 So we can just get started. Hi everyone, good afternoon. I hope everyone is having a great first day at Socap and we're really excited to have you here for our panel on women's entrepreneurship in Africa. My name is Liz Grossman and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Baobab Consulting. We are an international firm spanning seven countries in North America, Europe and Africa working to put entrepreneurs, political leaders and organizations that make impact in Africa on the global stage. We have a particular interest in women and we work with established leaders such as former Malawi and president Dr. Joyce Banda and emerging leaders alike to ensure that they command the respect, visibility and resources they need to have impact in their communities. Worldwide women face a $30 billion shortfall in access to credit. Yet the female economy is the world's largest emerging market with the potential to add $12 trillion to the global GDP by 2025. And according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurs globally with approximately 26% of female adults engaging in entrepreneurial activity. But because of gender specific challenges the African Development Bank estimates a $20 billion financing gap for African women causing their businesses to suffer. Needless to say there's a huge opportunity to invest in African women. Today I'm honored to be joined here with two female entrepreneurs, one male entrepreneur and one female investor and they're all originating from Africa. So I just would like to clap for that. That's really exciting. So I'm going to let our panelists introduce themselves. They'll get maximum of two minutes to tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do and please go ahead, Margaret. Hi, my name's Margaret Nyamombo. I'm the founder of Cahow 1893 and we're a specialty coffee company that's focused on empowering women. So I grew up in Kenya actually on a coffee farm. So I grew up knowing all about producing coffee then moved to the US, went to school, did my MBA, went to work on Wall Street and then I looked around and I saw that even as the value of coffee has grown especially Kenyan coffee which is the best coffee in the world objectively. So when I looked, I asked my mom, like how much are you getting for your coffee? And she's like, oh, five cents, like six months or a year later. Then I realized that the coffee supply chain was pretty inefficient in terms of getting a lot of the value that's been growing in the consumer countries and having that value evenly distributed. And especially in Kenya, we're about 90% of the work in coffee is done by women but because they don't own the land so about only 1% of women in Kenya own land. So they don't get a lot of the benefits of coffee. So for me, Cahow 1893 was a way to get the women that are involved in the coffee, get them to benefit from the trade and also to just get fair prices. So what we've done is we've used technology like blockchain to essentially make the trade more transparent so we get more value for farmers and we also help women get access to capital for their businesses. Hi everyone, my name is Saleh Mafangideh. I am from Nigeria. I am a lawyer and a social justice entrepreneur. I started co-founded an organization called Drive African Girl and it has evolved in a lot of different ways like most entrepreneurs in here know. And what we do and the bulk and the core of our work though is to connect African girls to African women in high impact and high power positions. We believe that human capital is actually just as important as like financial resources and if you don't see and have representation within your field as a girl, as a woman, you're very likely going to drop out of that field or not even or have like a lot of barriers to entry. So at the bulk of what we do at the core, what we do is centering young African girls and creating inroads into entrepreneurship or into like other corporate settings for them. As a lawyer, I'm always aware of like the legal implications and the structural barriers that keep women, people of color, minorities down and very interested in using my craft, my art to change that, so thank you all for coming. Good evening everyone, my name is Pauline Bayer. I work with the African Enterprise Challenge Fund. It is a $356 million dollar fund that is supporting businesses in the renewable energy and agricultural sector in sub-Sahara Africa. We have gender, fragility and youth as some of our cross-cutting themes. Why am I in the investment and in the agricultural space? I'm the daughter of a farmer. I was essentially taken to school, to university through the proceeds of what my mother made from farming and because I saw the opportunity, I felt it good to give back by way of looking at the investment side and saying, how do we make more of what my mother did multiply for more women? And that is what pushed me to work for the African Enterprise Challenge Fund where we are making a big difference investing in the continent. I will be talking about the fund we've just launched with funding from UK aid on investing in women that's looking at four African countries, thank you. Hi, my name is James Thuj Madhir and I'm the founder and executive director for Rainmaker Enterprise. I'm the only male on the panel. Rainmaker Enterprise is implementing solar-powered water infrastructure in South Sudan and hopefully branching out to other African countries, especially East Africa region. I started Rainmaker mainly because my great-grandfather and my grandfather, all of them were rainmakers. If you are from Africa, you know what a rainmaker does. These are the people who are entrusted to bring communities together every season that people are to go on the farm to do farming. And these people are the custodian of water. My grandfather was a rainmaker. My great-grandfather was and so was our great-great grandfather. But unfortunately, with the coming of climate change, the powers that my grandfather