Nigeria

Juliet Anammah: The Powerful Lady Spearheading the Digital Drive in Jumia Nigeria

When it comes to e-commerce in Africa, one name that has been entrenched in the minds of many African consumers is that of Jumia.

And the name that has been saddled with the steering of the ship and provides leadership and direction for the e-commerce giant this past 7 years is Juliet Annamah.

Juliet joined Jumia in 2015 as its Chief Executive Officer and was in that position till January 2020 when she assumed the role of Group Chief Sustainability Officer and Chairperson till date.

As former CEO and now chairperson of Jumia Nigeria, who also doubles as the chief sustainability officer of the Jumia Group, Annamah has her hands full with providing direction for the e-commerce giant.

Jumia as a brand has pioneered a number of firsts within the e-commerce space. It is Africa’s first e-commerce unicorn and was the first to launch Black Friday (the colloquial term for the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, where stores offer discounts and promos on products) in Africa back in 2014. It has since gone on to expand the scope of its Black Friday offerings to span an entire month given the huge success it recorded in Nigeria.

The brand presently operates in 11 African countries and 23 countries globally, and stands out as the first African e-commerce company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Launched in 2012, the Jumia brand has evolved over the years from being a retailer to a marketplace where buyers and sellers meet, thus providing the virtual infrastructure needed to onboard the informal sector. Juliet has apparently played a huge role in its progress so far.

A consummate professional, Juliet has over 28 years of professional experience which spans sectors such as consulting, consumer goods, sales and marketing, and e-commerce.

She started her career at Sanofi Aventis, a French pharmaceutical company, in 1991 and held various roles in the sales, marketing, and product management departments, after which she moved on to join Accenture in 1999, where she rose to become Partner/Managing Director of the company’s manufacturing and consumer goods practice, overseeing all of Africa.

She has a Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an MBA in Finance from ESUT, Nigeria, and is also an alumnus of the Wharton Advanced Management Program.

She is a Fellow at High Impact Leadership for a Better Society, of the Nigeria Leadership Initiative and Yale University.

She has held and continues to hold positions on several boards, in an independent and non-executive capacity. She currently serves as an EXCO at large at CGAP a not-for-profit agency of the IFC/World Bank, and also currently serves on the Boards of Flour Mills of Nigeria and Imperial Logistics South Africa.

Managing a dynamic internet-based marketplace as Jumia does not come easy, especially with the challenge of bringing more sellers on board in a market where a large portion of sellers are based in the informal sector without access to formal credit, but Juliet is well up to the task even as she provides direction for the e-commerce giant driven by a vision beyond just profit-making.

According to her, “In the end, reducing inequality is so critical and is a big part of how we create value. And how we create sustainable improvement in quality of lives on the continent is by asking ourselves: What more can we do?”

Looking ahead, the challenge for the Jumia brand, she says, isn’t really so much the expected competition from other brands like Konga, but the informal market.

“The real competition is the informal market. We are every day working to bring more and more sellers to the platform, and bring more brands to the platform, excite more consumers,” she says in an interview on Grit & Growth, a podcast produced by Stanford Seed, an institute at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Juliet certainly has her work cut out for her and is poised to take the e-commerce brand even to greater heights in the years ahead.

Senegalese Tech Founder Drew Durbin is Helping Africans to Build Affordable Financial Infrastructure

Drew Durbin is the co-founder and CEO of Wave, a digital mobile money platform helping Africa build extremely affordable financial infrastructure. The company prides itself on being Africa’s biggest startupdiaspora community.

The Senegalese-born Durbin started Wave in 2018 with Lincoln Quirk, his American schoolmate. The pair met at Brown University, an ivy league private institution in Rhode Island, United States. Both of them also co-founded Sendwave, the money remittance company that WorldRemit acquired in 2020.

Destined partnership and aligned vision

Drew and Lincoln became friends because they shared a passion for creating simple products with a social impact. And with Wave, they believe they can make Africa the first cashless continent.

“We are deeply committed to developing products that users love. Our technological background, combined with our living experience in some African countries like Tanzania and Senegal, was the ideal combination for developing a technology-first solution to address the challenges of domestic money transfer in Senegal,” Quirk says.

Drew Durbin and his partner focused on cross-border payments in 2014 after Drew became frustrated with the difficulties of sending money to his Tanzanian NGO.

“This prompted us to create a no-fee instant remittances app that allows users to send money from North America and Europe to East and West Africa,” Drew says.

After launching that, they realised that mobile money provided by telcos was expensive and provided a poor user experience.

According to them, “Besides, the technology (USSD) was out of date, and the customer experience and agent liquidity were both lacking. So, in 2018, we launched Wave Mobile Money, our second company, in Senegal.”

Interestingly, in 2021, WorldRemit, a digital, global crossborder payments company, completed a $500 million cash and stock acquisition of SendWave in 2021. Durbin said Wave was piloted in Senegal from within the Sendwave ecosystem. Partech invested in Wave in 2018 before spinning it off because “Wave has executed superbly from a proof of concept level,” Tidjane Dème, the firm’s general partner, told Quartz.

In the past, Drew Durbin has been associated with four companies, according to public records. The companies were formed over six years, the most recent being incorporated one year ago in May of 2021. Two of the companies are still active, while the remaining two are now listed as inactive.

The competition woes

As an independent company, Wave aimed to compete against telecom companies like Orange, also a mainstay of mobile money in Francophone West Africa.

Both companies have had at least one commercial disagreement so far: Orange refused to allow Wave to sell Orange airtime to users. The issue has been referred to Senegalese regulators.

While that is resolved, Wave looks set to march on to compete for territory in other telco-dominated mobile money markets. Its intention to launch in Uganda suggests new competition for MTN and Safaricom’s Mpesa - the continent’s flagship mobile money juggernaut.

Becoming one of Africa’s tech unicorns

According to Durbin, when mobile money succeeded in Kenya, it lifted about a million people out of poverty. And yet, over ten years later, most Africans still lack access to affordable ways to save, transfer or borrow the money they need to build businesses or provide for their families.

In 2021, Drew Durbin’s Wave became Africa’s one of Africa’s tech unicorns after a $200-million Series-A funding round. The platform was valued at $1.7 billion.

TechCrunch reported the investment as the largest-ever Series-A funding round raised by an Africa-based startup. The investment was led by top Sequoia Heritage, a subsidiary of the Sequoia brand, Founders Fund, Stripe and Ribbit Capital.