Like the Paypal mafia, Jumia could become something greater in Africa. These two Africans – Raphael Afaedor and Tunde Kehinde – the original co-founders of Jumia, left out in all the major stories, must NOT be forgotten. Along with Sacha Poignonnec, they created the first Jumia – but they left, surprisingly. That $3.9 billion happened because of Raphael Afaedor and Tunde Kehinde. I recall the day they followed Nigeria’s former minister of ICT to Silicon Valley and the world paid attention. They should inspire younger people in this story of Jumia. (Added from LinkedIn summary)

“Jumia was incorporated in Germany, its legal Headquarters is in Berlin, Germany, while its administrative Headquarters is in Dubai, UAE. Its global Technology centre is in Porto, Portugal. Its Top Executives aren’t African. The largest shareholder is MTN”, writes AfricaFactZone .

Yet, Jumia Nigeria was co-started with these two West Africans.  People need to see their faces to understand that without Jumia Nigeria, the mission of Jumia cannot thrive. Raphael Afaedor and Tunde Kehinde are key reasons why Jumia trades in NYSE today. They must inspire a new generation of Nigerian entrepreneurs!

Sure, the West Africans left in surprising ways, and today Sacha Poignonnec and the co-CEO run the show. Yet, Tunde and Raphael seeded, strategically, this company called Jumia. The money men have since changed the company. I just hope they will get something out of this major party in New York City with valuation hitting $3.9 billion. .

Comment on LinkedIn Feed

1. Well said Prof. these two bosses had that foresight in bringing the business to limelight after their Harvard studies. I was opportuned to be part of the team not up to 50 staff who toil day and night to see the dream come true. They were true leaders with high energy and drive for success. They sit on the same table deliberating and calculating the way forward when average daily order rate was at 30. The impossible was made so easy with their strategic and continuous improvement process. I celebrate them.

2. As they say, great things start small. I remember seeing Raphaels name on some sensitive data point when i recently joined the group, and I had always longed to speak with him and know what they were thinking when JUMIA all started seeing what it has become today……. Fastforward today I think lessons has been learnt, younger entrepreneurs would learn how to forecast properly, know when to sell off, or when to remain, how to sell off and what clauses to have. I also remembered a tech start up that was sold for over 1million USD and 2 years down the line, they are no where to be found. Good decision to sell off on the part of the co-founders! Good value for them at the end.

3. Hi Ndubuisi, yes these guys are cited as the Jumia Group cofounders but I think that we need to insist on the lesson to learn at this stage: Building champion companies takes time and commitment. While I hope these guys will get part of the financial return they deserve (provided they still have shares in the company), I also think that we, African entrepreneurs, should start thinking long-term and Shen starting companies, make sure that we’re there to stay, no matter what. And that’s where enabling environments could come in, in order to make sure that basic needs are covered in the early years, backed by a vision to champion industries. Recall the Steve Wozniak case with Apple and late Steve Jobs!

4. As an entrepreneur, you should be in it for the long time. There will always be challenges along the way. You also need to be ready to get other people involved in the business. If the other parties have not  invested in the business. Jumia could have been dead today. We have seen how greed and wanting to own it alone have killed good business that could grown in Nigeria. Congrats to them for let other people to be a part pf their business.

ICT brought huge productivity gains across sectors and markets. The web is delivering disruption at scale. It will be nearly impossible for your ICT venture to disrupt without the web!

But with the advent of the Internet, many things are changing, owing to the unbounded and unconstrained nature of the web. The companies that relied on ICT to change their sectors are also now vulnerable. Indeed, ICT brought huge productivity gains, Internet is delivering disruption at scale.

The implication is that the way we run Internet companies must be different from the way we ran businesses pre-Internet and when ICT was the vehicle for productivity gain. There are key things to note:

By Nnamdi Odumody

In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 60 percent of farms are powered by humans with less than 20 percent provided by engines, a model which is not sustainable as food demand increases due to population growth, which is averaging 11 million per year.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 35-50 percent post harvest losses for perishable agricultural products are lost annually in the region due to poor planting practices.

Jehiel Oliver, an African American investment banker, decided to do something about this. He founded Hello Tractor which in 2014 launched a mobile platform to enable farmers access tractor services on demand. Through the use of a mobile app and other technologies, it aggregates tractor service requests, and then pairs them with recommended tractors and operators, while simultaneously tracking how many hours each piece of equipment is on the field and areas serviced.