held and all of that was lost to changing rainfall patterns. And so, being in a unique position as someone who is in a modern day world that has technology, I decided to reinvent the whole practice of being a rainmaker. And so, I started Rainmaker Enterprise to harness the power of the sun, to power communities to farm and have food to eat. That's what I do. Nice, you guys can feel free to make noise. I don't really like silent audiences, so if you like something, please woo-woo or whatever you feel, it's been a long day. So, give us some energy too, we're cool with that. So, the first question I wanted to ask all of our panelists is just to explain more about the landscape for women's entrepreneurship, specifically in Africa. So, Salem, why don't you get started? Yeah. So, I actually wrote down, while I was thinking about the women that we've worked with, so in my capacity with Drive African Girl, we've worked with over 250 women entrepreneurs, from girls to women. I think the first kind of class of entrepreneurs that we see are like the uneducated, in Western education type of entrepreneurs that are very talented in their craft, but they just don't have any desire to go to school. They don't have any desire to go to a formal learning setting, but they're really good at their craft. And so, that's one class of women that I think sometimes often get left out of the conversation because they're not Western educated. Another class of women are those who are like college educated, high school to college educated, but they just can't find jobs when they get out or in the process of school. And so, they start like little things on the side and eventually become, typically become like serial enterprises. So, they're braiding hair and selling things in the market and like selling things to their classmates in school and they just have like multiple different things that they're involved in. Those are usually my favorite to work with because they have a lot of passion, they have a lot of energy and they have a lot of connections within the community. They know everyone because they work in every different space. They're my favorite. And then you have another group that are typically like moms or young women or like middle-aged women who have like done the thing and have paid their dues but just don't have enough financial capital to support themselves. And so, they go into maybe like later in life entrepreneurship opportunities. And those are another group of women that are also left out of resources because they may not necessarily have the time or due to ageism, they may not necessarily have the access into spaces where they can receive resources. That's kind of the landscape from my perspective. From an investor's perspective, we have businesses that are women owned. So we have a class of women that run mega businesses in the continent. We have others who lead big business and that's another class of women. Then we have others who are working in businesses that make a positive contribution to the lives of women. So we do see in our work in 26 countries in Sub-Sahara very different nuances in each context. So if you go to Ethiopia, for example, you will find that to get to work with a woman on business, you have to go through a cooperative. So Ethiopia for us is one very interesting market. The women are there, 85,000 cooperative movements within each cooperative along a certain value chain, certain nuances in that. So as much as we are putting money in women owned businesses, what we are appreciating is that they're different, the landscape matters. I take another example, we're investing in Malawi in renewable energy. The typical woman you'll see investing or to invest in in that space is a social worker turned entrepreneur, turned investor. This is somebody who started doing social work for government, went into the villages, discovered people have no electricity, decided to take fate in her own hands, flew to India, flew to China, bought solar components, came back, assembled, and started selling to the women in the cooperatives in the villages. So we see very, very different nuances of women who are investable. If you come to Kenya, the context is again completely different. You will find people who are born of coffee farmers who are now exporting. We have a woman we are supporting in Kenya who was what we call an extension worker supporting government interventions in the agricultural space. One of the things she was told as she invested is that every person told her we have no access to markets, we have no access to markets. So again, she took fate in her own hands, asked the husband to lend her a bit of money, started a company that is now known as Meru Greens and Meru Greens as we speak is exporting to Europe. She started actually growing their fresh produce in her mother's farm, expanded, started again empowering other women and beyond working in her own county or in a state in the typical US case, she's now working in 26 counties in Kenya and exporting and empowering over 3,000 women. So those are the nuances we see and the beauty for us investing in women. We believe touching one touches many. Thank you. Margaret, I have a question for you. Okay. So you believe in tailored solutions to local problems. So it's not a one size fits all answer for women in Kenya or in Senegal or in Lowy. So based on your experience running your business but also your previous experience at the World Bank, what are some of the approaches that work for empowering women? Sure. And just to continue sort of an extension of the landscape. So one group of entrepreneurs that we never really think of them as entrepreneurs are the female farmers. So for Kahawa, we actually give 25% of our profits to support female entrepreneurs. And actually I insist on the word entrepreneurs when people are asking me what exactly are entrepreneurs? How can farmers be entrepreneurs? And for me, the way that we represent people matters. And I was very