It is common knowledge that Africa's diaspora is a huge resource for the continent. Here, Yuniya Khan interviews Almaz Negash, CEO and founder of the Africa Diaspora Network to hear just how important the diaspora is, how individuals and organisations in the diaspora are helping to change the narrative and just what impact the diaspora is having on everyday lives in Africa.
by Yuniya Khan
With Africa experiencing rapid economic growth and technological advancement, and its cultural dynamism increasingly exposed to the world, the African diaspora is becoming increasingly important. Through investment, knowledge transfer and advocacy, the diaspora is helping to shape a new narrative for Africa – one characterised by innovation, creativity and resilience.
Contributing to this powerful movement is Almaz Negash, the hard-charging founder and CEO of the African Diaspora Network (ADN), one of the leading organisations working to support and invest in Africa’s development. With nearly 15 years at the helm, Negash and the organisation have made significant strides in connecting and empowering African diasporas globally.
With a deep commitment to fostering economic and social development, Negash has led initiatives to help bridge the gap between Africa and its diaspora communities, promoting investment, innovation and collaboration. Her leadership and dedication have turned the organisation into a pivotal platform for dialogue and action, enabling Africans and their descendants to contribute meaningfully to the continent's progress and global engagement.
In the following conversation, Yuniya Khan talks with Negash about the conception and development of ADN and gets her insights on the role and power of the African diaspora, and the challenges and opportunities facing the continent and the diaspora.
THE GENESIS: You emigrated from Eritrea to the US. At what point did you first conceptualise the idea for ADN? What sparked the idea?
In 2007, I was the head of the global leadership and ethics department at Santa Clara University at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. My job was to organise former heads of state to work on HIV/AIDS education, as well as transition to democratic states.
Every time I went to a meeting in Vienna or Salzburg or at Stanford University here in Silicon Valley, everybody was speaking about Africa but there were very few Africans at the table. This was confusing for me. Even though they all meant well, there was no African to represent Africa.
In 2010, I became a part of the Skoll Foundation Social Edge program, which was a fantastic online platform bringing together social entrepreneurs from around the world. We had conversations about issues related to water, sanitation, clean stoves, climate change, education, hygiene, etc., basically all the stuff we were dealing with on the continent and in other developing countries.
These social entrepreneurs had big hearts and really wanted to do great work. One entrepreneur, in particular, was working in northern Nigeria providing lighting to communities in the region, which was fantastic. I went to this person and said, “Where are the Africans in this discussion?”
They pointed to me and said, “You're here.”
I replied, “I'm one, but there are many, many people that need to be here.”
I realised that, in my frustration, I had turned into a nagging, noisy woman. My energy became negative.
At some point, someone pushed back on me and said, “Okay, what are you going to do about all the stuff you're complaining about?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question, so he said, “I will give you a chance to write a paper, and I will publish it on Social Edge and then see what people say.”
I wrote a paper about the concept of knowledge transfer, based on my belief that, if you want to make a difference in a formerly colonised country, knowledge has to be transferred to the local community. One of the questions I posed in the paper was, “What is the role of the African Diaspora in facilitating knowledge transfer?”
That question sparked something in me, and that spark became the genesis of ADN.
THE FORMATION: The African Diaspora Investment Symposium (ADIS) became ADN’s flagship program. How did that evolve?
In August 2010, with the assistance of Dr Musimbi Kanyoro, at the time CEO of the Global Fund for Women and one of the highest-positioned African people in Silicon Valley, I gathered 15 African people from around the city to explore the concept taking form in my mind and determine its feasibility. “We’ve been asking people to invite us to the table,” I said. “What would it look like if we invited them to us, instead?” They all loved the concept and gave me the green light to develop it.
We started out small, meeting around the city of Santa Clara about once a month, wherever we could find the space. We talked about how, as members of the African Diaspora, we could collaborate to support and build up Africa. The whole endeavour cost about $5,000 per year, which I donated because I didn’t want to ask for money unless I knew this proposition would work.
In 2013, we got our US non-profit status, which was fantastic. But still, we hadn’t raised much money. Then, in 2015, we heard about something called IdEA – International diaspora Engagement Alliance, which was created by the US State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They knew that engaging the Indian diaspora, the Mexican diaspora, Filipino, Nigerian, etc., was very important for US foreign and domestic policy.
I wanted to turn that upside down and really focus on the African diaspora as a whole. We needed to move from a national identity-based description of ourselves to a continent-wide identity. A lot of people pushed back on that. I said, “You can push as much as you want. But I believe in one Africa.”
With that principle in mind, in 2015 we sent a proposal to the State Department. In it, we proposed taking over the African Diaspora Investment Symposium (ADIS), which they had started in Washington, DC in 2014. We proposed to do it in Silicon Valley instead.
