In a recent investor call for our seed round, we were asked about our motivations…
For Nic, a South African who worked in development finance across Africa, set up his own development program for rural SMEs, and built an automation startup previously, his motivations can be easily inferred.
For me, it is less clear. My background in interfacing ai to financial organisations, and managing large data sets and building platforms on top does clearly align. In hindsight it is bizarre how close Vula is to previous projects I’ve built.
But why focus on Africa? The answer obviously isn’t ‘because Nic knows it’!
I’m an optimistic generally and in a climate sense too (read Not the end of the world by Hannah Richie and you’ll be convinced). We can be the first generation where we improve the environment that we inherited and improve lives for us.
I am a globalist. The world’s problems are all our problems.
But I do have worries.
Demographic dividends is a boring word. In short, a baby boom tends to produce an economic boom 20 years later, which increases standards of living, and decreases the number of children people have and hence as the boom generation retires a smaller working population have to support the economy so economic progress slows. It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again.
But it isn’t a sure thing. Fail to make jobs, fail to make economic progress.
Guess what the average age across Africa is?
About 20 years. Most African countries are about to enter their boom stage and I see no structures to build jobs.
Okay, but is this motivation?
The alternative case is. It’s scary.
Fail to provide jobs and hence progress, I fear for increasing tensions, wars, and ultimately mass migration which politically it seems is impossible for the west to accept and hence will only cause great poverty and suffering.
Add to this climate challenges that make strike on poorly prepared and functioning societies, I fear a huge failure for a huge number of people, largely caused because lending money *seemed* risky.
I say seemed as I really do believe this can be addressed, using open finance, using Vula.
