What’s life without risks? What do we stand to lose? What is our deepest fear? At the end, we all wish we did more…more when you were the health prefect in secondary school, more in college as secretary of the frat club, more in the university as a captain of the football team, more in your first job as an office assistant. We all wish we did more. Why did we not? Fear? Doubt? Peer pressure? Laziness?
2017 presents us with a new opportunity to put timelines to all that we dreamed of and pursue them with the fervor of the same guilt of not doing enough in the past.
Over the past few years, I have kept an archive of several business ideas I conceived, either by i-nspiration or see-nspiration. Over the next few days or weeks, I want to publish several of them out there. I hope someone will be brave and daring enough to take an idea and run with it. Make it your own and run with it.
I wish you all a beautiful 2017 and pray God will order your steps and set you in the right path!
I am the author of Scaling for Success: Empowering African SMEs. I am a Partner at Sahel Capital, a food and agriculture-focused private investment firm in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sahel Capital manages the Fund for Agriculture Financing in Nigeria (FAFIN) and the Social Enterprise Fund for Agriculture in Africa (SEFAA).
I co-lead SEFAA, an impact-first fund investing in agribusinesses that provide direct or indirect benefits to smallholder farmers across 13 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. I also lead investments and portfolio management for SEFAA and manage FAFIN portfolios, two of which were recently exited. I am a director on the board of one of the portfolio companies and serve in advisory roles for several startups and SMEs.