Our next speaker is the Executive Directive of B Lab East Africa.
A lot of you all might be familiar with B Lab Business for Good.
She is running and in charge of making this happen in East Africa, no big deal.
Everybody, please give a warm welcome to Olivia.
Hello everyone.
It is lovely being here with you all this week at Skoll
and it’s my pleasure today to talk to you about my journey involving inclusion
and why businesses should be involved in inclusion.
I grew up in Nairobi, Kenya
and when I was sixteen years old
we got a chance to go to the Nairobi Stock Exchange.
I was in an all-girls high school
and the Stock Exchange wanted to start bringing women into the market.
They only had two female brokers working at the time.
And standing there and watching the trading floor open and close,
I found it exhilarating.
I wanted to be part of that energy
and so I set my goal:
I wanted to go work at Wall Street.
Fast forward five years later
and I was on a bus ride from Philadelphia to New York
for a job interview at Wall Street.
And this was around the time that the financial crisis was happening
and I found myself at a cross road,
something that I debated during that bus ride.
Research had clearly shown that when
executives were making decisions on housing loans and
all this complex structures that they implemented,
they had not considered the negative impact their decisions would
have on their clients.
They just looked at bottom line.
It was this something that I wanted to a part of.
Did I want to work for organisations that only considered bottom line
and did not consider other stakeholders and did not give them a voice.
Thankfully the answer was no
and so I decided to go search for such organisations.
The goodness of this search is that it landed me back home.
I moved back to Nairobi and started looking for this type of opportunities.
I found myself working for the Macro Finance Sector,
for those who don’t know, MFIs, they provide credit
and access to different financial tools to low income, poor and very poor people.
So those who are considered
un-bankable by the mainstream financial industries.
I worked as a social analyst,
going out to different MFIs in West, East and South Africa
and interacting with their clients and trying to understand
were these MFIs making an impact in their lives.
Did they feel included in the financial sector and the answer was yes.
Most of these people felt empowered,
they felt proud that they were now contributing to the economy.
They felt they had a voice.
They felt included.
This was powerful to me and I wondered,
were other sectors doing this or was it just specific for MFIs
and so again I went searching.
This search led me to my tribe at B Lab.
B Lab works with businesses that use the power of business for good.
These are companies that are competing,
not just to be best in the world, but best for the world.
Companies that consider all their stakeholders
when they’re making decisions, not just the bottom line
and this resonated with me.
Coming from Kenya where our employment rate is high,
income inequality is high,
our environment is going through a horrible impact right now
despite having UNEP headcourted there.
Having these types of companies in our region
could create that positive change that I was looking for.
We work with companies on different initiative,
one of them is B CORP certification.
B CORPs meet a high bar in terms of social and environmental performance.
Early on I got to interact with Dark Forum Africa,
they are a B CORP based out of Nairobi.
Dark Forum was founded by Steve Kamanja.
His childhood dream was to create
a company that would employee the un-employable.
These are mainly youth
who did not have higher education
and how they supported them was to give them employment
or an apprenticeship where they would give them technical training
and then offer them
financing to be able to complete their higher education degree.
Once they’d completed that they’d offer them soft skills training
as well as job placement.
These were the types of companies I wanted to work for.
Companies that were profit focused,
people focused, triple bottom line focused
and so today I encourage those of you who are not part of this tribe,
to join the tribe of businesses who are using the power of business for good.
Thank you.
Such poise.
I learned from the best.
You know what I find really interesting about B Lab going to East Africa
is the translating of something that’s been very US focussed
into something more international.
My question for you is,
what are some of the gaps or needs that need to be addressed
as you’re translating something that’s largely America focused
to something that’s more East Africa focused?
That’s a great question so just to kind of shift that,
we’ve actually been doing global expansion for the last five, six years
and so we started in South America and then progressed to other countries,
so the East Africa hub started about three months ago.
Biggest hurdle of us is,
and this is an opportunity as well,
though social entrepreneurship is booming,
it’s still a very young industry in Kenya,
it’s still a very young concept in East Africa
so trying to have these conversations with companies, it makes sense to them,
it’s something that they’re doing but it still feels a bit western,
so how do we translate this into a local context,
how do we make them feel part of a community.
And one thing that is working to address this challenge is actually
showing them examples of how other regions
that were still at a young stage with social entrepreneurship
came together and worked on building that
and creating that narrative for their region.
So, it’s a challenge that it’s still really young
but we see it as an opportunity for us to start shaping and
articulating what this actually means in East Africa.
Yeah.
Awesome.
And you mentioned that B Lab East Africa is relatively new,
three months, yeah?
Just curious from a personal perspective,
what is it like to build something from the ground up, so new
and what’s your vision for things moving forward for everyone.
So even building something from the ground up,
I find that exciting especially since it’s in my home town.
It makes me really happy.
Anyone at B Lab will tell you this has been my dream for about six years
so bringing the B Lab, the B movement to East Africa
is a dream come true for me.
Having people now talk about the things that matter is important.
It’s stressful,
there’re moments you go sleepless at night
but it’s all worth it because I know with the types of companies
we’re talking to, the people we’re engaging with,
it’s so positive and so energetic.
It is really inspiring to see Africans trying to find solutions for Africa and Africans
who found solutions for Africa.
Such poise, thank you so much.