Usually when people think of Africa, they usually think of safari,
wars, HIV, fraud, bad government, poor roads, malnutrition.
But nobody ever thinks of Africa as a hotbed of innovation.
Or a place where intelligent, creative people live and grow up and
do great things.
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My name is Ehi Binitie, and I'm from Rancard, and we're based out of Ghana.
Rancard helps businesses find customers.
Essentially, we look for connections among people and the things they buy.
And how these things are related to people who want to sell something.
So if you had a pair of shoes to sell, you could find
who in the world would be interested in the pair of shoes you have to sell.
We connect people, we connect businesses to users and users to businesses.
My mom had a bakery when I was much younger.
And so I thought there was an opportunity for cupcakes in my class.
So I would bake cakes and put chocolate icing on them.
And put a little Smartie on top of it, and these were a huge hit.
And that was probably my first entrepreneurial venture.
In the final year of university, a co-founder at Rancard, with a friend of
mine, we had this vision of changing the perception of what's meant to be African.
At the time, mobile was just taking off.
And so we had one eye on the future,
looking at systems which enabled people deliver email, their phones.
Bear in mind this was 2001, this was before BlackBerry launched,
and this was in Ghana.
A high-tech company which was a little ahead of its time in the market,
which was just not ready for us yet.
I remember one day, my business partner and
I went to a meeting with a really large consulting firm.
The partner of the consultant firm took a look at us, and
he was like, do you guys even have a laptop?
These two kids, promising to solve these problems, and it seemed totally ludicrous.
But at the same time, it was very interesting.
Because a few months down the road, we were taking on a super ambitious project.
It was a predictive system for
General Electric which would help predict problems before they happen.
We built it, and it was phenomenal.
In our journey as a tech company, we've solved phenomenal problems.
Problems which many parts of the world never get to see.
How you compress data and get it over the lowest bandwidth conditions.
The highest levels of reliability in the world in the most unreliable parts
of the world.
It's great to hear your big clients say,
everywhere we go in the world, we want you to come with us.
But it's even better when you hear someone who says, my life was transformed
because you made something which was simply not available to me.
Once you begin to accept the responsibility of transformation,
then the impact, your impact on people, your business,
your community, becomes better felt.
Go from being the person who builds something to being
the person who build people who build something.
And I think that change in getting people to achieve things way beyond what
they thought they could do is what makes a good leader.
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