Boniface’s story plays out every day across
Africa in the thousands of businesses we
support. And it goes to the heart of what
inspired us to found AMI a decade ago.
As we celebrate our 10th birthday this year,
we’re reflecting on what we’ve learned about
driving business outcomes through skills
development. We’re also raising our ambition,
as we prepare to scale our proven model for
massive jobs and livelihood impact in the
decade to come.
When we started this journey, the impact
sector’s response to Africa’s ticking time-
bomb of youth demographics was to train
young people for jobs that didn’t exist. It
wasn’t working.
It seemed clear to us that getting young
people into work, and catalysing African
economies and livelihoods more broadly,
would require new jobs. Millions of them. That
would need a vibrant business sector, with
hundreds of thousands of growing, job-
creating SMEs, along with larger business
champions - staffed by high performing
leaders, managers and employees - to build
markets, innovate and position the continent
for success on a global stage.
For Kenyan entrepreneur Boniface
Odera, business has always been
about people. Specifically, jobs - for
his community in a low-income area
of Nairobi.
Odera’s business, Mukuru Talent, supplies
sports equipment to schools and sports clubs
across Nairobi. In 2023, after professionalising
and growing his business through AMI’s Grow
Your Business programme, he created 32 new
jobs and increased revenue by 76%. Of his 48
employees, 80% are women.
OUR CO-FOUNDERS
A LETTER FROM
Like Boniface, we knew that business is
fundamentally about people. Performing
people build thriving businesses, and thriving
businesses create jobs, prosperity and dignity.
Africa has no shortage of talent. But to
harness that talent, to build the business
champions of tomorrow, there was an urgent
need to rapidly improve the performance of
business owners, leaders and employees at
every level.
We knew that traditional training couldn’t
achieve this. Our approach had to be
obsessively focused on practice - providing
business owners and their teams with
practical tools to underpin the daily habits
and behaviours needed to build strong
companies.
It needed to be rooted in the realities of
Africa’s dynamic economies. No more ‘fly-in-
fly-out’ workshops with expensive foreign
trainers. Critically, it had to scale. The
challenge - and our ambition - was too
significant to replicate the status quo. We
needed a whole new approach to training for
business outcomes that could ultimately
reach millions.
So that’s what we did. And that’s what we’ve
been doing ever since.
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