How we made it in Africa

Learn from the stories of 25 entrepreneurs who've built thriving businesses

Jaco Maritz

• Publisher: Maritz Africa
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780620823548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

From the team behind the award-winning website (www.howwemadeitinafrica.com) comes the stories of 25 entrepreneurs who've built thriving businesses. Learn from the experiences of Africa’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, while gaining insight into the continent’s business opportunities. Discover why Ken Njoroge is building a billion-dollar pan-African digital payments company (it is not because he wants to drive a Ferrari); Find out how Jean de Dieu Kagabo grew a Rwanda-based industrial group from a simple product: toilet paper; And be inspired by the extraordinary tale of Hassan Bashir who created a booming insurance company from nothing but grit and persistence. Each entrepreneur’s story is told in an honest and sober manner, not shying away from the mistakes made and the considerable hurdles they had to overcome. And there were many tough times: from being betrayed by long-time senior managers to losing vast sums of money because of poor market research. Pursuing their business ambitions also had a toll on their personal lives: one entrepreneur was too broke to afford diapers for his baby, while another had to sell her house to keep the company alive. MEET THE ENTREPRENEURS: 1. Ken Njoroge (Kenya): The long, hard journey to build a billion-dollar company
2. Tseday Asrat (Ethiopia): A modern twist on Ethiopia's coffee culture
3. Tumi Phake (South Africa): Flexing his entrepreneurial muscles to exploit a gap in the health club industry
4. Monica Musonda (Zambia): Instant noodle pioneer
5. Hassan Bashir (Kenya): An insurance company created from nothing but grit and persistence
6. Ebele Enunwa (Nigeria): A $50-million food and retail empire
7. Tayo Oviosu (Nigeria): The entrepreneur who traded in his Silicon Valley life to bring mobile money to unbanked Nigerians
8. Navalayo Osembo (Kenya): How to make a Kenyan running shoe
9. Jean de Dieu Kagabo (Rwanda): Rwandan industrialist always hunting for the next big business idea
10. Addis Alemayehou (Ethiopia): Serial entrepreneur bringing the world to Ethiopia
11. Kasope Ladipo-Ajai (Nigeria): Nigerian cooking made convenient
12. Chijioke Dozie (Nigeria): Leveraging past experiences to disrupt the banking industry
13. Sylvester Chauke (South Africa): Marketer with a passion to take African brands global
14. Yoadan Tilahun (Ethiopia): Showing Ethiopia how to throw an event
15. Mossadeck Bally (Mali): West African hotel group built on an appetite for risk
16. Jennifer Bash (Tanzania): Adding value to everyday staples
17. Jesse Moore (Kenya): Thinking out of the box to power over 600 000 homes with solar energy
18. Twapewa Kadhikwa (Namibia): How one hair salon became a group of companies
19. Jacques de Vos (South Africa): Growing a high-impact tech business one problem statement at a time
20. Nana Akua Birmeh (Ghana): Architect breaking glass ceilings in Ghana
21. Nelly Tuikong (Kenya): Kenyan beauty

1

Ken Njoroge

The long, hard journey to build a billion-dollar company

By Jaco Maritz & Justin Probyn

When starting out, most entrepreneurs typically have a rough idea of where they want to take their companies. But as they are confronted with real-world realities such as a lack of money, increasing competition, staff matters and changing market forces, the bigger goal often starts taking a back seat in the battle for survival. Vision and mission statements can quickly become little more than PR tools and words on the company website.

Ken Njoroge, the Kenyan co-founder and co-CEO of pan-African digital payments business Cellulant, is someone for whom the original vision remains front and centre of everything the company does, even more than 15 years after starting the business. In fact, he and Bolaji Akinboro, his Nigerian partner and co-CEO, decided on a goal before they were even a hundred per cent certain of the type of business through which it would be accomplished.

Their goal? To build a $1-billion company. They didn’t pick this figure because they were “particularly interested in driving Ferraris”. It symbolised something bigger. It was to dispel the myth that “Africans can’t do anything for themselves” and demonstrate that it is possible to build a world-class company without political connections or paying bribes.

“Our stories and how we grew up, are very similar,” says Njoroge. “After we became friends, we spent a lot of time complaining about the state of things in Africa. Everywhere in the world we looked, we saw Africans doing great things in multinational corporations. Then we looked at the state of our own continent and had to ask: What’s wrong with us? That’s when we decided to do something about it,” Njoroge tells.

But why specifically $1 billion and not $100 million, or even $10 million, which would be equally respectable?

Because $10 million is not enough for Njoroge, who says that a friend of a corrupt politician could relatively easily accumulate this much. Even $100 million can be achieved by a “couple of guys who stole oil money in Angola or Nigeria”. But a $1-billion company requires a top-notch operation. “At that size, no one can have an excuse for being mediocre in Africa. That was our motivation – it is the thing that drives us.”

Njoroge says it is crucial that entrepreneurs take the time to formulate the why of their business, as it will drive all their decisions, from who to employ to what processes to put in place.