keen on making sure that we saw farmers also as entrepreneurs and not just as marginalized people that could not help themselves, that they were actually actively involved in a business. And so, as I mentioned, the coffee farmers in Kenya actually have to wait for a long time for their payment. They wait six months up to a year. And coffee is seasonal. So it actually comes around just once a year. So for the rest of the year, the women have to support themselves using other means. And the way that they do that is they have small businesses, they go to the market, they buy, they grow some crops in their backyard, they take the market, they buy chicken, they can hand clothes. So they do all this micro-businesses and they're the ones that support families. And so for us, when we were thinking about this group of entrepreneurs who obviously don't have the books to show an investor or don't have the land to be able to have an asset-backed type of facility, how do you support this women in the context in which they're already supporting them? And in this context, what they've done is they've actually created this table-lending groups, which is groups of 10 to 30 women that essentially pull their capital together and then have a merry-go-round of sorts where they fund each other's capital purchases over time. So that's kind of what they're supporting. And when we were thinking about how do we participate in that empowerment without disrupting it? Because sometimes external solutions always disrupt what's going on. And once that funding is the community, then there's a lot of disruption. So for me, it was very important to be able to add oil to existing systems. And in this case, it was how do we get more money into the funds that are already circulating? So I'm gonna turn to James, the only man on the panel. So you're already working in a very competitive space as an entrepreneur, as an African entrepreneur, but how can you explain to the audience here what the returns are of investing in African women? I'm sitting on a very hot seat up here. I think it's not a zero-sum game to invest in women over men. I don't think whether it is a zero-sum game. First of all, how I even got to this space where I'm sitting here today, I think I can all attribute that to a woman who invested her time into raising a family by herself as a single mom in the middle of the war. And generations of women in that sense. My grandmother losing her husband during the war and raising my mom and other siblings and my mom raising us as herself as well as an entrepreneur. And so I've always believed in the power of putting resources in the hands of women because they know how to distribute it equally. So I don't necessarily see investing in women as a zero-sum game in that sense. So I'm all about that and that's what I do at Rainmaker Enterprise. The work that we do is focusing specifically on youth and women just because from the context of what I was born into, the war, the people that fight the war are usually youth and the people that feel the effect of the war are women. And so by focusing on women and youth, we are actually focusing on the people that are highly impacted the most by some of these challenges that happen. So I think it's such a great thing that there should be a discussion that we have. I think it's not about what is the return of investing in women over men. I think it should be a question of how can we invest more in women? Good, thank you. Good answer to the hot seat question. Yeah, I'll have to challenge you a little bit more. I don't know. So I want, this question is first for Pauline, but the rest of the panel, I'll give you a chance to answer. As you work with donors, often foreign donors, I'm sure you come across many misconceptions about what women's entrepreneurship in Africa is, and I'd like you to share some of those misconceptions and what the realities actually are for this audience. Thank you. So yeah, just to say, we are once again a multi-donor trust fund. We have a group of donors that believe in the course of what ACF does, which is touching the lives of rural poor. What most people see when you talk about investing in women is risk, and big risk at that. A lot of people see poverty, and a lot of people see the woman in the villages. What we have is, yes, they are structuring inequalities, but we also have a lot of opportunity. We have a lot of talent. We have women who start one business, and before you know it, they're running five businesses. So I think for us, it's as ACF, and this is actually what has led us to convince our donors to actually launch a fund that is specifically looking at investing in women, because there is tremendous, tremendous opportunity. There is tremendous talent, and there's the multiply effect. I give you an example, and we like storytelling a lot. We funded a woman in Zimbabwe who was doing primary maize production, so essentially farming at its lowest form. Within a very, very short time, she had managed to get enough money from her farm to start a security company. Now her security company then has grown to be the largest security, and she essentially brought in what people call the gender element into the security company. It was not just providing security services, but providing security as a service. What that has done is that she's now the largest, she has the largest farm in Zimbabwe that provides security. She's created jobs for women in mainstream. Dog handling, being the watchman, doing any other job that is traditionally looked at as a male job. From where we see it is, fortunately, because we are using ODA or public money, our donors have allowed us to take that first loss, the risk as it's called. We are giving grants, we are giving zero-interest loans, and because that is what we are doing, we are able to catalyze a market that has traditionally been left behind. We believe we've prepared a pipeline of businesses that can now get on the next following of financing. Thank