On November 16, 2019, local time, a TV studio in Accra, the capital of Ghana, an African country.
On the stage stood ten young people, men and women, black and white. Ten smiling and confident faces looked at the camera under the stage.
On the big screen behind them, a row of English is displayed:
Africa’s Business Heroes
Under the stage, four judges, three men and one woman, sat in danger.
Two Africans, respectively, are Zimbabwe’s telecom tycoon Straf Mahiywa.And Ibkun Awosika, a Nigerian female banker..
Outstanding African entrepreneurs in these years.
The other two Asian faces are Cai Chongxin, executive vice chairman of Alibaba’s board of directors, and the one who just stepped down as chairman of Alibaba’s board of directors not long ago:
Ma yun
Ten young people are carefully selected from more than 10,000 entrepreneurs in more than 50 countries in Africa.
They need to tell their dreams in front of the camera, introduce their projects, and accept comments from four judges to compete for a total of $1 million in venture capital.
Ten years ago, a similar program in China was all the rage. It was called Win in China.
Ma Yun is also a judge.
01
The first one is a girl from Rwanda, Kevin Kejirimpudu..
Her entrepreneurial project is to make a pair of shoes worn by Rwandans.
The reason that prompted her to start this career was that walking in the streets of Rwanda, she often saw various shoe repair shops, but a large number of people were barefoot.
The reason behind this is that Rwanda’s light industry is very backward, and its shoes and socks are basically imported. Local shoe repairers can only repair shoes, and no one can make shoes.
After a long time, many local people go barefoot all the year round.
Discovering this market, she decided to teach herself and do it herself.
The first step is to search in Google:
How to make a pair of shoes?
According to the steps provided on the internet, Kevin began to practice his hands by using the existing materials at hand-discarded tires that can be seen everywhere on the streets of Rwanda. How to cut the sole, how to polish the leather, how to stick, and how to sew. ……
After several months of trying and consulting the shoe repairer repeatedly, she finally made the first pair of shoes and founded her own footwear brand, employing 70% female employees.
The raw materials she uses basically come from waste tires. This is also a practice of environmental protection.
Are you wearing shoes made by yourself now? Judge Straff asked suddenly.
Kevin standing on the stage directly took off his shoes and sent them to him barefoot.
Sure! You see, there is my company’s LOGO…… in it … I’m so embarrassed!
The audience burst into laughter, and Ma Yun sitting next to him also laughed.
This is far from his first contact with Africa and the young people here.
Two years ago, in 2017, Ma Yun gave a speech to thousands of young people in the university auditorium in Nairobi, Kenya.
In particular, he highlighted his failure to take the college entrance examination three times when he was young, and his failure to apply for a job 30 times to encourage young people to stick to their dreams.
In the cheers of the young people in the audience, Ma Yun said on the spot:
From now on, I will come to Africa every year and visit three African countries. I hope I can visit all 54 African countries in the next 10 to 15 years.
02
Vaccine promotion, agricultural technology, palm oil … One contestant after another came on stage to tell their dreams.
Their dreams are often linked to the suffering of the African continent.
In 1994, the biggest news that shocked the world came from Africa.
This year, a humanitarian disaster broke out in Rwanda, which is destined to be written into human history.
A few years ago, a civil war broke out between Hutu and Tutsi, two major ethnic groups in China, which killed more than 1 million people in just three months and wiped out one seventh of the country’s total population. Many Chinese have seen the film Hotel Rwanda.
Rwandan girl Kristel QuezelaI was born in this year. Fortunately, her home was far from the front line of the conflict and was not affected.
But for Rwandans, the massacre is only part of the disaster. Even if you get away with it, you need to face many challenges and death traps in your life.
The biggest threat comes from the water that everyone can’t live without every day.
In sub-Saharan African countries, almost all of them face the problem of water shortage because of drought. In fact, except for a few areas, most countries have rivers flowing through them, and water shortage is not serious.
What is really lacking is a safe water source that can be used.
In Africa, many deadly diseases, cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever or polio viruses are hidden in surface water, and a large number of people get sick and die after drinking unclean surface water every year.
Many years after the massacre, people in Rwanda are still dying all the time-just because of water.
Quezela’s childhood was full of experiences of fetching water again and again.
As long as she can remember, she and her mother walked to a water point more than ten miles away every day, carrying nearly 20 kilograms, ranging from five or six hours to more than ten hours.
