Welcome to African Hustle! Your bi-weekly dose of inspiration and smart insights into African entrepreneurship — featuring real stories about tech, culture, startups, founders, and innovations shaping the future of the continent.

The average life expectancy in Africa is 64 years.

Tunisia leads with the highest at 77 years.

Nigeria sits at the lowest, with just 54.8 years.

Opportunity, health, and quality of life look very different depending on where you’re born, even within the same continent.

I came across a post on LinkedIn the other day that inspired the newsletter for today.

Uzair Essack had written:

And here I was thinking, the best I could do when given lemons was make lemonade.

That is the difference between perspective and exposure. The same lemons, two very different approaches to what can be done with them.

Uzair has built a career sourcing and exporting tonnes of African fruits and agricultural produce to America, Europe, and Asia. What most of us see as something for the kitchen, he saw as something for the global market. That shift in thinking has not only made him good money but also earned him recognition from Forbes 30 Under 30.

For selling fruit.

It sounds so simple, almost too simple. But that’s how it usually goes, opportunity often lies where you are, hiding in plain sight. You just need to be exposed well enough to see it.

I remember back in the village, every household had at least five mango trees. They were easy to grow, shaded us from the scorching sun, and gave us fruit abundantly. My grandfather had an entire field of mango trees.

One year, lorries came from the city. They drove through the whole village, harvesting our mangoes. Everything was taken, the green ones, the ripe ones and the small ones still clinging to the branches.

The story we were told was that these mangoes would be taken to factories and made into jam. I don’t know if anyone in the village ever saw a return from those mangoes.

But looking back, the village folk had an entrepreneurial case in their hands. They had a fruit that could fill up trucks. Yet, because no one thought beyond eating and selling a few baskets on the roadside, the opportunity vanished as quickly as the lorries did.

Back in the village, eating and having a cool shade were the only incentives for growing fruit trees, so to this day, no one has planted new mango trees.

When Uzair sees lemons and thinks of exporting. That speaks volumes about his exposure and his association. He’s been in rooms where global trade is discussed. Uzair knows buyers in foreign markets. And he understands logistics, regulations, and currency dynamics.

Meanwhile, for most of us, lemons trigger simple thoughts. Lemonade. Or bitter concoctions for a stubborn cough.

Exposure shifts your frame of reference.

It gives you a wider lens to look at the same world others are looking at, but you start noticing opportunities they can’t even imagine.

Africa is filled with opportunities that could travel the world if only someone saw them differently.

Bananas, avocados, macadamia nuts, coffee beans, shea butter, baobab powder, sorghum, the list is endless. We are a goldmine of agricultural produce. Yet, for the most part, we consume a fraction, waste a fraction, and sell a fraction.

We rarely consider the possibilities of commercialisation

What if those mangoes had been processed into dried fruit and shipped to Europe, where health-conscious consumers pay a premium for tropical snacks?

What if someone had organised the village into a cooperative, ensuring every household benefited directly from exports?

What if we didn’t just see a fruit, but a global commodity chain?

It’s not that one person is smarter than the other. It’s about what they’ve been exposed to.

If you’ve never seen dried mango in a European supermarket, it’s difficult to imagine its worth exceeding $10 a packet.
If you’ve never been in a conversation with peers in the diaspora, you may probably never know that they are desperately seeking emerging market suppliers of agricultural produce.

We act within the limits of what we know.

That’s why the single biggest gift an entrepreneur can give themselves is exposure. Read widely. Travel if you can. Sit in rooms where global ideas are shared. Follow people online who operate on a different scale. Broaden your circle. Because every time your world expands, your opportunities expand with it.

Here, I don’t just mean export in the literal sense of shipping containers abroad.

I mean it as a mindset.

It’s the ability to look at something ordinary and ask yourself, “What is the best use of this?

You may be a photographer. Do you limit yourself to studio shoots, or do you consider exporting your skills digitally by selling stock photos globally, or licensing African-themed visuals to agencies in New York?

You may be a fashion designer. Do you limit yourself to your neighbourhood, or do you think about exporting your designs through e-commerce platforms that reach buyers in London or Lagos?

You may be a software developer. Do you stop at local clients, or do you think about exporting your code, your apps, your plugins to the world?

This export mindset forces you to see beyond lemonade. It reminds you that the world is a marketplace, and Africa’s stories, products, and talent deserve a seat at the table.

Most of Africa’s value chains are broken, underdeveloped, or underutilised.

We grow cocoa, but Switzerland makes the chocolate.
We produce shea butter, but France puts it in luxury skincare.
We export raw coffee beans, but Italy builds billion-dollar espresso brands.
We sell raw cashews, but Vietnam dominates processing.