you. So when we talk about investing in women entrepreneurs, often funding comes up as number one need, but there are also some other needs that women have, like mentorship and other forms of support. So I'd like to hear from the two entrepreneurs, the female entrepreneurs, what kinds of support have you maybe received that's not finances, that have helped you, or what would you have liked to receive that maybe you did not? That's a good question, I had one. So many things. But I think yes, apart from money, I think access to our network, I feel like because, so I'll give Kofi as an example, Kofi in the US is a white male industry, so I think when I first came into it, everyone assumed that I was a barista or something. So it took a while for people to figure out that I was actually on the trading side of Kofi, but actually found a lot of allies in the industry. So I think as soon as people figured out that I was in the trading industry, they stepped in to teach me a lot of the things that I didn't know, so I think having a network or having someone pull you into a network that you can use. And the second thing is, like you've said, mentors. So having people that can advocate for you, especially from relationship point of view and people that have access to the resources. So having someone that believes in your mission and what you're doing and that can really advocate for you. And I think just to extend this from sort of my position as a diaspora entrepreneur to kind of entrepreneurs on the ground, I think what they need is like a translator, so someone that can translate their needs and their dreams from a local perspective to a global, basically to a global language. So I think for me, when I think about the women that I'm working with on the ground and being able to translate what they're doing to investors and to buyers and actively, so what we've been able to do is actually develop a certification for women produced coffee which didn't exist before. It was fair trade and now, because of the work that we're doing, being able to convince roasters that they should actually offer female produced coffee as a premium product for people that are interested in supporting women. So I think it's just network, mentorship, and translation. You took most of mine at this point. A huge network, a network is the reason why I do what I do with Thrive. It is connecting people who have done it, people who have been there with people who have not. And I think that from my work, from my perspective, it makes all the difference between people who choose to stay in certain careers and people who don't. And people like that ability to have a network is something that we take for granted a lot. It's something that I didn't particularly have in my career. And I think that's why I'm so hungry to create that for others. I think also trust, there's always an element to risk but I think certain people look the part and so they're trusted more easily. And when you're working with African women, there's just a huge level of distrust. I don't really know why that is. I think global misogyny like distrust for women. And that often comes in even heavier in an African context where African women are just not trusted. They're not brought into conversations. They're not brought into the rooms where decisions are being made. And if you're not actively seeking that, you probably won't get that because of present misogyny in the continent as well. And so going in as an investor, you have to seek women, you have to seek trust, you have to ask for the woman who's running the thing. Because chances are there's always a woman who's running the thing. There's always a woman behind the scenes running the thing but she's not always the person that's present when talking about the thing. Oh no, excuse me. I think also checking in with backtracking. Understanding that Africa is not a monolith, recognizing that I think like everyone else has said, they're very unique needs and they're very unique experiences. And so really taking your time to do your homework before going into a particular part of the continent makes all the difference. So as an example, I grew up in a city town called Calabari in Nigeria and it's a matriarchal run society. And that operates very differently a state of way. And if you don't understand that about the city that I'm from, you don't understand how things are done. You don't understand who's in charge who's making the decisions, who's behind the scenes. You can't get anywhere. And so getting, I guess understanding and doing the homework around the context of the place that you're going to and understanding that a whole other tribe that lives like 10 minutes away do things completely differently. And that's often a barrier because people just assume that the same way things are done in Kenya will be the same way things are done in Malawi or other parts of the continent. Thank you. I'm gonna open it up to you guys in the audience. So if you have a question, I don't know if there are mics that are gonna be passed. No, maybe, yes, great. Or if you have a loud voice and you wanna shout, that's also good. But if you have a question, I mean maybe just raise your hand. Oh, there is a mic. So yeah, I see one up here. Okay, cool. Oh, it's being recorded. Nobody can, yeah. Sorry, everybody in the back. So Margaret was talking about networks and being able to build those networks. And Salem, you were just speaking about the individuality, looking at the individual natures of different communities and making sure that those are connected. Being experienced in this space, how do you overcome that within sub-Saharan Africa, such a massive geographical area? How do you overcome that when you're communicating just with other entrepreneurs directly with one another? Can I answer? Okay, so what we see is that, yes, the context is different and every individual comes as an individual. So what we do is that on the ground we actually very much engage