CUTTING HIS TEETH

Njoroge calls the first time he connected to the internet “a very powerful experience”. “I was like a kid in a candy store. I love reading and with the internet I could find information on any topic and read a bunch of things that took me in any direction.”

Inspired by the likes of Yahoo and Netscape, he began to see the business opportunities the internet offered. He was drawn to the possibility of building a “knowledge business” from anywhere in the world using only “what’s in your head”.

After obtaining a graduate diploma in information systems management from Nairobi’s Strathmore University, Njoroge worked at a handful of internet service providers (ISPs) at a time when the internet was a relatively new concept in Kenya.

Then, in 1998, he founded his first company, a web-development firm called 3mice, with two partners. The name was a play on a computer mouse and the company having three founders. “The name turned out to be one of the best branding decisions we made. People joked about it, but they never forgot it,” recalls Njoroge.

The start-up worked from a “small, dirty kitchen” in an upmarket Nairobi suburb. “When someone asked where our office was, I’d say, ‘It is in a cool area.’ And it was – the dirty kitchen was in a cool area,” says Njoroge. Luckily clients rarely visited their office.

With relatively few competitors in the market at the time, 3mice signed several blue-chip companies, such as East African Breweries, Safaricom and Coca-Cola. They built one of the first big e-commerce websites in the region for Virtual City, developed an online booking platform for Kenya Airways and worked on a Uganda Securities Exchange project.

Njoroge became increasingly interested in the mobile telecoms industry which, although in its infancy, was growing rapidly. To explore opportunities in the sector, he formed a separate research and development team at 3mice, called The Mobile Project. “We spent a lot of time engaging with 3mice’s mobile-operator customers to figure out where the industry was headed,” he says.

It was during this time that Njoroge met Bolaji Akinboro, who was in Kenya to work on a World Bank-initiated project to create an open and affordable distance-learning institution for the continent, called African Virtual University. They clicked immediately and spent hours discussing business and a host of other topics of mutual interest.

At 3mice, the partners eventually decided to go their own ways. It was agreed that Njoroge would give back his shares in the company in return for The Mobile Project that had one retainer client and a handful of staff. In 2002, he registered a stand-alone entity, called Cellulant, with Akinboro as his co-founder.

MAKING MONEY FROM MOBILE RINGTONES

Cellulant initially concentrated on selling mobile ringtones and music. They charged around $1 a track and customers paid using their prepaid mobile airtime.

Akinboro wasn’t active in the day-to-day operations and continued to work full-time for two reasons. Firstly, they bootstrapped the business and had little money, which meant one of them had to earn a salary. Secondly, they thought it would be good for the company’s governance to have “one guy sitting on the outside asking hard questions”. Njoroge took on the role of CEO.

Although Cellulant was based in Kenya, their first ringtone services were launched in Uganda and Ghana where they partnered with mobile operators. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much money in it and on top of that, Njoroge frequently had to “scrape together coins” for flights to be able to keep an eye on the businesses. “We looked at each other and said, ‘We are Kenyan and Nigerian – what are we doing in Uganda and Ghana when we are barely making ends meet?’” That was when they decided to focus their efforts on Kenya and Nigeria, where the markets were much bigger, too.

It turned out it was less easy to gain entry into their home countries than it was in Uganda and Ghana. Cellulant spent a long time negotiating with mobile operators and regulatory bodies to get their service up and running. “In Kenya there was literally no regulatory framework for what we were doing. The copyright frameworks did not exist and things took three times longer than we thought they would.”

After much back and forth they eventually launched on Kenya’s Celtel (now Airtel) and Safaricom networks in 2004. That same year they also rolled out an offering in Nigeria.

Cellulant needed good employees, but as Njoroge didn’t have much financial resources to work with, he hired “diamonds in the rough who just needed some polishing” – inexperienced employees eager to learn and willing to commit for the long term. He is not convinced that highly experienced people are always the best fit for a start-up environment and therefore “got people who had a lot of potential, who had a lot of fight in them, but hadn’t realised it yet”.

The first few years in business were tough. Njoroge describes it as “a series of near-death experiences”. Many months they did not have money to pay salaries, which meant employees couldn’t meet their financial commitments either. Njoroge says he’ll never forget the day his chief technology officer (CTO) didn’t turn up for work because he had trouble with his landlord as he hadn’t paid his rent. “I knew if I didn’t get our CTO’s mind back to his work, we wouldn’t complete our projects on time, which would mean that we wouldn’t get paid and would damage our reputation. So I said to him, ‘You get back to work, let me talk to your landlord.’”

Njoroge married within a year of starting Cellulant and the company’s struggles had a big toll on his personal life. “There was no salary in the business for me. With whatever little money there was, I paid the employees first. The business always came first. If a client gave us a cheque and I had to buy a computer server, I would buy the server instead of paying my rent. Of course my family suffered.” Many times there wasn’t even money for diapers for his newborn baby. “Those were very tough times. I sold every asset I could. I borrowed money from everybody I could. If you ask me how I did it, I honestly don’t know.”

Not even the prospect of much-needed money from an outside source could turn Njoroge’s attention away from Cellulant and their vision of building a $1-billion business. During this desperate period a company offered him a freelance assignment to develop a web strategy. Even though the fee was €4 000 ($4 600), and although he had gained considerable expertise in this field during his 3mice days, he turned down the job.