They accepted our proposal, and we hosted the first ADIS in Silicon Valley in 2016. That first year we had 167 attendees, most of whom came from Washington, DC and around the US. Quite a few also came from the continent.
We have held an ADIS event every year since then, and it has become like a pilgrimage, a place of play for us Africans in the diaspora. The first ADIS was in January 2016, and the ninth one was this past March 2024. Next year will be the tenth anniversary of ADIS, and it will be in Washington, DC, where it began.
ADIS quickly became the cornerstone of ADN. It was how we proved our concept that you can bring Africans and friends of Africa together for the greater good of all Africans.
But while ADIS continued to grow, we also focused on growing ADN. We had this great organisation, but we didn’t know how to scale it. How do we take it to the next level? How do we get to a level where we’re convening upwards of 300 people? How do we create programs that can sustain the organisation?
ADN’s GROWTH AND EXPANSION: How are ADN’s programs contributing to Africa’s development?
In 2017, just after we hosted the second ADIS, I approached some of our champions and board members and said, “Okay, we're doing this great event, but what does it mean to the average African trying to figure out what to do with their life? What are we giving them? We're getting together and supporting each other, but that’s not going to make a change.” In answer, I suggested creating an accelerator program for grassroots African entrepreneurs.
So, we created the Builders of Africa's Future (BAF) program in 2017, which supports early-stage African enterprises. After a rigorous application and selection process, the finalists received mentoring support for growing their businesses. Until 2020, we had not been able to give them any funding, but we brought them to Silicon Valley in the US to pitch at ADIS events.
We went to virtual convening in 2021 due to the pandemic, and we couldn’t bring the participants to the US to pitch. Instead, we were able to give each of them $5,000. We did the same in 2022.
In 2023, things changed. Thanks to C.D. Glin, who at the time was the head of the United States African Development Foundation (USADF), with whom we had formed a partnership, we were able to grant $25,000 to everyone who completed the BAF program. That was huge. A grant of $25,000 is transformational in our communities because it goes a very long way and helps our entrepreneurs access additional funding.
Then in 2020, before COVID took hold, we were celebrating the fifth ADIS at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. A young woman I had known for a long time, Erica Wood, came to me and said, “Almaz, you're doing this amazing work with grassroots African entrepreneurs. Do you have anything for African Americans and diasporans in the United States?”
I told her no, we didn’t. But as she was from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, I added, “If you give us the funds, we can create a program.”
They then gave us the seed funding to create the Accelerating Black Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ABLE) program, focused on entrepreneurs in the United States, which we launched in 2020. We select innovative entrepreneurs who receive mentoring and do a pitch session at Santa Clara University, our academic partner.
Now we are about to onboard our fourth ABLE cohort. We’ve partnered with bill.com, KLA Foundation and Makahakama Foundation, among others, to support this program and to provide the cohort members with funding once they complete the program.
Since their creation, at every ADIS event, we bring participants from both programs together in an entrepreneurship session. We can't pay for everybody to come, but we are able to bring one from each program. They come together and share knowledge and resources with each other, and they create their own connections. Someday we hope to hear one of them say, “I met so-and-so at ADIS and partnered with them, and now look what we’ve created together.”
Our ultimate goal is that, in two or three years from now, one BAF and one ABLE cohort can partner on a climate change project. That would be a great success story. But right now we are connecting them and bringing them together.
Besides investments, we have other programs to support Africans in Africa and the diaspora. Just this year, we launched the Young African Leaders Initiative Legacy Localization (YALI LL) project. In partnership with several organisations, academic institutions, and the US government, we are helping to mobilise the African diaspora globally and within the continent to mentor, partner and collaborate with alumni of the YALI program across 49 African countries. Through this program, we are aiming to leverage the skills and experience of the African Diaspora to facilitate transformative leadership and training opportunities for African youth and YALI alumni.
IMPACT OF PROGRAMS: What are some specific stories of how ADN's work has directly empowered a social entrepreneur or facilitated a successful investment on the continent?
Wawira Njiru, Founder of Food for Education, is a Kenyan entrepreneur who was part of the first Builders of Africa cohort. She came to the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University to present her idea, which had come to her when she was in Kenya and seeing children go to school hungry. It was something she couldn't fathom. Her thinking was, what would it be like if we provided food to students so they don't get hungry?
Wawira’s vision was to use technology to create and sustain school feeding programs, using smart, centralised supply chains and kitchens to prepare and deliver meals to schools. She started out small, with a very deliberate strategy. And as she kept showing up consistently, people started to see what she was doing, and the funding began to come in.
Just last year, seven years after that first cohort, I came across an article about her. I read it and thought, “This is Wawira! I know Wawira!” She had made a multi-million dollar deal with Kenya’s Ministry of Education to increase and enlarge her facility.