through what we call business associations. So where they exist, they already form on networks. So if you're working with a renewable energy association in Mozambique, they already know one another and they already know the construct of their own community. So you work with what exists on the ground where they are in formal networks. And again, we've done that in Mozambique. We are doing that in Ethiopia with the cooperatives of the SACOs where they are in formal networks. You then learn to work through the informal networks. It's a model that microfinance has taken. So the table banking my colleague was talking about is another channel that you can use. To some extent, you're actually even using the, for example, the Christian-based organizations. So you have the Danish refugee council doing a lot of work, the Norwegian church aid. Those are networks that are already working informally supporting the communities. And you can write on the back of that network to navigate the nuances that come there. Now, there are levels where you actually have to work through government, because then government through its mechanism has the network to access the people. So you will work through the village community head, whoever that is. So somehow, and again, it's the whole thing of just getting a solution to work for what you see as a challenge. So you work with government, you work with civil-based associations, you work with NGOs or informal table banking groups. I would say also the diaspora is a really good way to tap into, because the diaspora serves as what you talked about with the interpreter. So the diaspora, and we see a clear picture of like, oh no, East Africa is very different in this way from West Africa. And so tapping into that diaspora audience of, you know, who's already here? What's work that they're already doing? Who are they connected with already? Chances are you'll be able to like get the shift, the specific nuances of each when you're in that specific diaspora space. Thanks. My name's Jessie. I work at EY or Ernst & Young. I'm part of a small team that runs a low-boner consulting practice that extends EY services to social entrepreneurs globally. It's really great to see at SOCAP a panel of African entrepreneurs and investors. And one of my observations from working in this space for a few years now is that because a lot of the social capital originates in the West, even when we're investing into Africa, inevitably there's a disproportionately high amount of capital that goes to white male founders and entrepreneurs. Mainly, well, my presumption is that it's because it's always easier to invest in something that you recognize and can associate with. And I'm interested to know from you as a panel how investors and donors can do better to search and invest in local African entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurs. Maybe I talk to that because we are living example. So essentially, when we started, we were putting money in foreign owned, well, locally registered, but having majority foreign shareholding. The reason being the space that we're investing in, if you're talking, for example, renewable energy, most of the businesses are essentially, the technology is coming from the West. And because the people bringing the technology in the West, we then found the idea but the company has to be locally owned. What we've done is we've become very deliberate about looking for locally owned businesses. And over the years now, we are supporting over 256 businesses. We've made a case for invest local. What we've also seen is that a lot of, again, because of the nature of the African investable business, most of them are doing it like the one I just get on. So for them to start preparing a business plan, get all these things done is a lot more work. So what we are doing again is working with, we bring in mentors and consultants to work with them to help them prepare bankable business proposals. Cause a lot of them get put off by, give us a two page, give us your business plan. Most of the time it's in the head. And when you ask them to, when you ask them to do this thing. So we are deliberately going out about it. We are not the only one. East Africa has what we call the East Africa venture capital association. It's another association that's trying to bring businesses that are locally owned into mainstream financing. You have also a lot of social impact investors now in the East Africa market. They're going into West Africa as well. And you have a lot of very active ecosystem development. There are a lot of market builders just trying to bring local businesses to the market. I just want to add that it comes back to this whole interpretation and translator issue. So just to give you an example, a friend of mine just got invested in by a foundation that invests in Africa. And he was the first African entrepreneur that they had invested in out of 40. And so they were getting criticized for that. And I think when they looked around their portfolio, what they realized was I think it was, they were more, I think the American entrepreneurs were able to describe those problems in American language in a way that local entrepreneurs aren't able to. So I think for foundations that are looking for African entrepreneurs, and I know East Africa has this issue, a lot of Kenyan investment is actually into American entrepreneurs, which is very, very worrying for the local ecosystem. So I think for foundations, for investors that are specifically looking to invest in Africans, they have to be very intentional. They have to almost have a percentage of their portfolio that they want to make sure is invested in Africans. And also if the portfolio doesn't have, essentially what my colleague was saying, which is they don't have the expertise to be able to put in the due diligence and the paperwork, being able to actually front someone from their staff to prepare them for those kinds of meetings outside. You wanna say