Strive Masiyiwa Article Lifestyles Magazine - Jan 2023

Written by Vanessa Valkin

Strive Masiyiwa works to help Africans stay healthy.

It

would be hard to guess that a reallife African hero is living in the quiet confines of the English countryside, but that is part of the fascinating story of Strive Masiyiwa.

His beginnings were humble, yet today the Zimbabwean-born telecommunications and technology tycoon is listed by the media outlets that count as “Africa’s own Bill Gates,” one of the “50 Most Influential People,” and one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.”

Masiyiwa is the founder of Econet Group, which includes Econet Wireless, a mobile network and payments operator, and Cassava Technologies, which offers fiber broadband networks, data centers, cybersecurity, cloud services, solar renewable energy, and fintech payment platforms. He sits on the boards of Unilever, Netflix, the National Geographic Society, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as on the advisory boards of Bank of America, the Council on Foreign Relations (USA), Stanford University, the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, and the Prince of Wales Trust for Africa. He is the only African member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience.

After I arrive at his home and get settled, our conversation turns to his recent two-year role as the African Union’s (AU) Special Envoy for COVID-19.

Masiyiwa’s private sector leadership in African health crises did not start with the pandemic in 2020, however. Back in 2014, the chair of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (herself a medical doctor), beseeched Masiyiwa to help raise $50 million to fund a major medical intervention to fight the Ebola crisis.

To help tackle the highly transmissible disease, which was devastating parts of West Africa— it was feared it could spread rapidly across not only the continent but also the world—Masiyiwa called friends, including billionaire philanthropists Patrice Motsepe, Cristina Stenbeck, Phuthuma Nhleko, and Aliko Dangote.

“I said to them, ‘Guys, people are dying. We have to do something,’” recalls Masiyiwa. “Nhleko

was first with a $10 million donation, and so it went. Two weeks later, I handed over a check for $50 million.”

The donors established their own board that oversaw the efforts, including sending more than 1,000 African health care workers to affected areas. Within three years, the Ebola outbreak was eradicated.

In June 2020, amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic, Masiyiwa was approached by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who told him that Africa could lose between 10 million and 20 million people. Ramaphosa then asked for Masiyiwa’s help to coordinate private sector and institutional donations.

“I said to President Ramaphosa that trying to get the continent vaccinated was a full-time job,” says Masiyiwa. “He said, ‘Ja, try 20 million people dead.’ I said, ‘I get it.’”

Masiyiwa then assembled a team and organized a call with 53 of the 55 African health ministers to discuss the crisis response and establish their nations’ respective requirements. Around 45 million units of PPE, test kits, and other medical items were soon procured, but no countries or pharmaceutical companies had any vaccines to spare.

“The Americans made it absolutely clear that it was their people first,” notes Masiyiwa. “No Pfizer, no Moderna. The Europeans had AstraZeneca. We couldn’t get that, either.”

Masiyiwa saw his chance when he learned that South African pharmaceutical company Aspen Pharmacare was supplying Johnson & Johnson with a key component of its vaccine. Enough was being made for 250 million doses, but all of it was going to Europe.

“It caused the biggest row,” Masiyiwa recalls. “We went berserk.”

President Ramaphosa informed Johnson & Johnson that the vaccine components would not leave South Africa unless some remained for African citizens.

“And that is how we got the Johnson & Johnson vaccines,” Masiyiwa says, smiling triumphantly.

The AU Vaccine Acquisition Task Team eventually raised $3 billion from AfriEximbank (which is owned by African countries and investors primarily from Africa) and Africa was able to order 400 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines. MasterCard Foundation was the only global donor involved.

While he did what he could when the pandemic began, Masiyiwa’s own philanthropy started as soon as he saw a need for it.

“It was 1990, and we had an HIV/AIDS pandemic. I had been operating my own small business for three or four years and I recognized that I had employees who had died and left small children,” he recalls. “It didn’t matter what pension they

had—I owed it to them to get their children educated.”

Masiyiwa and his wife, Tsitsi, approached relatives of the AIDS orphans and offered to cover all the children’s financial costs. They looked after so many children that Masiyiwa’s accountant admonished him, telling him that he at least had to organize his finances better to continue supporting the children.

And that was the beginning of Masiyiwa and Tsitsi giving through what is now called Higherlife Foundation, and later, Delta Philanthropies.

The couple are also signatories of the Giving Pledge and vowed to focus on social impact investments in education, health, rural transformation, sustainable livelihoods, and disaster preparation and management.

For the past 25 years, Masiyiwa’s family foundations have supported mentorship and training programs and provided scholarships to more than 250,000 young Africans.

“These kids have gone global,” Masiyiwa says proudly. “We have doctors, we have engineers, we have psychiatrists, and they are all over the world. They end up at some of the finest universities. We have had six or seven Rhodes scholars through the program.”

The family’s approach to philanthropy is all about empowering people.

“Africans are not looking for a handout, they

Tsitsi Masiyiwa at Voice of Hope Children’s Home in Harare, Zimbabwe

Melinda French Gates and Masiyiwa

LEFT PHOTO COURTESY OF HIGHERLIFE FOUNDATION; GATES PHOTO BY KHASIJA FARA

are looking for a hand up,” Masiyiwa explains. “Philanthropy is not charity. Charity is giving money and walking away. When you educate somebody and they have a college certificate in their hands, you have taken it to a completely different level. When you help a young girl go to school, that’s a whole family you are helping. So you have to be thoughtful in what you are doing. You can’t be everything to everyone.”

