our investments and our philanthropy.
Reuben Coulter: I'd like to shift gears. As the name of this podcast implies in the conference. We're mostly focused on investing. However, we realize that not all the world's problems can be solved purely by investing. Some issues do require philanthropy, or sometimes we like to call us gospel catalytic giving. That might be whether it's a humanitarian response or addressing basic needs. So I'd like to understand a little bit more about your foundation, Higher Life. You have this wonderful tagline, Investing in People for Africa's Prosperity. Can you unpack a little bit of what you do?
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So at Higher life, we do impact investment at different levels. So we do grantmaking and scholarships because of the type of communities that we are working with and the type of communities that we invest in. Our primary target groups are vulnerable communities and in particular orphans. So that has informed the manner in which we do our giving the communities from early childhood development level to primary school to high school to university to Ph.Ds. So because we are building human capital resource, we see that is our contribution to strengthening Africa's ability to provide highly skilled and competent pool of human resources, plus also lifting levels of literacy, especially for those who are not able to really go beyond high school. So the investment has to be scholarships and grants in then comes to working with communities where sustainable livelihoods is. At the center of what we try to do is to provide grants, but also low interest or no interest loans in order to give our communities the opportunity to invest in their livelihoods, but in a way that honors their ability to contribute something, which is, you know, their labor, their efforts, their times, their skills, but also in a manner that doesn't burden them by having to carry out loans. You know, so where it's appropriate, we look at doing impact investment and giving out patient capital in order to strengthen sustainability in communities, so ability for the communities to improve livelihoods. We've also found it important for us to also partner with your big suppliers, where we've gone in to invest in businesses for profit so that they can increase their capacity to be able to provide goods and services to communities that would be unattractive for them if they did not access our type of patient capital or types of investments.
Reuben Coulter: So it's going to say, let's unpack each of those, because each of those is, as I know, a huge piece of work. And so I'd love to kind of understand a little bit better. So you talked about patient capital. So can you explain to us kind of what that looks like in practice? And yeah, how do you go about doing that?
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So for Patient Capital, we're looking at where we have given loans at very low interest rates. So initially, I'll give you a specific example of investments we did. Our goal was to increase poultry production because the two companies we're working with needed to build capacity. But the investment that they needed for them to build capacity to service your small buyer required funding that was fairly inexpensive and also that gave them a lot of leg room to be able to build on their cashflows and also profitability. So that's the patient capital. So what we did, we invested in these two companies. They were able to increase their capacity. Number one, to train new smallholder farmers. That would then be given a batch of one day old chicks, look after them, raise them over a period of 8 to 12 weeks, and then be the supplier back to the company that we invested in. So it has worked very well. Because it allowed those companies, like I said, to consider investing in small holder farmers that they ordinarily would not consider or would be unattractive for them also to. It allowed the companies to go into areas where levels of poverty are very high, levels of rainfall are very low, and where economic activity is at a minimum. So communities were able to see income generating projects that actually made money and improved the livelihoods of those farmers who have participated in projects like that. So I'm very excited in that. It's an area we are expanding and in the next season we are hoping to recruit a lot more farmers. We also, if I can also just add one other project which also excites me. So there is a group of farmers who came up with a very climate smart type of approach to farming agriculture to increase productivity among small holder farmers. So we partnered with them and trained small holder farmers as a pilot during the 20, 20, 21 agricultural season. So we provided training, which was around $118 per person, and that included comprehensive training over a week, plus a small pack of your seeds and all the inputs that are needed for the farmers to plant a seed and be able to harvest enough maize for a family of six. We had a mixed bag of results, I have to say. I would love to say it was highly successful, but I think for the pilot we learned a lot of lessons. There were things, of course, that we didn't know but we should have known or we were too ambitious. But I think the important lesson for me was to understand the impact that if we are to invest more of this patient capital in these small holder farmers, the impact is not only evident to the farmer in terms of higher income per family, but also it gives the farmers the ability to really be empowered and have skills so that even once we are gone, we are not able to offer them patient capital. They still have the ability to grow their crops in a sustainable manner.
