Albert Einstein famously said that “imagination is the highest form of research.” And in one simple phrase, he encompassed the idea that to make change, we have to see beyond the world we live in and look to the potential solutions. We often talk about thinking outside of the box when it comes to solving the world’s problems, but what we are perhaps a little less aware of is just how many people are silently busy blowing the box wide open.
By Muturi Githae
As the men and women on the list below exhibit, the powerful are not boxed into any specific career or demographic. They seize opportunities and overcome adversities to build successful organisations, while utilising their levers of power to support the growth and development of social innovation and create impact across sectors. We hope that the stories of these leaders, in diverse sectors and across multiple countries, will enhance understanding of the opportunity in Africa, spell out what it takes to build a sustainable business , and inspire others to do so.
Innovative business model: Fulfilling a societal need for financial inclusion
The Moneyman: James Mwangi,
CEO, Equity Bank
Kenya

James Mwangi, CEO of Kenya-based Equity Bank, built the company with one core purpose in mind: to solve the social problem of lack of access to financial services. Equity Bank was born out of Mwangi’s turnaround of a then-small Kenyan building society, which was converted into a commercial bank in 2004. Today, it has more than 12 million clients in six countries across East and Central Africa, as well as nearly $5 billion in assets and reported pre-tax profits of $270 million.
By spotting potential at the bottom of Kenya’s economic pyramid, Mwangi has taken Equity Bank from bit-player to market maker in the thriving financial sector. Not stopping there, Mwangi used this momentum to turn Equity Bank into a leading player in the mobile-money space, as well as expanding into regional markets, like South Sudan and the DRC, becoming Kenya’s most international bank in the process.
“Social impact is embedded in our DNA, and it is what has enabled Equity Bank to scale: today it is the biggest bank, by market capitalisation, in East and Central Africa,” Mwangi says.
“We see the bank not just as a company but as a movement for socioeconomic transformation. People see themselves as part of that movement. They say, “I joined, I became a member,” not “I opened an account.” That concept of belonging has been central to Equity Bank’s growth.”
Putting governance at the centre of Africa’s development

Truth Seeker, Mo Ibrahim,
Founder, Mo Ibrahim Foundation
Through the four pillars of his foundation – a prize, an event, a report and fellowships – the Sudanese businessman-turned-philanthropist keeps people thinking about governance on the continent. The Mo Ibrahim Index, now in its 17th year, parlays more than a decade’s worth of data on governance in Africa into specific and practical recommendations for African leaders. He is working hard to raise a commotion about the climate, democratic and technological changes about to hit the continent.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation defines governance as the provision of political, social, economic and environmental goods that a citizen has the right to expect from their state, and that a state has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens.
‘Leadership is the single most important factor in determining the future of African countries,’ said Mo Ibrahim in an interview for Kenya’s Nation newspaper. ‘By governing well in the interests of all their citizens, good leaders create the conditions where all the other challenges, such as health and access to water, can be tackled much more effectively.’
Mo Ibrahim is one of Africa’s most successful entrepreneurs – within less than a decade the mobile phone business he established in 1998 had spread to 15 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, bringing telecommunications to millions of Africans. When the company was sold to MTC Kuwait in 2005 for $3.4 billion, Ibrahim looked for his next challenge.
At the heart of the foundation’s work are two major initiatives: the Ibrahim Index of African Governance and the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. Both break new ground: the Ibrahim Index is the most comprehensive assessment of governance performance on the continent, annually assessing each Sub-Saharan African country against 57 measures (which are then aggregated into an overall score out of 100) and ranking them accordingly.
The Prize also has a legacy component: ‘I hope the money from the Prize will help ensure we don’t lose the experience and expertise of Africa’s best leaders when they leave office by enabling them to continue in other public roles.’ He believes passionately that Africa should celebrate its successes. ‘High quality leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot be overstated – it is a hard job, with many challenges and few resources. Against those odds, if a leader manages to move forward his or her country, it is a wonderful achievement. We need to celebrate those achievements and the people behind them.’ He is keen to highlight that the foundation’s work is funded by African commercial success. ‘There is a sense of Africa’s money returning to Africa,’ he says.
The Index he describes as a ‘tool by which civil society can hold governments to account and frame the debate about how we are governed’. The foundation’s work in this area is, he says, ‘setting benchmarks not only for their own continent, but for the world’
Unleashing Africa’s talent: Imagining new approaches to shape the skills of the future

