My secondary school alma mater, Secondary Technical School Ovim (Abia State), today informed me that it would like to rename one of the Inter-Houses to my name. It has five Houses – Red, Green, White, Yellow and Blue. Essentially, during the annual Inter-House Sports competitions, one of the Houses would be Ndubuisi Ekekwe House. Unlike the chieftaincy title, I accepted this one. The letter was written by the school principal on behalf of the staff, students and the PTA.

Secondary Technical School Ovim is a community school. It was established by Ovim Community as one of the foremost technical secondary schools in eastern Nigeria. The Motor Vehicle Lab, Wood Work Lab and other labs remain some of the best in the state. In short, the new computer lab is used by Abia State University for lab works.

This is not anyhow school – community sons like Rear Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu (rtd) [former governor of Lagos State], Major General Ike Nwachukwu (rtd) [former governor of Imo State], Lt General Ihejirika Azuibuike (rtd) [ former Chief of Army Staff] are some of the icons that invest efforts to make sure our school remains strong.

The school is largely managed by Ovim Community League – a community development entity. We are recording high double-digit percentage on transition from secondary to university education. They have accomplished impressive number on primary education to secondary education. Largely, any child in my village is guaranteed of secondary education.

I attended this school. I became a local legend, breaking and holding all-time WAEC academic result in the school history. I also became a teacher while a student teaching Maths, Physics and Further Maths. I won laurels for my school in competitions across the nation. After my WAEC, my principal and vice principal received State Awards.

The last time I visited home, primary school kids were brought by their parents for me to help them with algebra, numbers, etc. And the bigger boys and girls in secondary school came with Geography map reading, Calculus and Physics.

It makes you humble that you are inspiring young people. I would likely attend the next Inter-House Sports Competition, not to cheer those competing from Ndubuisi Ekekwe House but all kids in our school. Ovim is a very small community (about 10,000 people) but we are enviable in our quest to build a society for all. I benefited from the efforts of those ahead of me – they brought the best teachers in Nigeria to teach me. We would keep that tradition going. I am indeed honored.

Our AgTech pioneer, Zenvus, moves to the next phase of the Katerva Award which was referred by Reuters as “the Nobel Prize for Sustainability”.

Zenvus is a pioneering precision farming technology company that uses computational algorithm and electronics to transform farms. Zenvus collects soil fertility data and crop vegetative health data, concatenating them with AI to deliver precision agriculture at scale. It then uses the aggregated and anonymized data to deliver financial services to farmers. Zenvus can support any size of farms, from small to the largest farms.

The Katerva Award is the pinnacle of global sustainability recognition. Through them, the best ideas on the planet are identified, refined and accelerated toward impact at a global level.

Katerva isn’t looking for ideas that will improve the world in small increments. We are looking for game-changers and industry breakers; ideas that leap efficiency, lifestyle, consumption and action a generation ahead of current thinking. Single-digit percent change isn’t enough. We’re looking for triple-digit and beyond. We’re looking for what are truly the most promising and impactful ideas!

Katerva Award is managed by Thomson Reuters Foundation and Indiana University.

A lot of people think blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are one in the same, but that isn’t true. Cryptocurrencies are in the headlines, but the transformative power of the underlying blockchain technology is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

One simple analogy is that the blockchain is to money as the internet is to information. It removes the friction and costs of access to the masses. But don’t confuse blockchain technology with the bitcoin-ethereum-blockchain crytocurrency. It is quite easy to be distracted by the media onslaught of coverage around virtual currencies, and more recently, Initial Coin Offerings (ICO), however, this is mostly smoke and mirrors when compared to the potential held within blockchain itself. Token technology may anchor the next web revolution, spawning crowdfunding behemoths that expedite the value delivery path to their users while cutting out the advertisers and fee-based middlemen.

The current thought model posits the question, “What can’t be tokenized?” Future research notes will explore and detail the many use cases of blockchain and how they are being put to the test with early adopters in this bleeding edge space. Big banks are embarking on programs to provide syndicated loans and the grocery supply chain has signed up with IBM to launch a blockchain-based solution to track food shipments and monitor food safety.

It all sounds mysterious, intriguing and, to be frank, easy to dismiss as so few of us really understand what blockchain technology really is and how it works. Let’s take the first steps towards closing this knowledge gap.