Reuben Coulter: Yes, now that it's super exciting and I believe the partner you are working with is foundations for farming. Is that correct?
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Absolutely. Foundations for farming. And they have gone all over the world now. I think they are quite their rock star in terms of climate, smart agriculture.
Reuben Coulter: Yeah. So foundations for farming for our listeners is a wonderful organization helping farmers in regenerative agriculture, really using natural organic methods to grow, and they've just seen phenomenal results. I believe that Craig Deall is the CEO of Foundations for Farming. We were with them just a couple of weeks ago, and I believe this year was the highest crop yield that Zimbabwe has seen and 25 or 30 years, which is just so encouraging for the country.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Absolutely. I think that for me, the turning point was when the government realized that this was a sustainable strategy that would enable the country to be more food secure and also provide farmers with the right skills to be able to produce at a level that can take care of your average family in a village.
Henry Kaestner: Tsitsi I'm hoping you might be able to help us unpack a topic that's come up a lot, and I've thought about it as an investor in Africa a bit too, and navigated through it with the help of some good counsel. But it's just the concept of patient capital. There's an investor in America named Marc Andreessen, and he's famous for saying, I will buy a house, meaning I will make an investment or I will buy a boat, which he says is making a gift, a philanthropic gift. But I won't buy a houseboat. A houseboat is a combination of two, and they have them on lakes here in America. And what he was doing is he was referring in that illustration to a houseboat being patient capital or an impact investment because it combined too many aspects of both giving and investment. And he just couldn't make sense of it. So he wanted to stay away from that. I think that we as Christ followers need to be drawn into that space of patient capital, that it's not so black and white. That's not just market return capital. We clearly can see through to a 20% return on investment or that is just a gift that there's a huge area in the middle and yet it is complex. Some of those complexities, as I've seen in the past, is how do you think about patient capital amounting to a subsidy and does that create an artificial market distortion that the entrepreneur can work their way out of so that they can then graduate to someplace where they can get access to maybe larger pools of capital that are in the market, but at market rates, how do you process that with your investing? And maybe I'm even thinking about the framework wrong.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: It's always important, I think, to look at the context because if you're sitting in the US. And you're looking at patient capital. What it means in the US is very different to what it means in Africa. Our histories are different. In the US you are probably maybe second or third generation university exposure to entrepreneurship. You've seen US grow from, you know, industrialization to information age, all those phases. We are not in an environment like that. Majority of the people that you are going to come across is first time graduates from university. These are those who you are likely to meet in a conference. But remember, 70% of the population still lives in the rural areas, number one. Number two. 70% of the population has no access to clean water and they have no access to power. So even the concept of a houseboat is strange. So if the fundamentals are different, it's very difficult to arrive at the same conclusions or to see patient capital with the same lens. So patient capital for me allows us the runway we need as Africans to be able to catch up. So we need to where Europe and the US where the West is there to far ahead. You are talking of GDP per capita of 60,000, 80,000, 100,000. Majority of the sub-Saharan Africa is living on a dollar 90 a day. And so you have to look at where are the areas one needs to invest, number one, to build the skills necessary in order to create an environment that allows open space for innovation, for high levels of productivity, and that requires, you know, high levels of literacy and education. So that's at one level. And then at the second level to understand the importance of business entrepreneurship. Capitalism is something that many sub-Saharan countries are not familiar with because we come from a background of countries. We are young countries that were born out of liberation movements and most of them with financed and funded by Union of Soviet Socialist Republic and China. So the influences of Russia, India, China in terms of entrepreneurship made entrepreneurship something that is not general mindset was a lot of people generally think of employment and jobs and not job creation and entrepreneurship and then added to that a perception that capitalism is evil and that it takes it does not give. So all these underlying factors, I think, have really affected the way in which you look at investment, you look at wealth creation, and also the way you look at what economic empowerment means. So when I then look at patient capital, I see it as it's one of the strategies that we need to ramp up and ramp up very quickly in order to help us leapfrog so we can get to a place where we can begin to build an entrepreneurial class that is highly competitive and that can produce products or services at the level of your highly developed countries.