The Educationalist: Fred Swaniker,
Founder, African Leadership University
Fred Swaniker is the founder of several innovative educational and leadership institutions, including the African Leadership University (ALU), whose campuses in Rwanda and Mauritius are based on a new model of higher education. ALU students manage their own education, using technology, peer-to-peer learning with classmates, and four-month work-experience internships with partner companies. That enables ALU to provide a world-class education at a fraction of the cost of traditional universities.
Swaniker says he spends life today looking for and developing Africa’s future talent observing that the continent is an abundant source of talent. “It(Africa) has the youngest population in the world, with an average age of 19.5, compared to 46 or 47 in Germany and Japan. And this talent is driven, hungry, and willing to learn—all they need is an opportunity,” he says. He adds: “When we give them that opportunity, even though they may have come with less preparation than you might find in other parts of the world, they catch up fast. We’re able to get people who come from very disadvantaged backgrounds with very weak foundations to perform at world-class levels within two years.”
He reveals that companies that succeed in Africa need to look beyond the rough edges that they might see in a young African that they interview-someone who hasn’t necessarily been to a fancy university and doesn’t speak English the way they might expect.
“They need to really invest in that talent; that investment will reap significant rewards for them as they grow.”
Swaniker points outs that technology is a game changer in talent development. “Universities, for example, were invented in a world where information was scarce, but today we live in a world where knowledge is ubiquitous. Today’s technology enables an African sitting in Kenya to get access to world-class curricula and attend classes virtually from Harvard Business School, from Cambridge, from MIT.”
“That’s why we’ve been able to leapfrog and build the universities of the future in Africa, driving significant improvements in human-capital development with much less capital than would have been needed before.”
The educator states that talent development is a critical part of the social mission of business in Africa “because when you’re in Africa, you’re not just doing business, you’re touching lives, you’re creating meaning for your employees, you’re transforming societies, and you’re really creating history.”
Do well by doing good: Making business a full partner in Africa’s transformation

The Change Agent: Graça Machel,
Chair, Graça Machel Trust
Machel, an international human-rights and development advocate, is the founder and patron of New Faces New Voices, a pan-African network that focuses on expanding the role and influence of women in the financial sector. The program not only promotes women’s access to finance and financial services but also aims to bridge the funding gap for African businesses owned by women.
She advocates for a social compact which would see governments, the private sector, academia, and civil-society organizations agree on shared responsibilities to solve Africa’s biggest social and economic challenges and achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. “Those goals are an ambitious, universal call to end poverty, protect the environment, and ensure that all members of our global family enjoy peace and prosperity. They require that we leave no one behind,” she says.
She sees a central role for the private sector to partner in poverty-eradication efforts and collaborate with public-sector and civil-society actors to drive job creation on a massive scale.
“Business leaders should ask themselves, “If our country has a certain percentage of young people who are unemployed, what kind of creative, forward-thinking changes do we have to implement to accelerate job creation and increase employment opportunities for our youth? How can we move from producing 5,000 jobs a year to two million a year, for example?”
Those kinds of audacious goals require a change in mind-set for all of us. Entire industries—and leaders themselves—have to meaningfully transform; it can no longer be business as usual,” she notes.
She notes that development doesn’t happen without transformation, first of people themselves, then of institutions, then of systems. “That means we all have to move out of our comfort zones and move to a different level of thinking, operating, and engaging one another. Ultimately, business leaders should see themselves as responsible partners in a national pact for development,” she states.
Machel says part of the change required is a set of very clear policies and strategies to bring more women into top leadership adding that business leaders in particular should make women’s advancement part and parcel of their strategy of growth and sustainability for the next five, ten, 15, 20 years.
“Human-resources departments and CEOs need to make upward mobility for female staff part of HR strategy and succession planning and ask themselves, “How can we get more qualified women into the C-suite? How are we nurturing our female talent? How do we ensure more capable women are sitting at the highest levels of decision making?” You need to value diversity as an element of strength and make it part of a cultural and institutional transformation.”
Empowering a new generation of African entrepreneurs

