If I asked you to guess
which country in the world
has the highest number
of female entrepreneurs,
which country would you guess?
Don't worry. I'll tell you.
(Laughter)
Uganda, yup, in Africa.
39.6 of all Ugandans
who start, own and operate
their own businesses are women.
Ugandan women are clearly formidable,
but they are not alone.
The second and third country
on that list of world
female entrepreneurs,
according to MasterCard,
were Botswana and Ghana.
Yup, Africa.
(Applause)
So what's keeping these amazing businesses
from dominating global stock exchange?
Why are you not seeing
people like me, yours truly,
listing our companies every day,
dominating Nasdaq
and London Stock Exchange?
Let me tell you what I think.
I love the hero's journey.
I can often be found on Reddit
late into the night,
after I've put the children to bed,
arguing about many fantastical worlds.
And I'm always secretly delighted
that the people
on the other side of the screen
could never guess that the fierce figure
arguing about Middle Earth canon
and the ways of
the Basilisk Isles in Sothoryos
is an African mom of two
who runs a startup out of Lagos, Nigeria.
I was born in a small town in Nigeria.
In 2001, my parents
moved to the United States,
where I grew up, got educated,
got married and decided to start a family.
It was the difficult birth of my son
that started me on my own hero's journey.
You see, while I was on bed rest,
I found out that 556 women
bleed to death every single day
across sub-Saharan Africa.
And to my astonishment, if you could
just move blood to these hospitals,
you could save four out of five women.
I decided as a woman who had sat
on that hospital bed seven years ago,
wondering whether
she was going to survive childbirth,
that I had a duty
to do something about this.
I moved back home to Nigeria
and started my own company.
You see, Africa has the resources.
We have the blood, the oxygen,
the PPE that we need to save lives.
But we don't always have it
at the right place, at the right time.
So that's what we decided to solve.
We built technology
with over 200,000 lines of code
that matches supply to demand,
and we closed the loop
by delivering it to the last mile.
In 2016, when this company started,
we had one single desk
at a coworking space.
And now, as I speak, we operate
across Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
We can deliver as far as Maiduguri,
Borno State, home to the Chibok girls.
But no part of this journey was easy.
In fact, it almost did not start.
Because while I recognized
the size of the problem,
I knew people like me
did not start big businesses.
There was no playbook.
There was no model for me to follow.
And I knew that to solve this problem,
we would need access
to a significant amount of resources,
from venture capital, from philanthropy
and other critical points of growth.
But there was no model
because people like me had not received
the critical resources they needed
to grow and scale their own enterprise.
So does this mean women cannot be heroes?
Does it mean that we cannot
be heroes of our own journey?
No, in fact, women like me
routinely start their own companies.
In Nigeria, we have [Abimbola Adebakin]
who is building the supply chain
to get medicine to the last mile.
We have Bilikiss Abiola,
who is protecting the natural world
by turning trash to cash.
And in Peru, Sully Siucho Diaz
is building wealth for families
by helping them
make better mortgage decisions.
Yet we're not seen as founders
that can scale and build large businesses.
A few years ago,
we needed resources at LifeBank,
and I went to pitch
LifeBank to an investor.
I was very excited,
and I told him about
all the amazing things we would do.
And he said to me, "I just can't see you
building something that scales."
To my face.
(Laughter)
Like any normal person,
I was taken aback by his lack of faith,
but I didn't let that stop me.
I felt like I was duty bound
to build the change,
the innovation that I wanted
to see in the world.
And although he was right,
I don’t look like the classic hero.
But, like Frodo, the journey chose me.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So I didn't let that stop me.
I went out there
and built a great business.
And here are a few points.
Since inception, we've doubled
revenue year on year.
(Applause)
We’ve built technology
that can predict oxygen demand,
and we use blockchain
to track our blood system.
These innovations are novel
even by global standards.
We have rescued over 40,000 people.
Our journey is by no means complete.
But watch us pull it off.
Truth is, heroes are often
not guys in a cape.
And my story suggests
that we must look to the unexpected places
when we are looking
for entrepreneurs and leaders.
Data suggests that if you hold
any kind of bias against a group,
you're most likely to discriminate
against the people
who most need to be heard.
And it is these people
who often have the solution
to the world's most pressing challenges.
It is critical that we do the work
to listen to every voice
and to break down the silos
that keep most of us back
and keep us from starting.
It is time to close the funding gap
between female-led startup,
Black female-led startup world over.
(Applause)
Because while you may not see us,
we are here, and there are millions of us.
So if you are an investor,
I want to invite you to join your peers,
and when you are looking
for founders to back,
look to the unexpected.
And if you are in this room,
and you think you may want
to go on your own hero's quest,
I'm here to tell you to do it.
And if they don't believe you, show them!
The world needs the most unique voice.
Thank you.
(Applause)