I wrote this post back on 24 July 2016. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and how true it still is. Finally decided to post it. :-)

I’m officially back in the U.S. full time. It’s strange. They say that astronauts have a harder time with the re-entry than the initial adaptation of living in space. I feel like that. Like when your head and body are still moving after you’ve been on a boat for many hours or days. Living in Africa for 6 years as an expat, you are almost outside the bounds of a culture that pressures you to conform. And you’re a voyeur to American life as you watch the country paddle through media, trends and daily events from across the Atlantic.

A few people have asked what I have had the hardest time with coming back. I can sum it up in one word – CONFORMITY.

It would be silly for me to think that I could live on the outskirts of a culture. The conformity I feel as a white woman in my thirties, the pressure I have to feel and act a certain way is sometimes suffocating. I also think that being in the Midwest exacerbates this. 

It’s hard to find an international community in Chicago – this city is one of the most segregated in the country. Races and cultures do not often mix. [My friends don’t want to go to a Nigerian club on a Friday night. :-( Damn them. How am I supposed to get my fill of Yemi Alade?] Many midwesterners don’t even own a passport. Travelling to California is a big deal to some. I forgot what that was like. 

I often wonder what people think of me. 

I ramble on about Ghana or Norway or Myanmar. Maybe this is a defense mechanism to accentuate how different I am because I’m scared I don’t belong anymore? To me, the world seems very small and very interconnected. And the more we know about other countries, the more we visit them and hear first person perspectives and deeply feel them, the more we understand each other. I’m not scared of going to new places, even when they’re considered “dangerous.” 

Needless to say, American culture is tough for me. People say the same things, read the same crappy news, follow the same shows, listen to the same music. I haven’t owned a TV since I was 18. Yikes. People, especially women, are supposed to look and act a certain way. There are unspoken social cues that have come with the advent of smartphones. We’re able to anonymize people yet become closer to people we haven’t spoken to in 10 years. 

We live in the real world… and in our phone worlds. What’s real anymore?

In a way, I sometimes feel like Americans don’t know what life looks like and sounds like and smells like anymore. Imprisoned by our inability to connect outside of technology… always after the newest, hottest thing. Thing. Why do we like “things” so much? I dunno. All I know is, who the fuck cares? 

Advice to myself: Live life. Do your thing. And enjoy the shit out of every moment you get to live in this body and be this creature. “Be brave. Seek truth. Love without hesitation.” [Can I quote myself? Lol]

I was ending a long trip on the L today and a woman began asking riders for money. She gave a story about losing her job, becoming homeless, etc. Nothing many of us haven’t heard before. I’m not usually the type to give money to people doing that. But, the woman started getting harassed by 3 white men – yelling at her to get a job, that she was too loud, and that she was ruining their train ride. The woman started trying to defend herself. She didn’t look homeless to me. She was a strong, beautiful African-American lady – she didn’t look like she was using drugs or living on the streets.

As I looked her up and down, with the guys scoffing at her loudly, she began crying, impatient to get off at the next stop. It was my stop too. I looked at her and could see so much pain in her watery eyes. I pulled out $5 and gave it to her, touching her shoulder and saying loudly enough so the whole car could hear: “I’m sorry about your situation. But not everyone are assholes. Good luck.”

I got off the train and cried a little myself. I can’t help but think how much racial emotion, oppression, and injustice came out in that moment. Sometimes, the US, and Chicago’s in particular, segregation and unfairness really leaves me hurting – more so than my 6 years of living on the African continent. It’s mind-blowing.

Disclosure: I’m going to get a little dorky in this post, and probably make a lot of assumptions with data that is not 100% proven, nor widely available. I’ll be as conservative as possible in my estimates for the sake of this exercise…

Some Background: To date our company Eneza has reached over 600,000 (offline) uniques in Kenya and Ghana. When we broke down our typical 70,000 monthly active users (well, 135,000 MAUs this month,) in Kenya, we found the following to be true:
• Out of school users make up around 30% of our most active users. These are also our super users.
• There is a high demand for formal secondary school content (local or international) for a broad age range (14-30 years old) whether learners are in school or out of school
• Our users wanted to chat with us on WhatsApp, meaning, they have smartphones

Thus, we made a strategic decision to focus on A. an older market than our usual 10-14 year olds; and B. Launching our Android app to the market.

When I was doing a ton of market research last month for our new financial model, I came across ridiculously amazing stats on Android growth and the potential of 14-25 year olds as customers in the African market. This matched the direction of what we see with our own subset of users. I wanted to share this info, because the numbers were so incredibly powerful to me.
Here’s what I found:

14-25 year olds are going to be THE market to hit in Africa.