“I knew that €4 000 would be like a cocaine shot. Once I had it, I’d want another and then another – before I knew it, I wouldn’t be focusing on Cellulant anymore. So that discussion did not go past a phone call.”

But Njoroge persevered and the business gradually built up momentum. By 2006, the company was in a relatively stable position. “It was a very slow and tough start, but through persistence and resilience we convinced operators and musicians to come to the table and began to build fairly steady revenues.”

CHANGING COURSE

With Cellulant out of crisis mode, the co-founders had time to reflect on its future and how they were tracking their $1-billion goal. They asked themselves: “Are we going to become a billion-dollar company by selling music?” It was clear that they weren’t. “Music was a good business, but we needed to think of something that could become bigger.”

They began exploring mobile payments platforms, which would also allow them to get a bigger slice of the music business revenue. Up until then, their customers were paying with prepaid airtime, which made Cellulant reliant on mobile network operators. For every $1 song Cellulant sold, the operator typically took about 80 per cent, leaving them with 20 cents. It therefore made sense to build a payment platform that would allow customers to pay Cellulant directly from their bank accounts and bypass the network operators.

The trigger to pivot into a new direction came in 2006 when Safaricom launched its free music service. Almost overnight, Cellulant’s business declined by 70 per cent. Again, they couldn’t pay salaries and were gasping for air.

“We decided that we couldn’t have a business where our fundamental billing platform depended on somebody else’s goodwill. Our music business was too dependent on mobile operators. It was a good business, but it wasn’t resilient enough,” says Njoroge.

They approached all the big banks with a proposal for a mobile banking platform. But it was such a new concept that none of the banks were interested. For two years they couldn’t convince a single one.

Then Safaricom launched another new product in 2007: the revolutionary mobile-money platform M-Pesa, which allows subscribers to transfer money between one another and deposit and withdraw cash through a network of agents.

Within a year, M-Pesa had over a million subscribers. Banks saw M-Pesa as a threat and were scrambling to get onto the mobile-banking bandwagon. “They remembered us and said, ‘Hang on, there are these guys in the corner of Nairobi called Cellulant who have been talking about this thing for a long time. Let’s call them.’ Fear of M-Pesa persuaded banks to pay attention to us. That is how we happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

It is how Cellulant came to launch its first white-labelled mobile wallet which could run with or without internet connectivity in 2009. Very quickly almost all of Kenya’s large banks, including Standard Chartered, Kenya Commercial Bank and Diamond Trust Bank, offered mobile banking solutions using Cellulant’s software. The banks paid Cellulant a set-up fee, ongoing maintenance charges and Cellulant earned a percentage of each transaction.

As the banks expanded their mobile-banking services to other countries in Africa, they took Cellulant with them. “We built our country footprint by basically following multinational banks,” notes Njoroge. Cellulant’s services are currently available in 11 African countries. They have also launched their own branded digital payments platform called Mula, which allows users to pay their utility bills and buy airtime.

TRANSFORMING NIGERIA’S AGRICULTURAL SECTOR

One of Cellulant’s most impactful endeavours is a digital platform used to distribute government subsidies to millions of Nigerian farmers since 2012. Previously, the Nigerian government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy and distribute fertiliser and seed to small-scale farmers, but only about 11 per cent of the fertiliser reached the farmers. The bulk was stolen by the so-called fertiliser mafia.

Cellulant became involved after a chance meeting on a plane. In July 2011, Njoroge and the company’s chairman, Samuel Kiruthu, were on a routine flight to Lagos, when they met Akinwumi Adesina, the then vice president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). They began discussing the problems riddling Nigeria’s fertiliser subsidies and Adesina asked Njoroge how he would solve it. For the next three hours on the plane, the three hammered out a solution that involved an e-wallet and sending subsidies directly to the farmers.

“We painted such a compelling business case that Adesina looked at me and said: ‘This is a very interesting discussion, I think I should introduce you to the Central Bank Governor.’ Then he said, ‘No, I think you should meet the President.’”

In a sheer stroke of luck, Adesina was shortly thereafter appointed Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development and four months later, after Njoroge’s team had done some groundwork in Nigeria, they were invited to pitch their concept to a group of top government officials which included Adesina, the Minister of Finance, the Central Ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Our Sponsors
• Our Early Supporters
• Preface
• Ken Njoroge
• Tseday Asrat
• Tumi Phake
• Monica Musonda
• Hassan Bashir
• Ebele Enunwa
• Tayo Oviosu
• Navalayo Osembo
• Jean de Dieu Kagabo
• Addis Alemayehou
• Kasope Ladipo-Ajai
• Chijioke Dozie
• Sylvester Chauke
• Yoadan Tilahun
• Mossadeck Bally
• Jennifer Bash
• Jesse Moore
• Twapewa Kadhikwa
• Jacques de Vos
• Nana Akua Birmeh
• Nelly Tuikong
• Dr Hend El Sherbini
• NJ Ayuk
• Polo Leteka
• Ashley Uys