One of the most heart-warming stories from the African entrepreneurship scene this week was about Margaret Nyamumbo, whose powerful pitch won the hearts and dollars of investors — the ‘Sharks’— when she appeared on the popular TV show ‘Shark Tank’.
Nyamumbo grew up in a community of coffee farmers in rural Kenya and was exposed first-hand to the inequalities of the industry. She noted that women, in spite of contributing about 90 per cent of the labour in coffee farms, were not compensated because they did not own the land.
Nyamumbo left her Wall Street job in 2017 to create Kahawa 1893. ‘Kahawa’ is the Kiswahili word for coffee and 1893 is the year when coffee was first commercially brewed in Kenya.
“At Kahawa 1893, we source our coffee directly from women farmers in Africa. But that’s not all; we go one step further: our customers can tip the coffee farmers and we match the tips,” says Nyamumbo in the Shark Tank episode.
Nyamumbo noted that her coffee business makes more than $1 million in sales annually and she wanted to sell five per cent of her business for $350,000. In the end, she took Emma Grede’s offer of $350,000 for an eight per cent stake in the business. Grede, also an entrepreneur and investor, noted that “any brand that’s going to scale and do really well now has to be rooted in some kind of community”.
Mission-driven entrepreneurs
Nyamumbo represents a new generation of mission-driven entrepreneurs who are more concerned about solving societal problems than revenue.
This perhaps is a philosophy African entrepreneurs can consider while thinking about entrepreneurship with purpose. A particular template that African entrepreneurs can use is the “Mission-Users-Business Revenue”, a framework that Chair and CEO of Mozilla Mitchell Baker often talk about.
Using this decision template, entrepreneurs first consider their mission and their role in society. For example, Nyamumbo’s mission is to address gender inequalities in the Kenyan coffee industry. The second priority is the individual users of your products.
Mitchell cautions that it is easy for a mission-driven organisation to ‘get lost in itself’, which is why entrepreneurs must actively work towards reducing the gap between the mission and the users. “Mission is always first, but the decision-making is pushing the user, customer, consumer much closer to the mission piece so we get a better match for that,” says Mitchell.
This calls for a continuous iterative process between users and your organisation’s mission to find the perfect balance. The last component is the business revenue.
Mission-driven entrepreneurs must think about the business and run it well. Again, this calls for a balance between your mission, users and your business interest. Sometimes you will have to take decisions that go against your business interests — and you should be okay with that. In the end, mission-driven entrepreneurship boils down to one thing, people over profits. BY DAILY NATION