something? So from my end, I think most of the time, so I'm South Sudanese Canadian and in most of the spaces that I go into most of the time, not only am I the only African, most of the time I'm the only black person in that particular space. It's both unfortunate and fortunate at the same time. So I realize this is a challenge and it's a challenge that I'm open to also challenging as well. And one of the things that I've been able to do over the years is show up 100% and push really hard for my presence and the presence of other Africans or black people in that sense. For example, I sit on the board of a large fund that funds innovation in conflict affected zones. I'm the only person who is African in that context, maybe the only young person on the team of that advisory board. And so I'm using that space and I acknowledge that I had to kick down all those doors with all my hands and my feet and everything. And so now I'm using that as a way to open doors for other young Africans or African entrepreneurs that are out there or other black entrepreneurs that are out there with a male or female. I would say as well, just pay Africans to tell you about Africa. Like don't pay white men to tell you about Africa. Don't pay people, thank you. Yeah, don't pay people that have been to Africa like twice on a trip on a mission trip to tell you about Africa. Pay Africans who lived in the continent to tell you about their continent. Like that is ultimately what it comes down to. Also, don't ask for free labor. Like if you're setting up meetings with people who are experts in their field, don't expect that they will come to you with their level of expertise and just give that up because you are interested in investing because the fact is the continent also has a lot to give back. And so it's not a charity case. Like the continent has a lot to give back. And so take that level of expertise seriously, like build professional relationships with people that are doing the work, be patient and recognize that trust building goes both ways and people don't just deserve to trust you because you show up with money. Like do the work to prove to yourself as a trustworthy person. Because in the same ways that you're skeptical about taking a risk, like a lot of our entrepreneurs are also skeptical about what comes with the money. What are the strings that are attached with it? And so there's some trust building that needs to be done on both ways too. I also just, I love that question, thank you. And I also just wanna highlight the importance of when you are not from Africa, you need to be sensitive when you're trying to go in there. Like it's not your way that's going to work. You need to take the time to actually analyze and assess the way people work. And also I think it's really important that when you invest, you also invest in the people and giving them the tools to work with you. So we often see like, oh, we'll get like a crash course before we go to Kenya, like, oh, this is the language. We can say like a couple of things in Swahili or a couple of things in Wolaf and we're feeling good. But what about explaining to the people that you're working with on the ground what your working life is like back in New York City? Some of them have never been, they've never seen that. So I think the cultural dialogue really needs to be a dialogue. And if we don't have that, our investments will still be risky and we'll still have these same issues. I saw a couple other hands. I see, yeah, great. Two questions. The first has to do with what efforts are underway to enable more women to have collateral which gives them credibility with a bank. So that's question number one because I observe the inability to have collateral as a big obstacle in getting financed. The second question is obviously this isn't a scientific question but what is your sense of the percentage of women run businesses which move from the informal economy into the formal economy over time or is there, if it's a low percentage is it a choice by women to say this is as far as I wanna go with this business, it supports my family, it does this and this and this or is it obstacles? Anyway, those two. Thank you. Go ahead. So I'll start with the first one which is what are people doing? So from a legal standpoint, I think it's actually, and this is something I have to explain to people when I tell them only 1% of women on land, it's not a legal issue, it's not illegal for women to on land in Kenya. It's just a cultural barrier where essentially it's the men that inherit the land and because the finances are supposed to be shared, there's no reason to have that legal separation. So up to now. So but I think that what we're doing in some of the, you know, in the coffee side is to be able to tell the men to actually give some of the land to the women to produce the women produced coffee. So I think whenever there's like an economic case to be made, then there's a legal extension to that. And I think she'll explain more in the legal aspects. On the second part, second question about how many businesses move from the informal to the former? And this just reminded me of, this is one of the projects I used to work on when I worked at the World Bank which was looking at access to credit and moving people from informal to formal. And what we realized is essentially the incentive to stay in the informal side is high because of the taxes. So cause essentially once you move into the formal sector, then there's a big burden to pay taxes, you know, with the workers. And so for a lot of women, you know, the bridge between going from a solo or you know, partnership to actually an LLC where they kind of have to now get a lawyer and do all of that becomes a big burden. So most of them float in a place where they can still have some access to credit. They make a comfortable living, but to leap onto the LLC becomes a little bit burdensome for them because of the legal framework at the moment. Legal, like