We sit on the raw materials, but someone else does the exporting, branding, and monetising.

When Uzair says “export lemons,” he is reminding us that we can play a different role. We can own more of the chain. We can build the bridges from raw to refined, from local to global.

That doesn’t mean everyone must start shipping containers tomorrow. But it does mean we must start shifting how we think about what we already have.

We often romanticise entrepreneurship as a hunt for big ideas. But sometimes the biggest idea is simply taking something ordinary and pushing it one step further than most people are willing to.

The same fruit. Four different price points. Four different levels of entrepreneurial thinking.

Where in this chain do you want to play, and how can I capture more value?

There’s another lesson here, Association.

Uzair didn’t wake up one morning and decide to export lemons. He grew into that mindset by being around people who already thought globally.

If all your conversations are about small hustles and survival, that’s the ceiling your mind accepts.

If your conversations are about global markets, trade policy, supply chains, and scaling, suddenly, your ceiling rises.

Who you spend time with matters. Who you learn from matters. Who you associate with matters.

One of the best investments any entrepreneur can make is curating the rooms they enter and the people they listen to.

One of our challenges is that many of us approach entrepreneurship with a survival mindset. We just want to make enough to get by, to pay bills, to keep moving. And there’s nothing wrong with that; survival is important. But it blinds you to bigger possibilities.

When you’re thinking only about today, you miss the chance to build something that can serve you tomorrow.

Strategy begins where survival ends. And strategy is what turns small hustles into scalable businesses.

It’s not just physical products. Culture itself is one of Africa’s biggest exports.

Afrobeats has conquered global music charts. Nollywood films are streamed on Netflix across the world. South African dance trends go viral on TikTok. Kenyan runners dominate marathons. Even our proverbs are quoted in leadership seminars in America.

All of this is export. All of this is taking something rooted in Africa and offering it to the world.

The same principle applies to your work. Never localise your skills, product, or story.

You might not have a mango tree in your backyard, but you’re sitting on something.

Maybe it’s a skill.
Maybe it’s a network.
Maybe it’s a cultural insight.
Maybe it’s a product your grandmother made that the world has never tasted.

Don’t dismiss it just because it feels ordinary. Ordinary here might be extraordinary somewhere else.

The world is shifting. Supply chains are being reconfigured. Consumers are searching for authenticity.

The difference between lemons for lemonade and export is the mindset.

Africa has one of the largest diaspora populations in the world, with almost 350 million people.

In 2023, Africa received $100 billion in remittances, equaling nearly 6% of the continent's GDP, and exceeding both Official Development Assistance, $42 billion, and Foreign Direct Investment, $48 billion.

If the diaspora were a bank, it would be Africa’s 3rd largest.

Most of the remittances go towards family support and consumption, not investment.

That’s where the opportunity lies.

With Africa exporting young, skilled talent at record levels, the diaspora will keep growing, and so will remittances.

The next frontier is diaspora investment funds. There is a need for structured ways to channel diaspora wealth into startups, real estate, infrastructure, and financial products.

✅ Can you build a platform that allows Africa’s diaspora to invest back home in a way that is safe, transparent, and profitable?

Typeform is a no-code platform that helps entrepreneurs create beautiful, conversational forms, surveys, and quizzes.

It will help you to:

✅ Collect customer feedback effortlessly

✅ Run quick market research

✅ Gather insights to fuel business growth

Who was the first Black African to appear on the Forbes list of billionaires?

(Patrice Motsepe in 2008)

Last week, Shoprite crossed the R250 billion revenue mark. Not bad for a business that started with just eight stores in 1979. Today, it’s Africa’s largest food retailer, with 3,000+ outlets and nearly 200,000 employees across 10 countries.

The story is filled with lessons for every entrepreneur:

Tomorrow, start your day by writing down your 3-year goal.

Then ask, “What one action today moves me closer to this?”

Applications are now open for the 2025 MTN-WWF Africa PachiPanda Challenge.

The challenge supports innovative solutions addressing pressing environmental challenges across the continent.

It is open to young people (18 – 35 years), youth-led SME’s, entrepreneurs, individuals, and organisations that work towards sustainable development in participating countries.

Read more and apply here.

By 2050, more than 1 in 4 people worldwide will be African (vs 1 in 11 in 1960).

A differentiation strategy focuses on creating a unique product or service that sets a company apart from its competitors.

This approach emphasises innovation, quality, or exceptional features that are difficult to replicate, allowing businesses to build strong brand loyalty and often charge premium prices

No shortcuts exist to the top of a palm tree.

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