Henry Kaestner: That's very helpful. So this is an investment. It's an investment in a generation to be able to build the infrastructure, to build the culture, to build the mindset that encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. And I think what you're suggesting here is that if you accelerate too fast in expectation that that these entrepreneurs who don't have the university training and don't have generations of this type of mindset, if you accelerate them too fast and to needing to return the same type of results you might have from a Western European investment that the system will break, it'll be thought of as being exploitative and that we just we need to be patient and that the market will develop when people can start to trust the market. Yeah, along those lines, tell me a bit about the participants and I understand enough about sub-Saharan Africa to know that there's not a broad base of local investors that can put local skin in the game. And yet you clearly are leading by example in that regard. And they bring so much confidence to a Western investor that wants to deploy capital but wants to do it on terms with others that really know the market, understand the culture, and also put their capital at risk, whether it's patient capital and market return capital. Do you see that developing or are you and Strive just such an anomaly that that has not yet developed? Are you hopeful? Talk to us a little bit about the state of local investment, people investing back into the local community.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: You know, I would like to think that the story of an I over time becoming the norm rather than the exception. And simply because we were very blessed to go into an industry in which Strive had expertize in. He was a telecoms engineer, so he understood what it takes to invest in an industry like that. He understood that local capital alone will not do it. So he knew that if years to build the business, some of the options he has to look at not only domestic capital to invest in the business, but also to look at long term capital, which is you're taking the company public in order to deepen and widen the pool, the access, the capital for the business. Also, I think the experience he had had working with, you know, the World Bank has IFC, which was very much active when we started our business in the 1980s, especially in Zimbabwe, investing in medium size businesses and that is patient capital. So he was able to attract some of that funding. But Zimbabwe is not a normal country, by the way, because of the political complications around the US, sanctions against the country, etc.. But we've seen an amazing crop of entrepreneurs develop in your Nigeria, in Kenya, we've seen even a rising class in Ethiopia, in South Africa. And I believe that has come about by. Government's understanding the importance of creating a macroeconomic environment and also a regulatory environment that makes it possible for local entrepreneurs to be able to access funding and also to just lower the entry barriers so that it's easier the opportunities are easier to take advantage of. I think yeah so. h onestly, I don't think, you know, we are a unique couple by any stretch of the imagination. I think we are very blessed to be able to have done what we've been able to do, but we are also in an industry. What we picked was a high growth industry and transitioning from mobile telephony to building fiber internet. I think that also was just very strategic in helping us to expand very quickly in a short period of time.
Reuben Coulter: Yeah, no, it's it's so encouraging. You were one of the first couples to sign the Giving Pledge, which, of course, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and were encouraging other people to give away their wealth and become more generous philanthropists. And but you've also gone on to chair the Africa Philanthropy Forum, and you've been mobilizing others and encouraging others. And over time, that's really grown into a substantial movement. And it's great to see the emergence of philanthropists and investors giving back and making a difference. And COVID 19 has obviously devastated the world. This third wave has been hitting Africa and Zimbabwe particularly hard. What is the situation like on the ground now and how should international philanthropists and investors who are listening to this podcast respond? What should they be doing to support what's going on?