There are many opportunities in the Nigerian (and indeed African) agriculture sector for entrepreneurs to unlock, starting from the traditional agro-businesses to the evolving agricultural technology (agtech) businesses. We have listed some of the ideas in this piece where we noted that agriculture could be on its way to $1 trillion cumulative revenue in Africa within seven years. Agriculture employs more than 65% of Africa’s working population, making it a very important part of our economy. It presents immense opportunities because the sector is still at infancy, and can only grow looking at the renewed efforts by investors, entrepreneurs, farmers and governments to deepen African competitiveness through agricultural production and processing.

Hello Tractor underwent a strategic redesign after Jehiel discovered that it needed to add additional services which include predictive maintenance, operator and tractor scoring, financing and crop yield forecasting. It collaborated with IBM Research’s Nairobi Lab to develop IoT (internet of things), Blockchain and AI technologies which would run on its Watson Intelligent Cloud.

On 11^th December 2018 at the Techcrunch Startup Battlefield Africa which held in Lagos, it unveiled an agriculture digital wallet and decision making tool which provides demand and supply visibility for farmers, tractor fleet providers and banks to give farmers the equipment and technology needed to build a sustainable farm. The new services will be tested in a pilot commencing in the first half of 2019.

For farmers, machine learning will help to predict crop yields, which combined with advanced analytics and blockchain can be mined to develop a credit score for loans. IoT Data from tractors will help smallholder farmers know when to cultivate, the quality of their farm cultivation, what to plant and the right type of fertilizer.

Tractor fleet owners will be able to view and manage fleet utilization, predictive maintenance and forecast future tractor utilizations based on history, real time weather and remote sensing satellite data. Using a five-star rating system, tractor operators will be ranked and utilized based on their training (e.g ploughing, deep ripping, harrow, fertilizing). Owners will also have financing opportunities for maintenance and buying tractors and implements using historical data.

Tractor dealers can benefit from improved tractor repair and servicing, after sales support, spare part inventory planning and credit administration. At the same time, banks and other financial institutions can view and track utilization of tractors to determine a credit portfolio for the farmer, and tractor owner, while also evaluating forecasted utilization to make credit decisions for tractor owners based on verified and trusted data on the blockchain.

Agriculture focused governments in Africa can utilize the data and actionable insights from Hello Tractor for various decision support capabilities such as for structuring incentives, enforcing regulations, prioritizing investments and policy decisions.

The backbone of the agriculture digital wallet is a blockchain-enabled and AI-based decision support platform which enables capturing, tracking and instant sharing of data while creating end-to-end trust and transparency for all parties involved across the value chain.

The next phase will see Hello Tractor utilize machine learning and image recognition to predict the quality of cultivation and also expansion to Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

The Central Bank of Nigeria’s intervention in agriculture NIRSAL, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and financial institutions need to support innovations like Hello Tractor which are promoting efficiency in farming operations to create higher value.

A very big confusion in economics and global public policy: IMF (International Monetary Fund) does not know the clear difference between Nigeria Sovereign investment Authority (NSIA) and Nigeria’s Excess Crude Account (ECA), as per terminologies. That IMF got trapped in that after years of those hard hitting articles on Nigeria is a concern. But thank goodness the local media challenged it, and the Fund has clarified. IMF had used “Sovereign Wealth Fund” (SWF) to refer to ECA which Nigeria has never designated as a SWF. NSIA has been Nigeria’s SWF.

The latest report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ranking Nigeria as the world’s second worst user of sovereign wealth funds is “fundamentally flawed”, the Nigerian government says.

The managing director of the Nigeria Sovereign investment Authority (NSIA), Uche Orji, said the report was “laughable”.

The IMF in its Fiscal Monitor Report released on Tuesday as part of the ongoing IMF/World Bank Spring meetings in Washington said Qatar was the only country worse than Nigeria on the index.

According to the Fund, the index was compiled based on the corporate governance and transparency scores of the sovereign wealth funds and the size of assets as a percentage of 2016 gross domestic product of the affected countries.

The IMF blamed Nigeria’s poor ranking on pervasive corruption, saying out of the 33 oil-rich countries considered, Nigeria faired barely better than Sudan, with depleted Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Columbia, Ghana and Chile were ranked top three best performers several resource-rich countries, on average.

Very nice they have clarified.

The IMF’s Senior Resident Representative and Mission Chief for Nigeria, Amine Mati, has provided more explanation on the report.

“In view of recent local media reports, I would like to clarify that the reference to the Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF) included in Figure 2.16 of the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor showing a low ranking for Nigeria does not refer to the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA),” Mr Mati said in a statement sent to the media on Friday

Yet, despite the confusion, the points IMF made on ECA stands. Nigeria has works to do there to make it more transparent.