What made this all so beautiful was when I went to the Skoll World Forum this past April in Oxford, UK, Wawira was there as one of the awardees. When you are a Skoll awardee, that means you have achieved something really great. It was so powerful. I was there cheering her on, and so proud. This young woman whom I met in 2018, with this brilliant vision, is now really living that vision. That's a big deal for all of us to be proud of.
We may not have contributed much to where Wawira is, because it's all on her. But we take the credit for identifying her as a builder of Africa's future and investing in her growth. She's living up to that title even now.
The ABLE program is a new program, so it's hard to tap into big measures of success at this stage. But in our first cohort, we had a member called Quilen Blackwell. He and his wife had created Southside Blooms, a flower-farming and flower delivery company based in southside Chicago, home to many underserved communities. This past May, he sent a message to us saying that they were going to be launching nationwide flower delivery starting on Mother’s Day. They had started out as a small company in Chicago, and now they are going national.
Another example is Jared Wilson, also one of our first cohort participants. He's an event coordinator who created a company called ABCD & Company. They're very well known for developing large events throughout the United States. Jared and his company became one of our vendors, working with ADN on our events. It’s great to be able to hire someone who was a part of the ABLE program.
It's hard to take credit for these entrepreneurs’ success because they had already done a lot of the work outside of our accelerator programs. But many of them attest that a good measure of their success could not have happened without the support of ABLE or BAF.
UNLOCKING POTENTIAL: The diaspora boasts a wealth of talent and resources. What are some of the biggest challenges ADN faces in connecting African entrepreneurs with these resources?
At the last ADIS, one of the attendees pulled me aside and asked why there wasn’t any media covering ADIS and its impact. I told her this is a fact related to anything to do with Africa. Even the African media don't come to cover this. Then we complain about our story not being told. How can we tell our story if no one comes to cover it?
There's a lot of talk from African leaders about diaspora engagement. But there isn't much of a conversation about how specific countries might work with us to do this. We have a wonderful relationship with Senegal, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa right now through the YALI LL program. These programs are supporting young Africans. But my vision is to see the Diaspora continue to connect and work together. We need to get away from divisive language, such as, “I am Ethiopian, therefore I can only be with Ethiopians”. We need to continue to think on a wider and bigger scale and work on bringing our people together.
In addition to those issues, funding for Black entrepreneurs, whether in Africa or in the United States, is dismal. We don't get access to funding easily. Less than two per cent of Black entrepreneurs in the US have access to venture capital funding. So, when you see success stories, you have to celebrate them because small successes can bring additional success.
Whether you’re a nonprofit organisation, like ADN, or an entrepreneur, it’s extremely difficult to raise funds. As Black entrepreneurs in the United States, for example, regardless of whether we are social or business entrepreneurs, we start at a disadvantage. It takes time to catch up. That's something we need to be aware of. Instead of victimising ourselves, we need to really figure out how to solve this issue. There's no easy answer, but that’s the work we do all day.
We need to give, and not just money. We can give through mentoring, through our time and skills. If we want to see our entrepreneurs, especially our young women, get into the space we want them to occupy, we need to provide them with the skills and the tools they need. One of the most important ways we can do that is through mentoring. It's so powerful. We often underestimate it, but mentoring makes a huge difference in one's life.
I don't think any of us would be where we are without someone else helping us. Mentoring is part of that. So is investing and co-creating. I myself have experienced this kind of support here in Silicon Valley. This incredible entrepreneurial ecosystem that Silicon Valley created in many ways came out of the generosity of people. It's very competitive here, but it's also an extremely generous community.
You can come with an idea, and in my experience, nobody has ever responded by saying, “This is a bad idea.” I've never heard that. What I hear is, “Well, this is good. But you have to do a few things before you go out.”
That has been the system I have been a part of. And I wondered what would it look like if we had that same kind of opportunity for young Africans, where they can come to the symposium and meet with CEOs and build connections.
Somehow it worked out, and we were able to do exactly that. ADIS is not a hierarchical culture. Rather, it's a community coming together no matter your background, whether you are a CEO of a company, or a student trying to figure out what to do with your life. ADIS became this place of connectedness to each other.
BEYOND REMITTANCES: Traditionally, financial support from the diaspora often takes the form of remittances. How is ADN facilitating a shift towards more impactful investments in Africa's long-term development?
Africans in the diaspora give the most amount of money to the continent. In 2022, we remitted more than $100 billion to the continent. We are the largest investor on the continent compared to anybody else, sending more than eight times the foreign direct investment. It behoves anybody who wants to engage with Africa to pay attention to this.
But we're trying to go beyond remittances, towards creating sustainable communities in Africa. In 2022, we started the Beyond Remittances initiative, which is now an integral part of our strategy. We're not asking African Diasporans to stop sending remittances right now, because they are still needed for this period we are in. But eventually, we need to wean Africans from remittances, so that our people don’t become forever dependent on the $100 or $200 we send to our families. Instead, through the support of their government, they would have jobs and opportunities that can sustain them for the long run.