there's a lot of legal infrastructure that prevents women from having access to things and a lot of cultural infrastructure. And so I mentioned earlier that I'm from a matratical town, basically like everything in our city goes through your mother's lineage. And so you have your mother's last name, all properties transferred from your mother's side of the family. And in that part of the world, in that part of the continent, there's a lot of women owned infrastructure. There's a lot of women owned land. There's a lot of women owned collateral there because it's more women controlled. There's even the equitable distribution of things that go to men, like happen, but because it's women controlled it, women obviously own more. And so that's an interesting perspective of just that part of my part of the world. As to the formal and informal, it's the same thing. There are taxes, there are legal barriers, a lack of understanding of what the requirements are from moving from informal to formal, also keeps people just staying informal and also lack of time. I think there are a lot of women who are just into doing the thing. They're not really interested in being recognized for doing the thing. They're not really interested in trying to go beg for money to do the thing. They just really wanna do the thing. And so that keeps a lot of women just in the informal, doing what they need to do to survive and support themselves without thinking about the bigger picture. Yeah, again on the collateral issue, there are solutions around land leasing in quite a number of African countries. So you don't have to own, but you can lease the land. And on the basis of that, you can discuss with the financial institution how you then apportion the collateral side of things. We have guarantee facilities that are now quite prevalent in most African countries. Again, what this does is essentially de-risks from the financial services side to a certain portion, up to 50% risk sharing. We've come, there are a lot of new alternative financing solutions. So there's a bit of asset finance that does not involve any borrowing from the bank. So again, that's another solution that's come. There is leasing, there are a lot of homebred solutions that institutions and individuals are coming up with just to go around the issue of collateral. And again, in terms of moving from the formal to informal, with the advancement of technology in the continent now, there are quite a number of businesses moving into mainstream. If you're really doing it for subsistence, then you wanna stay below the radar, but if you wanna scale and you wanna grow and you think there's economic opportunity, then technology is providing that opportunity to move up. And because now a lot of governments have gone, I think there's quite a number of African governments, very few now don't have the e-banking and e-government and e-everything. Once you just get registered, the process is very simple. I think the barrier has been, it's been too much paperwork in the past. And it was, if you're going to farm and do everything else you wanna do, you can remain below, but if somebody streamlines the process for you, then you do it and you get along with it. And the tax is automatically calculated and everything. So there's technology coming in and there's a lot of alternative financing solutions that kinda go around the issue of collateral that is becoming an un-issue now. I think just to briefly, I will talk specifically in context to South Sudan, which is a country that is only seven years old. We are not even talking about collateral at this point in time because there is no any infrastructure, be it financial or any other sort of infrastructure. So what we are doing at the organizational level in order to leapfrog the whole process that other countries have gone through, especially when it comes to collateral, is that at the organizational level, we have a mandate of our women employees, we put them through micro-saving and that is acting as a way for them to prepare them as a new breed of entrepreneurs that can start their own businesses out of their own savings. So as an East African diaspora from Ethiopia, working on women empowerment, it is wonderful to see all of you up there, not only as a women entrepreneurs, but also the pan-Africanism, that's the intersectionality of the work that you're doing. So my question is, what's your biggest challenge and how can we support you? Yeah, James, you first. Man first. Oh, thank you. I just didn't know the order change, but. My biggest challenge, especially, is in particular to South Sudan, which most of you here can relate to. I'm an impact investing, by the way, in every other country that we are here, the only South Sudanese here. And I'm only here because I'm coming through Canada. If I were in South Sudan, I would not be here. So that's one of the biggest challenges. How can we open up opportunities for people that actually need their assistance to launch themselves into taking control of their own challenges? How can we open that? That I would say is the biggest challenge. The second to that is the kind of cringe-worthy kind of approach to investing. At the same time, we are talking about impact investing, but it's not as impact as we are actually talking about it because if I tell you from my hot seat, even as a male, it's not easy to talk about South Sudan and impact investing in the same sentence. From where we sit as ACF, I think what my colleague has added, intentionality is key for us. I think for us, for ACF, it's the second time we are coming to SoCAP. The last year when we came, it was listening into the conversation. We have a lot of money that is interested in moving into the continent. So for example, last year when I came, one person told me, I have $72 million that I need to deploy into the continent in women-owned businesses over the next 24 months. And I asked, so how much do you know about the continent? And then said, give me