Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1Richard MaponyaRichard MaponyaBorn 24 Dec 1920South Africa. Under apartheid, Black traders in townships were limited by law in what and where they could sell. Maponya started with a milk delivery round in Soweto in the 1950s, built a chain of shops and petrol stations despite repeated licence refusals, and spent decades trying to get…0
  2. 2Herman MashabaHerman MashabaBorn 26 Aug 1959South Africa. In 1985, with partners, Mashaba launched Black Like Me, hair-care products made for Black South Africans at a time when the big brands ignored them, selling through salons and hawkers in the townships. Its factory was burned down in 1993, and the business recovered. He later went into…0i
  3. 3Raymond Ackerman (businessman)Raymond Ackerman (businessman)Born 10 Mar 1931South Africa. Fired by another chain, Ackerman bought four small Pick n Pay stores in Cape Town in 1967 and built them into a national grocer by casting himself as the consumer's champion: he fought state-controlled prices, famously selling bread below the fixed price, and campaigned against…0i
  4. 4James MwangiJames MwangiKenya. When Mwangi joined Equity Building Society in the early 1990s it was technically insolvent. He turned it into Equity Bank by doing what Kenya's established banks would not: opening accounts with tiny minimum balances for farmers, traders and the poor, sending mobile banking vans to rural…0i
  5. 5Manu ChandariaManu ChandariaBorn 1 Mar 1929Kenya. Chandaria built the family trading business his father started in Nairobi into the Comcraft Group, which makes steel, aluminium and plastic goods, from roofing sheets to household utensils, for Kenyan and East African buyers who previously relied on imports. Local manufacturing of everyday…0
  6. 6Juliana RotichJuliana RotichKenya. Rotich co-founded Ushahidi, open-source software for crowd-mapping reports during Kenya's 2008 post-election violence, then BRCK in 2013, a rugged internet router with its own battery built for places where power cuts and patchy networks are normal. BRCK later moved into free public Wi-Fi on…0i
  7. 7Said Salim BakhresaSaid Salim BakhresaTanzania. Bakhresa left school young and started selling food in Dar es Salaam, then built Bakhresa Group around everyday staples under the Azam name: wheat flour, ice cream, soft drinks and bottled water priced for Tanzanian households. He added fast ferries between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar and…0
  8. 8Mohammed DewjiMohammed DewjiBorn 8 May 1975Tanzania. Dewji took over his family's trading business, MeTL, in the late 1990s and expanded into manufacturing by buying factories privatised by the state: textiles, edible oils, soap, and drinks such as Mo Cola, sold cheaply across Tanzania. It became one of the country's largest private…0i
  9. 9Bethlehem Tilahun AlemuBethlehem Tilahun AlemuEthiopia. Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu founded soleRebels in 2004 in Zenebework, the Addis Ababa neighbourhood where she grew up, to give local artisans steady, well-paid work. The shoes use soles cut from recycled tyres, a technique long used in Ethiopian selate and barabasso footwear, with hand-spun…0i
  10. 10Mike AdenugaMike AdenugaBorn 29 Apr 1953Nigeria. Adenuga launched Globacom in 2003, and Glo undercut the incumbents by introducing per-second billing to Nigeria, so callers paid for the seconds they used rather than whole minutes. For millions of prepaid customers on tight budgets that changed what a phone call cost, and rivals had to…0