Let’s call these adolescent-ish chicks and dudes ANGs for short (Africa’s Next Generations). ANGs are a huge business opportunity that many entrepreneurs are starting to see. International companies are starting to focus their attention onto the last “untapped” market in the world, the ‘Final Frontier’ so to say. And when it comes to spending power and a burgeoning consumer market, 14-25 year olds on The Continent are an amazing market to hit… Why?

1. ANGs account for a HUGE percentage of the population in Africa, especially as the population quadruples in the next 35 years
2. ANGs all buying Android phones
3. ANGs are spending >20% of their income on these Android phones and services on them
4. ANGs are connected and empowered

Some general stats (find me for the source if you really want them):
• 67% of new phones in the market are Android
• 18% of all phones in the Kenyan market right now (Q4 2015) are Android
• Android phones in the market are tripling every 18 months in South Africa

THE BIG DATA

14-25 Year Old Market in English-Speaking (or English-Friendly) Africa

Adjusted for Simple Population Growth Rates (2)

If a certain % of market pays $12/year, (like they do for our educational service already (3)), this is your rev potential:

What about if they pay a bit more, say $20 a year?

Combine simple B2C model with a few select corporate customers, you’ve got one viable business right there. (There all also multiple layers to this model for revenue potential that I’m not even going to discuss here.) If that doesn’t make a B2C market in Africa enticing, I’m not sure what else can. I haven’t even included French-speaking Africa in these estimates, let alone the fact that India is a very viable market to expand to out of Africa. The problem is, not many people care about a B2C model in emerging markets and not as much capital as you’d expect is going into B2C models in Africa.

When I was in Chicago last month, I was at a workshop at a space called 1871. A workshop presenter mentioned that B2C focused companies are so few and far between, who would want to focus on that as a business model? I hear words floating around like “saturated,” “tapped out,” and even “insane,” when it comes to building a B2C company in the States. Insane if you only see that market.

But, if you turn your attention away from the ANG market I just showed you above (who are ready to spend money!) you are missing out on the next big thing. While a bunch of VCs are investing in the latest SaaS company out of the Valley, perhaps they should be looking to Africa for the next Unicorn. The potential is here.

Based off of population estimates in:

(1) http://statisticstimes.com/population/african-countries-by-population.php
(2) Annual Growth rates estimates from CIA World Factbook
(3) What Eneza users currently pay in Kenya

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a foreigner who has started a company in Kenya. While I’ve been here in Kenya since 2008, having lived 5 of the past 7 years in Nairobi and a small village called Muhuru Bay, there is still much about culture and life in Kenya that I don’t understand. Although I whole-heartedly attempt to immerse myself in all Nairobi has to offer – music, food, arts, culture, the scenery – I still often find myself sipping a cappuccino at Arte Café amongst a host of mzungus (foreigners, and more specifically, white people). I get tired and ache for a bit of home, excitedly dipping a cookie into a foaming cup of the Kenyan coffee usually reserved for exports.

No matter how long I stay here, I will always look and be perceived and most importantly, feel foreign. I stand out. I can be a target for crime. I get stared at when I venture outside the confines of my little Kileleshwa <> Kilimani loop de loop.

That said, I feel incredibly fortunate to have started Eneza with two amazing guys who are Kenyan – Kago and Chris. And what you’ll notice about our Eneza Team is that out of 16 people currently on it – 5 managers, 7 other full-time employees, 4 interns, 40 teacher content creators, and 60 agents – I am the only foreigner. I am also the only white person. Our staff represents a myriad of ethnicities and religions that, to me, reflect the make-up of Kenya itself. I’m really proud of that aspect of our team. To many people, especially those who are expats in the social enterprise space, they’re shocked.

A person I consider a mentor here in Nairobi (who happens to also be white) once said to me, “The talent exists here; you just need to find it.” I understand that time might not be on a startup’s side, however. You have to find someone to fit a desperate need and you gotta do it quickly before the ship sinks. But, there are reasons why it is so deeply powerful, enlightening and better for your business to only hire local people and only make an exception in an extreme case. When we started Eneza, we didn’t have this as a policy – and we still don’t. Something about having foreigners on our team just didn’t seem right. Three years of reflection later, I’ve compiled my list of why we hire African.