There are five foundational principles that underlie blockchain technologies:

• Distributed Database: All access all the time! Everyone partaking in the database can see everything in the database. This architecture provides true decentralization where there is no single point of control or failure. This transparency allows independent verification of transactions to occur without a middleman verification step.
•  Peer-to-Peer Transaction: Blockchain takes the idea of “serverless computing” to a whole new level as there is no central hub for processing transaction data. All transactions are processed and stored in the nodes plugged into the network and those nodes share that data with all of the other nodes.
• Transparency with Pseudonymity: Blockchain users have the choice to remain anonymous or share their identities. However, the record itself is present and visible to all. Transactions are encrypted and assigned a unique address as the means of identification.
• Irreversibility of Records: Once a record has been transacted in the distributed ledger, it cannot be modified due to the linkage between all records (blocks) that comprise the blockchain. These records are encrypted, ordered chronologically, and visible to all.
•  Computational Logic: Due to the programmatic nature of the blockchain, logic and algorithms can be applied to automate transactions between nodes upon pre-defined conditions

For the rest of the piece, download the Basics_of_Blockchain (PDF).

Note: This is used with permission from Info-Tech Research Group .

South Africa wants to invest about $170 million on its startups. That is good. Most African countries do those rituals: give money to companies as part of assisting them to grow. The problem is that no one goes back to see how these programs have performed, post implementations.  Nigeria’s YouWin has come and gone; I am not sure anyone has a publication on the value created. We have no memory, and that is why we cannot plan effectively since today’s mistakes do not shape tomorrow’s strategies.

Personally, what the governments are doing is fine: we need to find ways to jumpstart companies. My problem is that they are focusing on the wrong entities in these intervention programs: they fund small business owners instead of entrepreneurs.

Finance minister Malusi Gigaba announced at today’s 2018 Budget Speech that the government will set aside R2.1-billion for startups.

“Work is being done to provide crucial funding to innovative small businesses when they need it most,” said Gigaba.

“A fund with an allocation of R2.1-billion over the medium term is being developed between the Departments of Small Businesses and Science and Technology, and benefit small and medium enterprises during the early startup phase.”

That is the problem: African governments are supporting small business owners when entrepreneurs would have done better. They know what they are doing. It it politically better to share $10,000 among ten citizens than to give $10,000 to expand a promising business. The ten people are potential voters. Yes, even the governments do not believe in those jobs creation capabilities. It is all positioning for political gains. Once you get your $1,000, you have gotten your share. The whole grand strategy is stalled.

Foreign development finance institutions (DFI) do not do a favor here: they come up with the outrageous statements that Africans are more “entrepreneurial” than say Americans because we have more “companies” per capita than Americans. They say those to our leaders who delight on them despite the clear ironies. Yes, by the time you visit Oshodi market (Lagos), you can count 10,000 sellers doing what one supermarket in U.S. can use 70 employees to do.  The supermarket is one company; the Oshodi shops are 10,000 companies! Does that make us better? Not really.

But the DFIs are not trying to deceive: they are following the same manual even the U.S. Government uses where it counts Uber, Lyft and barbershop in the same league as newly created companies. Yes, when taking census and you want to know the number of new companies created, a barbershop is counted along with empires like Uber as new companies. What matters is that Uber has one Tax ID and the barbershop has also one Tax ID. It creates confusion when examining how new entities are creating values in economies.

This is the hard part which everyone knows: small businesses do not scale. They are static with largely no scalable advantage. They have huge marginal cost which means that the owner does his or her thing monthly with no change. The woman that sells corn by the road side in Aba (Nigeria) is not an entrepreneur – she is a small business owner. An entrepreneur is someone who has built a scalable business where the fundamentals of the business make it possible that there is no bounded constraint to growth.  Entrepreneurs give us startups, not small businesses.

NB: Startup in this content means going to create something of value with transformational impacts in the market. It is different from small business which could be barbing salon, selling corn along the roads, etc that rarely scales. You do not build such firms without focus.

“A company five years old can still be a startup,” writes Y Combinator accelerator head Paul Graham via email. “Ten [years old] would start to be a stretch.”…

One thing we can all agree on: the key attribute of a startup is its ability to grow. As Graham explains, a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly. It is this focus on growth unconstrained by geography which differentiates startups from small businesses.

Yes,startup has the fluidity and organic element to keep growing. It brings innovation, fixing specific frictions in the market, at SCALE. When a nation has many entrepreneurs, it creates pipelines for jobs. Small business owners rarely change the trajectory of the unemployment because their primary motivation is to create jobs for themselves. Entrepreneurs focus on expanding the world; they hire many people to do so.

So, a government policy when sharing the commonwealth to support firms that focuses on entrepreneurs would produce better results in Africa. That is why my proposition is always to focus on expanding businesses instead of looking at people to start new ones. That is the American model: they pump money into already growing ones with financial incentives in some specific sectors, over looking for people to start new ones. The model reduces the risk for government but it comes at a political high cost – only few would get the money and that could make politicians feel uneasy. Sure, politically, it sounds better that you empowered 10,000 people (most likely to fail) than 10 people (most likely to succeed).