For as long as flying has been a thing, Africa has largely been considered a fly-over continent. Centuries of colonial rule, exploitation, tyrannical dictatorships, warlords, and economic desecration have made obtaining fresh water or food or reliable shelter a lifelong goal of many.
Making your first million on the market is pretty far down on the to-do list.
And yet Africa’s new millionaires are starting to appear on the world scene as serious players. Bootstrapping in areas with low-cost labour markets and taking advantage of the continent’s abundant resources, not to mention a new era of global communication, is seeing a growing movement of new money in the hands of young people in countries not known as economic incubators.
The360Hub.com, a news outlet that labels itself as All Things Africa, has come out with its Top 5 Young Millionaires list, and it makes interesting reading.
#5 on the list is Senegalese beverage magnate Magette Wade, a 36-year-old woman who founded Adina World Beat Beverages, which manufactures coffee, tea and juice drinks using recipes and ingredients from smallholder farms across Africa. After raising $30m and getting her product in Whole Foods, Wade turned her attention to a new start-up,
Tiossan Skin-Care.
#4 on the list is South African Justin Stanford, a high school drop-out who started two computer security companies – one which failed, but the next (
ESET Anti-Virus) took off, bringing in $10m in annual turnover. 28-year-old Stanford has taken that success and founded a venture capital firm, 4Di Capital, with the aim of turning South Africa into a Silicon Valley-like tech hub.
#3 on the top five list is Nigerian Ladi Delano, who made $15m at the age of 22 starting and selling a premium vodka brand in China that he managed to get to a 50% local market share. He’s parlayed that money into a Chinese real estate investment company, and is now CEO of a
$1 billion joint venture looking at investment opportunities in African mining, oil, gas and agriculture.
#2 on the list: Uganda’s 29-year-old magnate Ashish Thakkar, whose Mara Group owns concerns in four continents. The company
describes itself as a “16 year-old pan-African multi-sector business conglomerate with extensive operating experience in domestic and international markets. With current operations covering IT, BPO, real estate, asset management, infrastructure, hospitality, packaging, and media.” The group has operations across 18 African countries with revenues of around $100m annually, and Mara has recently signed a deal with the nation of Tanzania to build a $300m mini-city.
#1: South African mover/shaker Mark Shuttlesworth, who founded an internet security company at 22 and sold it for $575m four years later, is the Justin Bieber of African commerce. Young and clearly talented, he took funds from his first exit and started an emerging markets investment fund,
Knife Capital, through which he’s started and sold several companies for 9-figure sums, to companies like Visa (
NYSE:V,
Stock Forum), GE Intelligent Platforms (
NYSE:GE,
Stock Forum) and Verisign (
NASDAQ:VRSN,
Stock Forum). He most recently started the open source Ubuntu operating system.