 Wow. Hello everybody. Has it been a good day so far? I hope so. It's lovely to meet all of you. My name is Viola Lualan and I am the co-founder of an African fintech platform called Ovamba. It was formed five years ago by myself and my co-founder Marvin Cole to solve the problem that African businesses have with access to capital in order to grow their businesses. And in the five years that we've been doing this we've developed some rather innovative products and solutions but today I really want to talk to you about what it means to build this new idea of Africa in the new tech democracy and there are players like myself and many others who have taken a very honorable role in fixing this. So here we go. Now every time democracy rears its head it's usually because there's been a moment of chaos and for some people they understand that chaos provides an opportunity. Democracy is often followed after a time of some sort of turmoil when there's been unrest or gaps in the market and where there's been confusion or in this case a desire to create technologies to create tools to help us to become the best versions of ourselves and to help other people to become the best versions of themselves. The idea of democracy relates to a gathering of like-minded people, ideas and create structures that will serve everybody on an equal footing in an equal way. Africa's post-colonial experiences are very well known by most people but in case you're not aware of it Africa has suffered very greatly from the inability of individuals to chart their own destination and create stable democracies but now that we're in the fourth industrial revolution I think that that is about to change. So it's a mixed story and I often ask myself the question what if how would we as a continent what would we have looked like if our history had not been interrupted? What would our democracy look like if those bright smart minds had not been extracted from the continent and had been given the the greatest gift of all time to create innovation and time for those innovations to turn into some of the long history companies like you have here in in Japan? What could our story be today without the commercial societal and innovative disruptions that we've experienced and that still occur? In this new era of democracy everything has leapt into the hands of individuals and users and out of the hands of foreign governments and local governments who I don't think have had as much of a good time we're growing the private sector where some of us believe is the destiny and the cradle of democracy in the new fourth industrial revolution. This new era of democracy is exciting at least I think so and watching young people get their hands on all of these new pieces of technology to innovate is something that most of us are going to stand witness to as history begins to reinvent itself for the sake of democracy. So when we see what others outside see as a continent of chaos we see a continent of great opportunity to recreate ourselves in the image of what we think technology requires and in today's world the driver is the chaos and the handheld app is a powerful tool so welcome to Africa's innovation era and me Viola I dare to be your host on today's journey. So as I said Marvin Cole and myself built this company and we have to build our future from scratch every single day idea by idea surmounting objection after objection but why and what are we building the future is waiting to be discovered and in our case for Africa the future has arrived a little bit early and I think in some respects governments have been caught unawares and so have individuals and this is because of Africa's leapfrog growth story which many of you are probably already aware of we bypassed landlines and we bypassed desktops and we bypassed banking and so much more the opportunities are there and growing the youth in the middle class is a great area by which we tend to focus being able to satisfy the tech savvy and the tech hungry and monetizing intellectual property the ideas of all of the individuals that graduate from the tech hubs that are springing up all over the continent it's an opportunity innovate on what has already existed and what has already be created but to make it better this is the true type of valuation value creation that we're excited about the type that investors are interested in funding it all speaks to the current market which has all of these great market imperfections and the growing appetite of the the burgeoning middle class and the appetite for consumerism and it speaks to a multi trillion dollar opportunity across a number of industries and sectors the accelerated consumerism and the need for solutions makes for the perfect opportunity for companies like ovamba and opportunities to partner with Japanese companies that understand what it means to operate within emerging markets with double digit returns it all leads to very huge gains and innovation is needed for all of these sectors that you see here and even more of those that we haven't mentioned or even thought about so Africa and this is an image that most people don't often get to see is physically way more imposing than you could have ever imagined that little part there in yellow is actually Japan and it's bigger and it's not one that's familiar with you but let me give you a few of the stats right now we have 1.2 billion human beings on the planet of sorry on the continent and by 2014 that number is going to hit 2.5 billion that is a very large addressable market of individuals looking for solutions or looking to create solutions and express themselves creatively and of that 2.5 billion most are going to be engaging in entrepreneurism and they will want to move into middle-class consumership Africa is going to count for 40 percent of the global population growth over the next 40 years and this is a land mass that is still underpopulated with the lowest population density in the world 67 cities are going to have more than a billion a million people in them that makes it far more urbanized than India and the diversity is big not just the fact that there are more and more women leading tech and financial companies but the diversity amongst those individuals that don't conform to what could be considered colonial norms religion we have more than a 400 million who are Muslims and need different types of products and services we have languages to more than 2000 distinct languages on the continent where I'm from in Cameroon I was born in the UK but my parents are Cameroonian we have 262 different tribes 262 different languages for which we actually had to create a natural language chatbot in order to deliver a democratic form of financial access to services now I do know that here at slush there are probably vcs this is an unfortunately low number and if you truly want to diversify a portfolio for great returns this 0.3 percent is not cutting it and I suggest that you quickly find great African operators like myself yes I consider myself one of those and come partner with us and find out how you can start to diversify a portfolio that reflects the direction that Africa is going in now I was told earlier today with new friends I've made here in Japan that change can be a little bit difficult to navigate well in the case of Africa change often breeds fear not just for individuals in the continent but for those who are watching us African change is very differently and when we adopt technology it's very rapid it's very sticky take a look at mobile wallets remittances telemedicine or us of amber how we've embedded asset ownership into our fintech solution to help grow small and businesses and small enterprises within that sector of Africa that has often been held hostage by traditional banking systems but we had to change that we've used technology to drive growth by leapfrogging over the typical capital distribution models of banks different can be a little hard to understand and it's hard to communicate if the people you're communicating with believe everything from a western standpoint and a western standard and