The Speakers

His Excellency, Henok Teferra Shawl, is the Ambassador of Ethiopia to France, Spain, Portugal, The Holy See, The Principality of Monaco and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. Mr. Teferra combines a background in business with solid experience in the civil service, both involving outstanding responsibilities.

He worked in several executive management positions and in October 2017 became Vice-President of Strategic Planning and Alliances at Ethiopian Airlines, where he helmed the implementation of the airline’s 15-year strategic fast, profitable and sustainable growth plan, Vision 2025. In May 2015, he was seconded as CEO to ASKY Airlines. When he was at the helm of the corporation, the company was recognized as Airline of the Year for Regional Operations by the African Airlines Association (AFRAA) for outstanding financial results and enhancing connectivity in West and Central Africa.

Previously, he was a First Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia, where amongst other tasks he served as adviser to Seyoum Mesfin.

Ambassador Teferra holds a Masters degree from Pantheon-Sorbonne University Paris I in International Economic Law and a Bachelor’s degree from University of Nice in Public and Private International Law. He was one of the Choiseul 100 Africa: Young Economic Leaders of the Continent in 2015.

Morin Oluwole is a luxury industry thought leader in digital transformation, business development and innovation. As Director & Global Head of Luxury at Facebook/Instagram, she leads the global luxury division and has managed multiple product and business teams within the company for the past 15 years.

She was formerly Chief of Staff to the VP, Global Marketing Solutions, where she developed business strategies for global brand partners. In her prior roles, she led Product Marketing and Public Content Partnerships for the fashion and luxury sector. Prior, she led management consulting at Sachs Consulting in New York.

Morin holds a BA and MA from Stanford University in Human Biology and Sociology and an MA in Management from Columbia University. She was a Bill Gates Millennium Scholar and received the Stanford Dean's Award for Academic Excellence - both for 5 consecutive years.

Tosin Eniolorunda is the founder and CEO of TeamApt, a financial technology company digitizing Africa’s economy by building financial platforms for businesses, providing them with all the payment, banking, credit and business management tools they need to succeed.

Tosin has led TeamApt through an impressive growth phase to become Nigeria's largest omnichannel payment platform by transaction value, with over 200,000 businesses onboarded, and over $6bn processed monthly. Before founding TeamApt, Tosin was a Product Manager at Interswitch and previously studied Mechanical Engineering at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.

He is an Endeavor Entrepreneur and is currently expanding TeamApt into other strong economies across Africa, with aspirations to provide financial happiness for every African business owner.

Curtis Vanderpuije is the Co-founder and CEO of ExpressPay Ghana Limited, Ghana's largest indigenous payment platform. Founded in 2012, expressPay is a technology company with an innovative platform that simplifies the payment of services, bills, and goods in Ghana.

Before founding ExpressPay, Curtis spent several years at Visa in San Francisco, where he was part of the Global Corporate Strategy team. Also an ex-Bain & Company consultant, Curtis holds a Master of Engineering degree in Manufacturing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Master of Science degree in Logistics and Supply Chain Management from Singapore's Nanyang Technology University (NTU), and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

Will Green has forged a successful career as a Africa tech founder. He now invests his energy advising Start-ups and accelerating high-growth Scale-ups as part of Grindstone’s Alumni (90+ companies) and Grindstone Cohorts (21 companies).

Grindstone is an entrepreneurial development environment that engineers high-growth tech founders. Previous alumni have been iKubu (exited to Garmin), Payfast (exited to DPO), WhereIsMyTransport, Quicket & Cradle (Knife funded), WizzPass (exited to FM: Systems), OneCart (exited to Walmart).

Kenfield is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ajua. After graduating from MIT with a PhD in Design and Computation, Kenfield built mSurvey, a SaaS platform that served some of the largest telcos, banks, and businesses in Africa. Ken grew that business to over $3M in sales and NRR of 140%, before spinning out Ajua in 2019 to build the ecommerce operating system for SMEs across Africa.

Today, Ajua has over 105K SMEs on their platform, onboarding 1 SME every 3 minutes, engaging with over 1.7M consumers, with a merchant run rate GPV of $200M. Ajua has innovated on the delivery of SaaS and enterprise grade tools to SMEs in Africa at $2/month, bringing SMEs online, as well as built a payment platform for SMEs to pay for online Ad space with mobile airtime.

Ajua has partnered and deeply integrated with some of the largest mobile operators and banks in Africa, giving them an addressable market of over 100M SMEs including anyone with a 'side hustle'. Ajua is currently focused on the $12B SME market across Nigeria and Kenya, before scaling to other markets across Africa. Kenfield hails from a 5000 person island called Montserrat, with ties to Barbados and Nigeria.