Masiyiwa leaves the operations of the foundations to Tsitsi and their oldest daughter, Elizabeth Tanya, who is the executive director of both family philanthropies.

“I don’t even sit on their board,” remarks Masiyiwa. “My job is to make sure I run a profitable business on this end that is able to meet their annual budget.”

Since 2013, one of Masiyiwa’s personal projects has been an entrepreneurship blog on Facebook, where, on a weekly basis, he writes and shares stories and lessons, interacting directly with almost 6 million followers. As an online mentor, he posts anecdotes, “tough love” lessons, and inspiring quotes, and answers lots of questions, emphasizing the importance of a mindset focused on imagining solutions to Africa’s problems and then launching businesses to solve them.

“My own entrepreneurial journey was something that they could absolutely resonate with,” he says.

And his journey is a tale of grit and bravery.

Born in 1961 in what was then called Rhodesia, Masiyiwa fled his home at age seven to join his parents, who had crossed into neighboring Zambia four years earlier amid the unrest following the country’s declaration of independence from the U.K. His mother’s entrepreneurial business success allowed him to attend a boarding school in Edinburgh. While he intended to join Robert Mugabe’s anti-government guerrilla forces in Zimbabwe after graduating, he instead went to study electrical engineering at Cardiff University in Wales. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1984 and began working as an engineer for the state-owned post and telecommunications company but grew frustrated with the bureaucracy and decided to launch an electrical engineering business.

“When in the early 1990s I saw what mobile technology was going to do, I could barely breathe with excitement,” Masiyiwa remembers.

In 1993, he decided to launch a GSM mobile phone network, but then president Robert Mugabe’s government refused to grant Econet

Masiyiwa with Agripreneur prize winner Isaac Sesi (left) and Svein Tore Holsether

PHOTO BY KATHI WALTHER BOUMA-UBUNTU HOPE

a license to operate, based on the nation’s state monopoly over all telecommunications.

Masiyiwa then embarked on what became a five-year legal battle that ultimately left him nearly bankrupt. The court initially ruled in Masiyiwa’s favor, stating that there was no monopoly over this new technology—but he then lost when the government appealed. It was a challenging time and Mugabe’s government stopped at nothing in trying to intimidate him. He spent nights in prison on random charges and often had government security forces outside his house.

Meanwhile, during the prolonged court fight for the Zimbabwe mobile license, Masiyiwa put together a partnership in neighboring Botswana that won the bid to roll out that country’s first mobile network, Mascom (Masiyiwa Communications).

At home, Masiyiwa refused to give up and appealed to the Consti-

tutional Court of Zimbabwe on the basis that the government monopoly violated the right to freedom of expression: The Zimbabwean government was not providing adequate communications service to its population. Only 1.4 people per 100 had a landline at the time, service was faulty, and long waiting lists existed for the phone lines.

“Does a monopoly exist if only 1 percent of people have a phone that they use for all their communications?” he asks, echoing his arguments from the time. “Could a case not be argued that it was a violation of freedom of expression?”

The court then ruled that a telephone monopoly was unconstitutional because the means by which people communicate is also protected by the freedom of speech act and the monopoly was providing inadequate service and infringing on the mechanism for communication and freedom of speech. The ruling, which led to the removal of the state monopoly in telecommunications, was a landmark case in opening the African telecommunications sector to private capital. Econet’s first cell phone subscriber was connected to the new network in December 1998.

From Botswana and Zimbabwe, Econet expanded into Nigeria, Lesotho, Burundi, and Kenya as well as elsewhere in the world.

Masiyiwa and Svein Tore Holsether with the finalists of the GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize

PHOTO BY KATHI WALTHER BOUM/UBUNTU HOPE

“I went to all these places almost like an evangelist with this new technology and what it could do,” Masiyiwa recounts with a smile. “Along the way, as each technology evolved, we responded. We built Africa’s largest satellite communications business, we built Africa’s largest fiber-optics business.”

Masiyiwa reaches for his iPad and points to a map showing a fiber network stretching from Cape Town to Cairo.

“We built the largest cloud-computing business. We do all the cloud storage, all the cybersecurity. We do so many things,” he explains. “As mobile financial services began to emerge, and mobile insurance began to emerge, we built businesses around that. We have a joke here that there is only one company that has a bigger presence in Africa than us and that is Coca-Cola.”

But even Econet is about giving people a leg up. Its stated mission is “a digitally connected future that leaves no African behind.”

Our interview time is coming to an end, but Masiyiwa wants the global donor community to understand one last thing: the misconception that African countries sit and wait for handouts from the First World.

“You look at some of the media in the West and you think that Africa is just waiting to be given donor money. Very little donor money actually goes to Southern Africa,” he explains. “The biggest source of money flowing in to look after and support African families, $70 billion a year, comes from African remittances. We get less than $10 billion a year from international philanthropists.”

He points out that it is the young Africans living and working abroad, sending money back to their families, and helping kids go to school that is the real philanthropy.

“And we don’t recognize that,” he adds. “Philanthropy is not all about billionaires. It is about the heart and if there’s one place where people understand the importance of heart and helping one another, it’s always been Africa.”

Masiyiwa stands and shakes my hand, then departs for his next engagement to continue his work to help Africans across the continent.

Masiyiwa examines products of a Rwandan entrepreneur

Tsitsi Masiyiwa leading a mentorship session at STAR Leadership Academy

LEFT PHOTO BY KATHI WALTHER BOUMA/UBUNTU HOPE; RIGHT PHOTO COURTESY OF HIGHERLIFE FOUNDATION