something in the renewable energy on health. And I said, it takes a lot more than that. So it's intentionality on the part of the investors. There is intent, but we are not seeing that intent converted to real opportunity. On the other side, we are sitting with a market that is full of opportunity. There are businesses that are investable. There are businesses that are making a lot of money. One of the companies we invested in in the early stages was Mcopa in East Africa. Everybody knows now Mcopa is a big thing. Every investor wants to put in money in Mcopa. So we are saying the continent has hope. The continent is on the move. Opportunity exists. What we are asking the investors on this side to do is work with the people on the ground to make the opportunities a reality and much make your money to the opportunities that exist. I think for me, probably my need right now is for people to do their own work on learning about the continent. I think that that is a big need that I have because there are so many questions. There's so much that's going on. There's so much opportunity. And if I feel like every conversation I'm engaging in with people that are interested or investors is like Africa 101, like how many countries are there in Africa? What part of Africa are you into? No West Africa is not the same as North Africa. No, like yes, there are white Africans. The whole spectrum of just educate yourself and be respectful of those who are doing the work on ground before you take up that space in their lives, that is actually really respectful. So that's the need that I have. And for those who are Africans and are already doing the work, partner with those who are on the ground doing the work, like you don't need to reinvent the wheel to create something new when chances are there are people who are already doing the thing. And I think for me it's openness to sort of different investing tools for the continent. I feel like when I speak to people, they wanna put me in non-profit or for-profit. And I think for me coming from Wall Street and seeing all this possible tools and financial tools that we could be using to deploy for these specific solutions and sort of trying to tailor those and explain actually, why don't we create this specific instrument for this population. And I think people are still stuck in or we are impact investors or we are non-profit or we are for-profit or we're like very risk high risk. So I think just having people be open to creating new instruments that are tailored to local solutions, I think that's something that I would love to see more of. Great. So as the moderator, I'm gonna take the last, you wanna do one? Okay. I just wanna add on to addressing Pauline Bayer, especially I love what you're doing in Africa. Sorry, my name is Charlotte Magai and I'm a Kenyan entrepreneur. I make cookstores for low income households and what I wanted to say was like if we complain a lot about investing in American or European citizens who are making solutions for the problems that we face in Africa. So what we can do like the accelerators for entrepreneurs, you can make the African ones to be just as competitive. So that way we're on a level playing feet so we can compete because right now they're still better. Like even though we do not want guys like you to invest in them to bring us solutions, it is the best way to go as at now. So make, create better accelerators for us so that we are just like them. Great, thank you. So yes, I'm gonna take the last question here to wrap us up since it's almost five o'clock and our time is sadly almost over. So Margaret, you said something that really resonated with me and you said how we represent people matters. And so to kind of close this session, what I would like each of you to do is tell us how do you want to be represented? Is that a tough one? Yeah, how do you want to be represented? What do you want people in this room to leave with? Leave with the fact that there's just as much opportunity as there are challenges about Africa and there's actually more opportunity than challenges because I think whenever we talk about Africa, the representation is oh, it's so hard and people are, I don't work in that part of the world or because we're invisible, the focus is always on the bad that's going on. I just want to use the word like disruptive that the disruption doesn't have to come from outside that people can also disrupt themselves within the continent and I'll give the example of M-Pesa which essentially inspired Venmore and some of their other mobile transfers. And when I describe to people kind of what we're doing with coffee and blockchain, it's essentially disrupting the coffee industry and it's possible for farmers to disrupt the whole system. It doesn't have to come from the top. I think from where we see it is to tell the team here that Africa has the pathways, Africa has the opportunity, Africa has the people, Africa has the intent. So we are open to working together. What I can say is to all the investors that are here and maybe innovators and entrepreneurs that are present in the room and maybe out there is to just let you know that do not let yourself, your life be ruled by fear. By fear of unknown, I think that is the biggest trap that you can ever have as a human being. I'm saying this as someone who started a successful business in war-torn Sudan. When you were reading the headlines, I was running my business and I'm here today because I ran that business, paid for my own school fees and covered for expenses for my own family. I'm still on that path. I'm running a business in South Sudan now as war is raging and I will tell you in five years now, from now, I'll show you the results and you'll see that there is success even in fire. So don't let be ruled by fear. Okay, well thank you so much. This was so amazing to get to stand up here and moderate this panel. Thank you everyone for coming and enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you.