In this Telescope Foundation LENS Q&A, we talk with Okendo Lewis-Gayle, founder and chairman of Harambeans, a Pan-African alliance of exceptional entrepreneurs spanning 36 countries. Okendo shares why trust, not talent, is Africa's scarce resource; how AI is unlocking capabilities that geography once kept out of reach; and what separates an alliance from a network.
Tell me about Harambeans and how your work aligns with Telescope Foundation’s mission to build technology that works for more people.
For almost 20 years, we've been building a Pan-African alliance of exceptional entrepreneurs, and today we have more than 400 Harambeans across 36 African countries building some of the fastest-growing companies on the continent. But I often say that our real product is the relationships — the deep relationships of trust that enable Harambeans to collaborate across cultures, borders, and industries.
We’re building the human infrastructure for African entrepreneurship. For two decades, we’ve been exploring the question: what happens when you deliberately identify exceptional young Africans, immerse them in a culture of servant leadership, give them a common identity, and then help them develop enough trust to collaborate?
Talent isn't a scarce resource; Africa has plenty of it. Trust is a scarce resource because once trust is established, knowledge, networks, and capital move much faster. Or as we say around here, they scale at the speed of Harambean trust. That's one reason our work intersects with Telescope. Telescope is exploring how you find and equip the builders of the future, and we've been asking a similar question from an African perspective.
Where does the name come from?
Harambeans derives from Harambee, a Swahili word meaning "working together." To us, the Harambeans are the people who choose to go to work together as one.
When you picture a future that works for everybody, what does that look like?
A future that works for everybody is one where geography doesn't determine the size of your ambition. A brilliant young person in Lagos shouldn't need to have been born in London or Silicon Valley to help build our future.
I'm increasingly convinced that the most impactful thing AI can do in Africa is to give extraordinary young Africans access to capabilities previously out of reach because of institutions, capital, and geography. The magic of the moment is that a young founder in Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town can now access world-class analytical, coding, design, and research capabilities.
While that's potentially transformative, technology alone won't create that outcome. You still need the people who know how to use these technologies, the networks that help them find one another, and the capital that allows them to scale. So while we are all hot and bothered about the tech infrastructure, AI models, chips, and data centers, the human infrastructure around entrepreneurs has become even more important. AI may scale our capabilities, but networks scale people, and institutions scale trust.
Is there anyone whose work is particularly inspiring you right now?
One person who comes to mind is Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who became a Harambean at just 19 years old. I've had the privilege of watching him grow into one of Africa's most consequential tech entrepreneurs, having founded two of our unicorns. What inspires me is how he has consistently looked at problems most people accept as inevitable and decided they were his to solve.
At Andela, he saw that African talent was underserved by the education system and disconnected from the global talent market, so he built the bridge between African talent and the world. At Flutterwave, his second unicorn, he saw that African businesses were creating value but were unable to participate fully in the global economy, so he built the rails that allow businesses to transact globally.
He could have stopped there, and no one would have blamed him. Instead, he chooses to serve as a mentor and early investor to thousands of entrepreneurs behind him, which reminds us that true greatness isn't defined by what you build, but by the people you choose to serve by recycling your knowledge, networks, and capital.
What would you tell young people entering this space right now?
What I usually advise young professionals is to master AI, but don't become prisoners of it. What you will see emerge over the next few years, as this becomes ever more prevalent, is people who are drivers of this technology and people who are just passengers. We have to think about whether we are leveraging it to amplify our capabilities, learn more, grow faster, and better understand the world around us. It's different for everyone, but we need to understand that this is a tool to help us become better, not one that will drive us.
The people who will matter most over the next decade are those who can move between worlds: technology and business, capital and policy, Africa and the world. So learn to build relationships with people who are different from you, because ultimately your network isn't just the number of people you know, it's the number of people who trust you enough to build something with you.
How do you think about building strong, productive networks right now?
You may be a little surprised to hear that within the Harambeans Alliance, we distinguish between a network and an alliance. Networking is about collecting contacts. An alliance is about building trust: a group of people who know one another well enough and trust one another deeply enough to be of service to each other even when there is no obvious benefit attached.
For that to work, you need selection. You have to care about who is in the room. You need shared identity, repeated interaction between members, moments of genuine vulnerability, and opportunities for people to actually be of service to one another. Technology can connect people instantly, but connection isn't the same thing as trust.
Is there a missing piece in how people think about technology that you wish more people accounted for?
You might think I'm a bit of a broken record, but sometimes we focus too much on technology itself. AI is extraordinary, but many of the world's biggest problems aren't intelligence problems. They are coordination problems. We know how to build increasingly intelligent machines, but we're still struggling to figure out how to get intelligent human beings to trust one another and work together. So the missing piece is still the human and social infrastructure: the networks that can scale people and the institutions that can help us scale trust.
What does the future of technology look like for your community and context?
Africa has an opportunity to move from being a consumer of this technology to being the laboratory that shows us all how to use it. Africa has enormous demographic growth, extraordinary entrepreneurial talent, and some of the world's most difficult problems. That combination is fertile ground for innovation.
I don't think the question is “how do we bring Silicon Valley to Africa?” The better question: what can the world learn from people who are building under African conditions? And we have done this already. As I often joke to remind people, before China had Alipay and America had Apple Pay, Kenya had M-Pesa. That's just the tip of the iceberg. We'll see a whole lot more of it if we understand that Africa is a laboratory for many of these technologies.
How would you describe the ideal founder you'd want to back?
We're looking for African innovators who are tackling consequential problems and possess that rare combination of extraordinary ambition and genuine humility. We want someone who sees a problem everyone else has accepted as inevitable and then becomes almost unreasonable about solving it. But we also want someone who understands that no matter how talented you are, you can't build something truly consequential alone. As the African proverb reminds us, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, you must go together. So we're looking for people who want to go as far as the eye can see.
We're entering a period where our very definition of leadership has to change. For a long time, leadership has simply been about having the right answers, the authority, and the resources. But increasingly, leadership will be about your ability to convene people smarter than you, help them build trust among themselves, and help them build something none of them could accomplish on their own. That's the biggest lesson I've learned over the last 20 years of building Harambeans.
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