Here they are:

1. Africans understand African customers – foreigners very rarely do. I may deeply understand rural African areas because I lived there for a year. I may get teachers and understand their frustrations because I was one. But not having that first-person perspective of what it’s like to be Kenyan, growing up with the Kenyan media and in the Kenyan culture, (not just an expat culture, but a Kenyan culture,) will always hold us back as a company. I recognize that, and I try to do everything possible to keep us inline with what our customers want and need. Listening to my co-founders or our head of biz dev tell stories of when they were in school is enlightening. The intuition involved with what Kenyans and even Africans need is everything to your business. It enables you to pitch better; it enables you to make rapid iterations on your products, to better communicate with your customers and to truly feel for your customers.

2. Your customers want to talk with a local person; often they’ll treat you differently if there is a foreigner around. I’ve witnessed this first hand. Last week I was in a school in Nairobi where our agents were first pitching to a head teacher. I gave the head teacher my card, explained to her that I was a teacher too, and told her why we started Eneza. Two days later, we received a note in our office asking us to contribute cash to the school for a donation day. The head teacher had immediately seen me as a dollar sign when I walked into the school building. I was not a teacher helping to lead a company, I was a mzungu with money who could give something to the school. When I don’t visit schools personally, we have better sales and aren’t viewed as a Tom’s shoe dropping machine. We’re taken seriously.

3. You can better maneuver the political scene when the staff negotiating is local. There are certain cultural cues and power dynamics that take years of living in a culture to understand. I often commit taboos in the ways that I do business in Kenya. Luckily for me, our staff usually negotiates our business in Kenya – I don’t. They understand what power dynamics are at play and how to maneuver them. One of our employees pulled me aside the other day and described to me the best way of first approaching head teachers based on her understanding of the school power dynamics. While you could learn a lot of these things as a foreigner through trial and error, (which I still use!) if you’ve grown up in Kenya, these dynamics are obvious. These subtle power cues and our ability to leverage them has substantially increased the efficiency of Eneza’s distribution network of schools and how we do business.

4. Your business will be sustainable. One may argue against me on this, but I whole-heartedly believe that it’s true. If your employees aren’t from the country you’re working in, they probably won’t stick around for too long. When people join the Eneza Team, we bring them into the family. We want them to eat, sleep, and breathe Eneza. We want them to see a future with our company 10 years down the road. We want them to know and feel that Eneza is created by Africans for Africans. How would we be able to do this if we had a mostly white or foreign management team? While I’m sure Americans or other foreigners bring strengths to a team, and may bring additional critical thinking skills, what these foreigners produce are often ‘quick wins’ for a company. A bump in sales, a more efficient system, a neat CRM tool. But the people who have the most impact on our team are those who are on it the longest and become deeply embedded into the Eneza family. That’s really hard to do when the company looks and feels foreign.

So yes, finding those who have deep market knowledge and the skills you need for a startup is challenging when you’re foreign. How do you go about meeting local staff when your friends and networks are all foreigners? But in my mind, and in light of what I think the market deeply needs, keeping a firm commitment to local staff should be a priority for any startup in the African market. (I’m not saying there aren’t benefits to bringing skills and expertise from outsiders. We are finally becoming open to a non-Kenyan hire on our team.) 

What’s going to make a business work in Kenya, however, is the patience and the resilience that Kenyans distinctly bring to the table. It is our duty, as foreign founders, to never, ever forget that.

I meet a lot of people with all the travel I do. Undoubtedly, I’m often asked a series of questions about where I’m going, what I’m doing with Eneza, and of course, the ever more annoying question, “Where do you live?” Since June 2011, my answer has always been “Nairobi.” The past 8 months, it’s been something like “Kenya, the US, on an airplane and in other countries.” Essentially, it’s complicated.

In June 2014, I woke up one evening around 3am to our guards with guns to their heads. There was a bit of commotion outside my window as two thugs came into my compound and stole one of the cars from our lot. It was obvious that these guys had been staking out the compound for some time. They knew exactly which car they wanted. When my roommate decided she was going to leave Kenya and pack up her stuff and our apartment in August, I obliged as well.

“Where you gonna live?” she asked me. But I wasn’t quite sure where yet.

The past 4 years in Nairobi have been eye-opening and an astounding era of both professional and personal growth for me. My co-founder and I started a business, growing our team to 15 amazing people, growing our customer-base so that we could be hitting that break-even mark super soon, growing our reach to nearly 5,000 schools in Kenya. I have met life-long friends that I love, friends who are among the smartest people I’ve ever met, friends who are loyal and loving and just plain awesome. I’ve learned how to let go and love life the way African people do, with intensity. Overall, I love this city. I often tell people that Nairobi holds the heartbeat of the world. Everywhere else is just a pulse.