It can be said that most of the labor force in the whole family only do one thing when they are alive: fetch water.
In Rwanda, only a few big cities have a tap water network, which can provide safe groundwater. The annual use price is about 500 dollars, which is about a quarter of the income of an ordinary person.
During her college years, Quezela studied mechanical engineering. After graduation, she founded Rwanda Water Resources Company.
Since 2014, Rwanda Water Resources Company has drilled wells and installed pipelines in more than 90 residential areas all over the country, and built hundreds of tap water networks.
Their price is one-third to one-fifth of the government water supply network.
Ma Yun comments:
Your biggest competitor should be the Rwandan government, because they have been actively promoting water supply construction in recent years.
Only if you are faster than them, provide better services and make your competitors worry about you, can your company continue to survive and grow in the future.
In March this year, after visiting Africa, Ma Yun established the Ma Yun African Youth Entrepreneurship Fund with a total amount of 10 million US dollars.
This fund will spend 1 million yuan each year to support entrepreneurs in the next ten years.
The "African Business Heroes" to be broadcast on major TV stations is the first.
03
In 2009, Temi Jiwatobson, a Nigerian girl studying in the United States.I signed up for an internship program and returned to Nigeria to participate in medical volunteer activities.
In her hometown, Tammy witnessed a scene that she will never forget in her life. A pregnant woman suffered from dystocia that lasted for three days.
Although the doctors and nurses tried their best to rescue them, they failed to recover them. The mother eventually bled heavily, resulting in the death of the baby.
To save the baby’s life, only an ordinary caesarean section is needed, or timely and sufficient blood supply is needed.
It looks like a common condition, but it is almost impossible in Nigeria.
Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa, selling oil to Britain, the United States, China and Japan. However, in the World Health Organization’s ranking of public health conditions, it ranks 187th in the world, ranking fourth from the bottom.
In Nigeria, local couples have an average of 5-8 children, with 814 deaths per 100,000 births. The main cause of death is postpartum hemorrhage.
Five years later, Tammy had her own family, was pregnant with a son, and also suffered from dystocia and bleeding during childbirth.
After a day’s struggle with fate, she has no strength, thinking about whether the fate of that pregnant woman will repeat itself on herself.
Fortunately, she has returned to America. The doctor gave her a blood transfusion easily and performed a caesarean section, saving the lives of mother and son.
After that, Temi, who returned to Nigeria, found:
This country is not short of blood, but information.
Because the information is not interoperable, some hospitals or blood stations store blood that has expired and thrown away, and some places have no blood available. The core issues are information and logistics.
In 2015, she founded a "life bank" based on this idea.To build the largest virtual blood bank in Nigeria.
On the platform of Life Bank, the real-time reserve information of 60 large hospitals and blood banks in China is collected. Hospitals and patients can timely inquire about the nearest blood bank, the reserves of blood of different blood types and blood products, and make reservations at the first time.
Life bank, which provides information and blood distribution services, charges a service fee ranging from 10 to 50 dollars each time.
At first, motorcycles that can walk freely in the streets and lanes and speedboats that cross urban rivers were used to transport blood, and then drones were used.
Since its establishment four years ago, Life Bank has saved the lives of 5,300 Nigerians with its 7×24-hour service.
Temi said that her dream is not only the $20 million blood supply market in Africa, but also the $30 billion African medical market. In addition to transporting blood, Life Bank can also try to transport oxygen, medical equipment, vaccines and other medical supplies urgently needed in Africa.
Ibkun, a female banker familiar with Nigeria’s predicament, spoke highly of this project:
You can’t expand too fast. The market in Nigeria is huge, and your products are related to people’s lives. This sensitivity is bound to require you to be cautious in your business.
Ma spoke, serious, dry goods:
First, global vision, local success. Blood supply is enough, don’t think about anything else.
Second, it’s useless to take away ppt and show the future figures. It doesn’t matter how big the market is. Most entrepreneurs say how big the market is. The market has 10 thousand yuan, but you only earn five yuan. What’s the use?
I don’t like ppt. Your expected data in the future is very vague. Only the specific figures at present can reflect your achievements.
This is not the first time Ma Yun talked about blood in Africa.
He said something like this:
Africa needs hematopoiesis, not blood transfusion. Countries that give more money and children who give more money can’t make a difference.