The altruist: Tony Elumelu
Founder and Chairman of Heirs Holdings
Tony O. Elumelu is one of Africa’s leading investors and philanthropists. He is the Founder and Chairman of Heirs Holdings, his family owned investment company committed to improving lives and transforming Africa, through long-term investments in strategic sectors of the African economy including financial services, hospitality, power, energy, technology and healthcare. Tony is the Chairman of pan-African financial services group, the United Bank for Africa (UBA), which operates in 20 countries in Africa, the United Kingdom France, and is the only African bank with a commercial deposit taking presence in the United States.
UBA provides corporate, commercial, SME and consumer banking services to more than 21 million customers globally. He also chairs Nigeria’s largest quoted conglomerate, Transcorp Plc whose subsidiaries include Transcorp Power, one of the largest generators of electricity in Nigeria and Transcorp Hotels Plc, Nigeria’s foremost hospitality brand.
He is the Founder and Chairman of Trans-Niger Oil & Gas Limited (TNOG), an upstream oil and gas company which owns and operates Nigeria’s OML17, (with 2P reserves of 1.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent) and committed to creating resource based added value on the African continent. Tony is the most prominent champion of entrepreneurship in Africa.
In 2010, he created The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), the pan-African philanthropy empowering a new generation of African entrepreneurs, catalysing economic growth, driving poverty eradication and ensuring job creation across all 54 African countries. Since inception, the Foundation has funded just under 10,000 entrepreneurs and created a digital ecosystem of over one million Africans as part of its ten year, US$100m commitment through its flagship Entrepreneurship Programme. Self-funded, the Foundation is increasingly sharing its unique ability to identify, train, mentor and fund young entrepreneurs across Africa, with institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other global development agencies.
His businesses and Foundation are inspired by Tony’s economic philosophy of Africapitalism, which positions the private sector, and most importantly entrepreneurs, as the catalyst for the social and economic development of the African continent. Tony sits on a number of public and social sector boards including the World Economic Forum Community of Chairmen and the Global Board of UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited. He was named in the 2020 Time100 Most Influential People in the World, recognised for his business leadership and economic empowerment of young Africans.
Setting Africa’s bar high

Challenging policy makers: Carlos Lopes
Economist and Academic
Africa needs more intellectual leaders. Economist Carlos Lopes fits the bill. The former head of the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa is now teaching about governance at the University of Cape Town. After his work pushing the continental free trade area, he has
turned to how a ‘New Green Deal’, might be applied in Africa, trying to push policy makers on how to adapt to climate change and drive industrialisation at the same time.
He says that what a Green New Deal must do is bring such innovations to scale, through coordinated public and private investment in wind- and solar-power generation – both on- and off-grid – and support for the deployment of clean-cooking solutions.
“This should be integrated with broader efforts to foster green industrialisation and entrepreneurship.”
He adds that given their heightened vulnerability, African countries have every incentive to set the bar high, thereby putting pressure on others to ramp up their own contributions.
“Only with concerted global action will we have any hope of averting climate catastrophe.”
Global advocate against rape as a weapon of war

Medic-cum-human rights advocate: Denis Mukwege
Founder, Panzi Hospital and Foundation
The renowned surgeon, who has devoted his life to helping the victims of sexual assault in the DRC, spoke out to the United Nations in 2012 and was later a victim of an assassination attempt. Co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, he has used this recognition to hold governments and international organisations to account for not doing enough to stop rape being used as a strategy of war. “All [the Nobel Prize]’s importance will be in its capacity to change the situation of victims in conflict zones.”
On an empty plot of land in Panzi, a hilly, impoverished neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bukavu, Denis Mukwege founded Panzi Hospital in 1999 as a clinic for gynaecological and obstetric care. However, when war broke out shortly after, more and more patients arrived with gruesome injuries. Girls whose organs were destroyed by gang rapes. Women whose vaginas were torn apart by the insertion of weapons.
At that time, Dr Mukwege was the only obstetrician-gynaecologist in the region. As Panzi Hospital became a refuge for thousands of victims, the team developed a specific expertise in the treatment of wartime rape.
Panzi developed a model that integrates psychological support, legal assistance and socio-economic support in the existing medical facility. “We can’t just treat the finger or the ear,” Mukwege explains. “We have to see the person as an entire whole.”
Over the years, Dr Mukwege has become a world-leading expert on how to treat the wounds of sexual violence.
Dr Mukwege campaigns globally to bring the use of rape as a weapon of war to an end. As the number of rape victims arriving at the gate of Panzi Hospital increased, Mukwege realised that medical services alone will not solve the problem.
“You can’t operate against violence,” he says. “You can only abolish it.”
Together with the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, Dr Mukwege received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
In his efforts to bring the topic to the attention of the UN and other international organisations, to increase protection for women and to advocate that those responsible for sexual violence be brought to justice, he has become a leading activist for human rights and gender equality.
Rising to a challenge