But as anyone knows when they first arrive back to Nairobi from a long trip away, it is literally a very dark city within an even darker side. I’ve been through great trauma in this city that no one should ever have to endure. In the past 4 years, I’ve: been hit by a matutu and had 5 stitches above my eye, been violently mugged at gunpoint while walking down a street, watched my guards get held up, seen dead bodies hit by cars, seen dead bodies killed by police, watched mob justice in action a handful of times, mourned the loss of a prominent leader in the tech community who was murdered, and in September 2013, lost my friend and old roommate, Ravi, in the Westgate terrorism attack.

The chaos that ensued during Westgate was harrowing. My friends and I were at Oshwal Center that evening, rapid gunfire interrupting our conversations as we anxiously waited to see if our friend would ever emerge. He didn’t. And the process of having to find him – calling the police, visiting the Oshwal Center while the siege was still underway, checking every hospital, and finally, a few friends digging through bodies at the morgue to identify him – was traumatic in and of itself.

The aftermath of Westgate sent me into a tailspin of PTSD. There were times when I didn’t sleep for 3 days straight. I was afraid of everything – of being murdered, of the night, of having the terrible nightmares that had taken over my life, nightmares of gunmen hunting me or my friends. I was lucky if I could sleep for more than 3 hours. And I could never be alone – even in the day. I avoided leaving the house to go anywhere, and I’d panic if I even heard a car backfire or a loud noise while I was in a grocery store. There were times I was convinced our office building was a target and would be bombed. I’d rush out of the office, sending my co-founder a text that said, “I thought we were gonna bombed today. Had to go!” (I made jokes about my paranoia, but it’s pretty bad.) 

The first time I returned to Junction Mall after Westgate was about 6 months later. And of course, there were gunshots nearby when the University students started rioting. I panicked and nearly dropped to the floor. I haven’t been back since. I had gotten to the point where I was sure my heart palpitations were going to give me a heart attack. In early July 2014, I found myself hiding in a closet in my room in Kampala after hearing gunshots off in the distance. I was convinced the bad guys were back. The impending sense of doom had taken over my life.

Thus, In September 2014, I decided to take 2 months away from Kenya to regroup my mind. (This aligned with travels that I had to do in San Francisco, Boulder, and India too.) I took another meditation course, and started to heal.

But what I’ve realized is that PTSD isn’t something that just goes away. It fades in much the same way that a red drop begins to dilute in water. It never dilutes completely, and certain places and memories are continuous triggers of it.

So then, if you haven’t seen me in Nairobi, it’s because A. I don’t really leave the house when I am here except to go to the office, and B. For the past 8 months I have decided to live my life in a gray area: in Nairobi, Chicago and our potential expansion markets (plus other work trips) instead of one place. While in Nairobi I work 15 hour days, exhausting myself silly for a month and then traveling back to the US for 3-4 weeks to give me time to work and heal and navigate my murky and deeply imbedded PTSD in a place I consider quite safe. I could write a novel about what it’s like to live this transient life, with my belongings scattered throughout California, Chicago, New York and Nairobi. Since August 2014, I’ve been to Dar, Chicago, Boulder, San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Omaha, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Durban, Mumbai, Delhi, DC, Charlottesville, Asheville, Raleigh, Accra and a few other places to visit family. But that’s a whole other chapter in my book.

The weird thing is – I like this transient life. I think it’s built my character and strengthened my relationships. I have to be direct and compassionate and vigilant to make it work. I can’t waste time, and I have to communicate clearly – with colleagues and with the people I love. The Eneza Team has kept me strong through it all, and it has only made me closer to the managers on our team. It has allowed other people to shine instead of me and has enabled me to build up my strength to be a better person for the company, for my loved ones and most importantly, for myself. When you live in flux like this, the only sanctity and permanence you have is within you. You have to look within to feel grounded.

Kenya will always be home to me, and I have no plans of leaving our company any time in the near future.  So to anyone who’s asked me in the past few months – there’s your response. I score high on the perseverant scale – I don’t give up. That said, wherever I decide to live in the coming months and years is my decision and will be what’s best for our company and for me. What I need from you, dear friends and family, is to stop asking me where I live. Support me and love me as I take time to heal. You may not be able to understand how I live my life in constant motion, but please, just accept it.

I haven’t written in a while, but I just want to end this by saying how incredibly grateful I am to everyone who has supported me in this transient period. I plan to reward you with a free place to stay when I get a real apartment. :-)