OPINION
Entrepreneurs from the diaspora are ramping up innovation-led development in Africa Ninon Duval, Director, Bond’innov
The African diaspora is a unique resource that must be harnessed. Aside from channelling financial flows back to their countries of origin, thanks to experience acquired abroad and familiarity with the local cultural environment, it helps the Continent’s economic growth by creating businesses and stimulating innovation. Media, fintech, sustainable development, services, etc. Ninon Duval, head of Bond’innov, is helping to showcase the young guns who are blazing an entrepreneurial trail between France and Africa.
AN ARTICLE BY NINON DUVAL Director, Bond’innov
Ninon Duval has been director of Bond’innov since 2011. This association is hosted in the IRD Île-de-France centre and fosters innovation projects in France and throughout Europe. Ninon previously worked as an independent innovation management consultant between 2004 and 2011 and she launched and ran the Paris Mentor programme until the end of 2011. She has also helped set up and develop a number of startups, including Vegetal Fabric, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de l’innovation de Paris in 2011.
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lthough the African diaspora covers a multitude of realities, like most incubators, Bond'innov looks for a typical entrepreneurial profile for the projects it partners: namely men in their thirties, with a degree and initial high-level professional experience. Thanks to its solid financial foundations and extensive network, it is in a position to take calculated risks in its specialist sphere of innovation. These high-tech entrepreneurs from the diaspora play a key role in providing fresh momentum and changing
the image both of the neighbourhoods we work in (knock-on effects and showcasing cosmopolitan neighbourhoods like Bondy where we are based) and of Africa itself. This means that the innovative diaspora – whether in France or in Africa or working between the two – are a major focus for the Conseil présidentiel pour l’Afrique (CPA) which was created in August 2017. In a speech he made a few months later in Ouagadougou, French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated his support for entrepreneurs from the diaspora who would “reinvent relations between France and Africa”.
In a speech he made in 2017 in Ouagadougou, French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated his support for entrepreneurs from the diaspora who would “reinvent relations between France and Africa.
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