What we have to do in the end is to support young people in Africa and make them change.
I hope that in the next 20 years, Africa will have at least 100 Alibaba and 1,000 Ma Yun.
During Ma Yun’s trip to Africa, an official of China’s local embassy also used a similar metaphor in his speech:
What about Africa? Ma Yun brought the answer.
One is environmental protection, and the other is the activities of Ma Yun Africa Venture Fund, which stimulates Africa’s endogenous motivation and cultivates local entrepreneurs.
Money can only be given for blood transfusion, and now it is for Africa to make its own blood.
04
Coming to this final, there are also African entrepreneurial projects created by copying the China model.
Walid Rahman, a young man from Cairo, Egypt, told a beautiful story. His project is to make an African version of Hungry.
According to him, in Egypt, more than 35% of the population and nearly 19 million Egyptians are obese. Among them, 3.6 million children are seriously overweight, but another 900,000 children suffer from anemia.
Therefore, his goal is to provide Egyptians with cheap and nutritious food and stay away from junk food.
In 2015, his online ordering platform "Mom" was launched in Cairo, employing all kinds of housewives and using the family kitchen to make food.
Users only need to pay a monthly membership fee of $9 to become members and enjoy free delivery service.
However, the reality is very skinny. In four years, Walid only attracted 7,000 users to register, and the number of orders per year was about 40,000.
Before the total population of 22.8 million in Cairo, this figure seemed to have little influence.
In contrast, China’s Hungry occupied Shanghai Jiaotong University with more than 20,000 people in the first year, and covered all of Shanghai in the second year, with more than 10,000 cooperative restaurants.
For this project that talks too much about ideas, judge Straff gave severe criticism:
I thought your scale was not good at first, but now I find there is something wrong with your figures.
When you introduce your project, you always emphasize nutrition, but it is often children who need to consider nutrition, and adults don’t have time to take care of so many nutrition problems.
You only cook so-called nutritious meals. How competitive can you be in front of Uber Eat (a takeaway service launched by Uber)?
For this project, Ma Yun pointed to the crux of the problem:
It is not a good idea to start a business, which is packaged with too many ideas and stories and lacks a business model.
Make the enterprise bigger first, and then talk about nutrition.
What an entrepreneur should do is to try to make things simple and not to put lipstick on monkeys.
The last project on stage has two CEOs. One speaks on the stage and the other sits under the stage.
Of the two people, one is good at operation and the other is good at financing strategy, so their work is generally mixed up, and whoever does it will do it. Their employees also report to both sides respectively.
A judge asked him why he didn’t come to the stage, and the CEO who came to the stage replied: His eloquence is not good, so I will speak out.
Ma Yun comments:
I had 18 founders and 20-30 businesses. It is impossible to have 20-30 CEOs. Why are there two CEOs? Four CTOs can do it, but two CEOs can’t.
A person has only one heart, so he can’t report his nose to his brain and his eyes to his heart.
Full house laughing and clapping.
After deliberation, four judges named the top three "African business heroes", and Temi, the founder of Life Bank, won the championship.
She will receive a prize of $250,000. Others share the remaining 750,000 in different amounts.
05
This time I went to Africa, Ma Yun was very busy.
In addition to participating in the "African Business Heroes", he also awarded prizes to the rangers who protected nature and animals, and visited many countries, running up to three times a day.
In every country, he was warmly received by the head of state of that country and was asked a question at the same time:
How can Africa learn from China better?
Ma Yun said to the young African people at the scene:
Seeing you is like seeing myself 20 years ago.
I tried to go to Silicon Valley for financing, and I hit a wall again and again. Because no one believes that the Internet in China will develop, and no one believes in China, because we have no credit cards and no logistics.
But because of this, there are opportunities for us entrepreneurs.
If China has everything, what else do we need?
In the past two months, Ma Yun has not been idle, even busier than before.
His schedule is full of public welfare, education, environmental protection, encouraging entrepreneurship and cultivating female leadership …
Africa is also a very important part of it.
He said:
People often ask me why China’s institutions want to protect African animals, and I want to say, why not China?
China and Africa, we live on the same earth, and we only have this earth. If the earth is sick, no one will be healthy.
Africa is a land of hope. Seeing African entrepreneurs, I feel like I saw myself 20 years ago.
