Chinelo Anohu-Amazu Quotes

One of the biggest challenges is project preparation. You can always find capital and it is available both domestically and globally.

This is something we incredibly proud of and when we talk about women in business, we’re helping make it a reality. We’re helping create scale and impact. This year, mining especially what are termed green minerals. We have many technology projects and also projects around logistics.

Talent is not the issue on the continent. We have it in abundance. We are naturally blessed in sports and in the creatives.

I explained to African Business why in the current crisis, originating transactions is more important than ever.

With the AIF, which is a flagship initiative of the African Development Bank along with seven other founding partners, we are preparing projects for bankability and helping projects progress through the different steps, the next one being raising capital and once that is done also working to unlock the bottlenecks that can cause some deals to not reach closure.

Around sports you have the merchandising, you have the whole ecosystem, the infrastructure and for those watching these sports, the hotels, the shops, the licensing. This is why people are paying billions for sports franchises.

One should understand that when the presidents come to the AIF they don’t come to AIF as the president of such and such a country, they come to AIF as CEOs of their countries.

Project preparation and due diligence is very important.

I think there needs to be a paradigm shift from the way we look at collaboration.

We are helping structure this, and helping channel investments towards this. The same applies to the creatives, and making sure that we are monetising our creations.

We are constantly putting things on the table that weren’t there before and constantly refusing to take no for an answer when it comes to Africa.

Africa is getting tired of receiving aid, adding that it would be more beneficial for the continent to take charge of its future.

That brings me to your direct question about the perception of the Americans in business. You have to deal with people telling you what they think is good for you because you’re not able to speak for yourself.

At the Africa Investment Forum, we distil the talk into projects.

That’s what we’re doing now with the Africa Investment Forum. Again, building a platform that is multi-transactional, multi-disciplinary and very deal-oriented. We are trying to get away from the endless talk about what needs to be done in Africa to actually doing stuff and we’re doing it one transaction at a time. We distil the talk into projects. We are working with the creative industry, for example, and doing a lot of work and seeing how we can channel funds to where it is needed, not just where people think it is needed.