The Ceiling Smasher: Winnie Byanyima
Executive Director of UNAIDS
Winnie Byanyima is the Executive Director of UNAIDS and an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. A passionate and longstanding champion of social justice and gender equality, Ms Byanyima leads the United Nations’ efforts to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Ms Byanyima believes that health care is a human right and was an early champion of a People’s Vaccine against the coronavirus that is available and free of charge to everyone, everywhere.
Before joining UNAIDS, Ms Byanyima served as the Executive Director of Oxfam International, a confederation of 20 civil society organizations working in more than 90 countries worldwide, empowering people to create a future that is secure, just and free from poverty.
Ms Byanyima led the establishment of the African Union Commission’s Directorate of Gender and Development and also served as Director of Gender and Development at the United Nations Development Programme. She founded the Forum for Women in Democracy, an influential Ugandan nongovernmental organization, and has been deeply involved in building global and African coalitions on social justice issues. A global leader on inequality, Ms Byanyima has co-chaired the World Economic Forum and served on the World Bank’s Advisory Council on Gender and Development, the International Labour Organization’s Global Commission on the Future of Work and the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Ms Byanyima is a recipient of several awards, including honorary doctorates from the University of the Free State, South Africa; University of Manchester, United Kingdom; and Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada. She was awarded the 2018 Human Rights and Solidarity among Peoples Prize by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences.
The philanthropist who connected Africa

The Enabler: Strive Masiyiwa
Founder, Econet Group and Liquid Intelligent Technologies
If Masiyiwa stands out as a Zimbabwean success story – he is the country’s first billionaire and now worth $2.3bn – today it is his philanthropy that matters. Through his Higherlife Foundation, he has provided scholarships for more than 100,000 young Africans; funded education, health and agriculture initiatives; and mentors on Facebook. Now he has entered the third phase: as thought leader he is on boards including the Africa Progress Panel, The Rockefeller
Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
Masyiwa, the founder of Econet Group and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, said in the statement that he’s worked with the foundation for 20 years, “beginning with efforts to improve agricultural production for more than 400 million smallholder farmers in Africa, to improving livelihoods for the poorest people across Africa and the world.”
The Zimbabwean billionaire who became the first black billionaire to enter the Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of £1.087 billion last year, has signed the Giving Pledge, a pledge created by Gates and Buffet to give away more than half of their wealth.
As one of Africa’s most prominent businessmen (albeit from afar), Masiyiwa is also much in demand on the boards of Western companies – his portfolio of directorships includes Unilever and Netflix. But it is his single-minded focus on improving individual lives on the continent that has set him apart.
As Fortune noted in 2017, “few people have shaped modern Africa as much as Masiyiwa” – whether battling to bust corrupt state monopolies or funding the education of Aids orphans. The thread that runs through his whole career is a deep-seated belief that “entrepreneurs like me… can use business to do good”.
Born in 1961, in what was then Rhodesia, Masiyiwa and his parents fled Ian Smith’s white-minority regime to neighbouring Zambia when he was a child. But from the age of 12, he was educated in the UK, says The Times. His “lioness mum” – whose business funded his school fees – had heard good reports of the Holt School, near Edinburgh, from a British neighbour.
After school, Masiyiwa studied electrical engineering at Cardiff University. In his 20s he returned to Zimbabwe, to take up a post at the state-owned telco ZPTC, but was quickly disillusioned by the bureaucracy and cronyism he found there. Ironically – given its implicit support of apartheid South Africa at the time – the institution that backed his first solo business in 1988 was Barclays.