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: I think, you know, COVID has it has devastated every country globally. And I think initially when it started, when we began to see the effects in countries like the UK, Italy and the US, a lot of people were talking about that maybe between 20 and 25 million Africans would die simply because the health systems, there's no capacity to respond to the pandemic. And thank God it hasn't happened that way. And I will say one of the things that I have seen that has really helped was, number one, all hands on deck. That is, everybody understanding they have a role to play in order to ensure that this pandemic does not decimate communities. And it also helps that the tools to make sure information gets very quickly to communities and communities are quickly educated about what COVID is, and its impact really helped a lot. So we were able to see information go quickly, move very quickly into communities on, you know, what is COVID, what are the dos and don'ts and how do you, you know, keep safe? But at the African philanthropy level, the philanthropists really stepped in and they stepped in in millions, not small amounts of money. There was deep levels of collaboration, especially in the private sector. We saw in South Africa a big solidarity fund put up in order to quickly get protective clothing and PPE and also testing equipment in collaboration with the government. We saw Nigerians also step in. They put in more than $100 million to quickly, again, partner with the government to get their test kits on the ground and get as many masses of people tested as quickly as possible. In the smaller countries, what we have seen through our work in African Philanthropy Forum is to see how smaller countries have built networks for resource mobilization money and also businesses have stepped in and a lot of private hospitals have been built in various countries in order to ensure that the health support systems are put in place. What we did in Zimbabwe, for example, we partnered with a philanthropist called Elma Philanthropies, and we've done a lot of training of literally from doctors to nurses to auxiliaries, staff training to build morale and strengthen the skills of the health sector. We also were able to partner to bring in quickly deploy equipment that was basic equipment that was needed in the major hospitals in order to ensure that we did not see a breakdown in health delivery services. So, you know, I've been very encouraged as an African philanthropist at seeing just how at the local level how communities have stepped in and mobilized resources to be able to respond. Of course, we've also seen, you know, schools close. And I think we've. Really lost two years in terms of education, kids not learning anything. I think majority of the children in especially in rural communities, just haven't been to school for two years. So that is a major, major problem we are facing. How do we respond? I think you need the private sector to step in. The government needs to step in. And, of course, philanthropy needs to step in. And I think the donor community needs to change its model. This is also one of the things that became very obvious during COVID. You know, in the past, you've had all these donor agencies, communities that are constantly flying all over the continent and spending, having a very high cost structure to deliver their services. And what has been very evident is, well, no one can travel. And it's not like the continent has collapsed because the donors have not been coming. What has become very evident is change the model, become more efficient in how you deploy resources and that the donor community must can do what it does effectively without having to, you know, to make too many decisions out of, say, in New York, Washington, D.C. or London, but rather to be more trusting of what local communities can do and partner with them to implement work that needs to be done on the ground. And then lastly, leave the private sector to do what the private sector knows how to do, which is they are very good at innovation, good at deploying resources, good at logistics. And also, they're just an amazing reservoir of ideas to solve problems.
Reuben Coulter: Thank you. I think that's a wonderful notes for us to end on is the challenge to philanthropists. We need to be locally led. We need to be driven by capable local leadership and trust them and empower them to do what they do best. They know their community, they know their people, and for the private sector and for the investor community to come in and innovate and supports the innovators and entrepreneurs on the continent to help them grow and develop. But don't just transplant a venture capital model from the US, but understand what type of capital and supports is relevant in the local environments, and how can that help entrepreneurship and innovation flourish for the prosperity of Africa? One final question. We always love to wrap up our interviews with this question, which is Where does God have you, in his words, right now? What is he speaking to you?
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Oh, I am so excited about what lies ahead, but I really feel we all need to take a very long term view in the decisions we make, whether it is in investment or making decisions in our own growth as individuals or families taking a long term view. See, when we make decisions with a long term view, you are always more willing to absorb the pain of change and decisions that one needs to make. So yeah, that's what I feel. The Lord is saying that let's not look at short term benefits and forego long term gains because we want instant gratification.
Henry Kaestner: Tsitsi., I'm grateful for your time. I'm grateful for your leadership in Africa and for the message that you shared with us today. I'm wondering if you might pray for us as we all leave and go out and have days where hopefully we'll honor God and be used by Him for His glory. In Europe, where Reuben is, and in North America or Justin and I are in and in Africa where you are.
Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Sure, Father, in the name of Jesus. I'm just so grateful for this opportunity. The conversation we've had, Lord, these are not ordinary words. These are words that are spirit and life, that not only will they impact the way we think and the way the listeners think and see and perceive what we can do to make the world a better place, but also that these conversations will open up our minds to see just how great our God is and that we, through a difficult season of COVID, that we have an opportunity to do something compelling in unity with the Spirit of God, in unity with one another driven by love. Father, I want to thank you for the impact also of the work that is being done by your children, and that the doors that are open to the new doors that are opened will result in us being able to do things that cause your name to be glorified and to be testified in all this, in the name of Jesus Amen.