I often tell people if you were to judge Africa it would buy western standards it's a little bit like saying that fish don't climb trees therefore they're useless at climbing but that's not what we're supposed to be once upon a time bricks was a scary idea for investment but then it became the standard choice and you were considered smart if you picked bricks as an investment opportunity and once upon a time made in Japan or made in Hong Kong was considered a little bit scary and maybe even controversial when the rest of the world is adhering to a global standard created by a few world superpowers it is very difficult for people like myself and businesses like mine to stand out and be culturally accepted because you're used to something else and it is very difficult to express yourself when your history your culture and your ambitions have been hijacked and held hostage by someone who does not belong in your narrative but seems to have developed the power to hold it hostage think about how freely technology can bring transparency and you begin to see the powerful opportunity to open doors understand collaborate with other people in fact if you're talking about change once upon a time having black women leading tech and finance companies globally was not the norm in the same way that people have forgotten about the efforts of Marie Curie who discovered radium well here we are again with history repeating itself or people like Katherine Johnson the black mathematician who helped the American space race if you haven't seen the movie hidden figures i suggest you see it this is a brand new narrative and change is the new norm and without change there is no growth not for anyone in fact i would defy you to argue with me and say that you need to conform to be accepted because to that i say absolutely not you need to be able to chart your own destiny so our African ecosystem has reacted to the change and if you want you can think about our content our continent almost there's a continental level of AI it's a system that has learned to evaluate itself and respond and teach itself based on inputs and in our case in particular we are adapting in response to both negative and positive stimuli whether it's from the media individuals themselves government or when we sit down in front of investors and they think we don't understand African risk and we're trying to explain to you listen to us not to the data and the texts that you've collected because there isn't very much of it and when one of the few people who have created it where the world believes there's war strived political instability there is actually growth and change going on and great minds are building this future we own our own narrative we reject generalizations and we certainly reject the idea of charity we need to be able to grow on our own in this new this new democracy so understanding and sharing is the power tool of democracy if you think about things like blockchain distributed ledgers cryptocurrencies sharing economies the absence of a central governing third party to control trust that's what the new democracy looks like and it's so powerful look at how distance becomes irrelevant telemedicine for example communications language chatbots fintech mobile wallets mobile money being able to do business with each other from anywhere in the world at any point in time one of my favorites is the ability to share ideas and collaborate to solve common problems despite who we are where we are or what we look like it takes the bias out of being able to make judgments about people and whether or not your elements of success are going to be verified the old idea of winning has changed in the new democracy it's no longer binary about winning and losing it's about those people who choose to dare to create democracies where everybody has a chance to win together or at the very least to thrive and in the best scenario winning together creates so much more peace and being able to win as a human right everybody has a right to thrive everybody has to right to win and in the tech age i think this is something that we will be able to to verify and to confirm and to provide to all citizens the democratic equalizer though is time we all fight for time with time to eat to sleep to grow to get into get out of relationships time to swipe right or swipe left on tinder and the time to develop and test innovation time for the masses to adopt ideas and join the collective and how we use time as a marker for creating value we either save time or create time with every app and technology that we innovate and it is a golden principle in the new tech era preventing innovation is the equivalent of holding entire communities hostage to lack of growth and progress and in fact i think it should be created as a crime where we would where we would have been if we had been able to control our own destiny as a continent goodness knows where and it's something that keeps me awake every night but in the next 10 to 20 years africa could quite easily be a global market leader if we can only find a way to use time wisely and innovate wisely to solve social issues and create impact every time we sit down and talk about the great countries of this world japan always comes up and it's respected very greatly around the world and it is a real honor to be here and i know that most of africa looks to japan as a potential partner all of the companies i see behind me and i know the dates might not be so right they have the opportunity and the advantage of time and the ability to maintain stability impact economies and to maintain relevance in periods of time that span more than 100 years we want the same thing that you do africans want to go into the future and be relevant to be able to come out and impact you and export our ideas and our technology and our innovation we do not want to continue to be the recipients of overlays of technologies we want to collaborate now our company in particular ovamba has been on this battlefield for the last five years and i feel that i am a glorious general and i really feel that i am helping to be an architect of a future that in my lifetime i might not see but we shape the seaco system and we deploy apps we interrupt our customers customers need interrupting every single day in our in our economy we encourage we adopt we adapt we co-opt our participants and we engage in disrupt financial institutions we beg them to come join us and be enabled if not we're going to eat their lunch and i know that we can we address the poor narratives we want people to see africa very differently we shirk charity we mold our staff and we demand standards and excellence we push for innovation and automation to create a fair agnostic level playing field where it doesn't matter if you're man female black white gay straight or none of the above africa is waiting for this future and with the level playing field and the tools that we're creating it will help us to for africa to meet its best cultural reality do you know that they're still using banking and risk credit models that come from other countries that have got nothing to do with our own ethnic individuality makes no sense that's not democratic democracy science survives best when it's led by people for the people to help address the needs of everyday people and technology is going to help us win the hearts and minds of the people so that we can all change together innovation technology this is where the new democracy is this is the fourth industrial revolution and i do believe that women africans and individuals will lead this this is a new democracy that is dawning and this ain't your granddaddy's africa in fact it never was but i want you to remember that you saw me and that you heard me today and that i said that there was a continent of individuals just like you looking to join you looking to collaborate with you and hoping that we can join a revolution where what we look like doesn't matter where we all win together thank you slush thank you for listening and i hope that you all enjoy the rest of the conference have a great day