We in the diaspora can also tap into our savings to begin to invest in the continent in a way that's more transformative, rather than transactional. Transactional is when I send you money because you're my family, and it's between the two of us. Transformational investment from the diaspora is when you look at it as a business investment. You might say, for example, “I think I could make more money by investing in housing in South Africa than in Kenya.”
We have seen the Diaspora do that kind of investment, and we want to see it scale up. The only way to do that is through partnerships with multilateral agencies, foundations or governments.
BEYOND SILICON VALLEY: How is ADN fostering collaboration and engaging the broader African diaspora globally?
I have been an advocate for diaspora engagement for a long time. When I started ADN 14 years ago, I knew there was power in the African diaspora. There’s no way I could have known that, years later, even the president of the United States would recognise this and create an advisory committee of his own, and that he would invite me to be an inaugural member of this committee.
Now, my background is in international trade and investment, so I always go back to where I started. A lot of African Americans want to do business on the continent. They want to know who they can trade with and who they can work with. That’s why one of our biggest dreams at ADN is to bring all the participants of Building Africa’s Future and Accelerating Black Leadership and Entrepreneurship together so that they can begin to really collaborate and co-create.
I believe this is why the ADIS event this year and last year had a completely different energy than before. It was because we brought entrepreneurs from both programs and created a rich sense of common identity and collaboration that was not there in the past.
One of the questions we discuss all the time on our board is, how do we bridge the gap between the historical and contemporary diaspora? The only way to do this is by bringing people together for a common purpose, and the common purpose of entrepreneurs is to do business with each other.
We are proving that we are not just willing to work only in our own community and those proximate to us. We want our work to go beyond our own ethnicity, race, religion, gender, etc., transcend all of that, and start thinking, “If I am a Ghanaian and there is an opportunity for me to invest in South Africa, why couldn't I invest in South Africa? Why couldn’t we work together to build bridges between each other as diasporans and as friends of Africa?”
Looking Ahead: What are your biggest hopes and aspirations for the future of the African diaspora's role in supporting the continent's social and economic development?
By 2050, Africans are going to number nearly 2.5 billion people, the majority of whom will be less than 25 years old. That means one in four people around the world will be African. That's incredible power. It shows that the continent itself is a place to invest in.
Given all that potential, I want to see Africa get away from aid. I want to see our leaders do their job, making sure there is a conducive economic environment for people in their home country so they don't suffer and die while trying to get out. But this will take time.
The geopolitical focus is now all about Africa. Why? There is a vested interest because Africa is full of minerals and resources. But we have to take ownership of these resources and use them to develop the economic vitality of our community. That’s my hope from the side of the African diaspora.
In the United States, there is tremendous energy among the African diaspora. There are about 50 million people in the United States who count Africa as either our heritage or place of birth. As a result, there are so many economic, intellectual and cultural opportunities. Look at Afrobeats music, for example, and African food, clothing, etc. There is a lot of energy with regard to these things.
The African diaspora is a core part of that. We are the ambassadors for the continent. Everywhere I go, people ask me if I’m from Ethiopia or Eritrea, and I love it. I tell them I am from Eritrea, but I belong to the African continent. I think that’s a beautiful way of representing ourselves.
If you look specifically at sub-Saharan Africans, we number about two million in the US, according to the Census Bureau. In comparison with the Asian community, which is much larger than ours, we're the highest educated population.
There is knowledge within the diaspora, and information to be shared. We would be a force to reckon with if we used it properly not to divide each other, but to bring each other together.
I recently returned from Washington, DC, where President Ruto of Kenya had a state dinner visit with US President Biden. In spite of the political situation in Kenya, the energy in Washington, DC was beautiful. Ruto spoke about the values of the Continent. I felt very good about what he was saying about the Continent as a whole, and Kenya in particular. We don’t get to see a lot of this in the US because we don't get a lot of coverage of Africa. It was a wonderful week of joy, excitement, anticipation and a sense of good things to come in the future. The energy at our most recent ADIS was a reflection of this hopefulness and optimism about the future of people on the continent.
ADN’s Future: What is your vision for ADN? How do you see it continuing to play a role in Africa’s development?
I've been running this organisation now for almost 14 years. I would love to get it to a place where I can hand it over to a wonderful human being who can really make it sustainable. My job right now is sustaining and scaling our programs, and that takes a lot of effort, including fundraising and partnership building.
Our strategic plan calls for us to become a $13 million organisation by 2028. That means we have to raise money from every imaginable place. By 2028, I'd like to see ADN fully vested, with 50 people working with us. Right now we're only seven full-time people doing a 50-person job.
We hope people see what we've done and support our entrepreneurship programs. Our current programs and the impact we're making are all because of the partnerships we’ve cultivated and the funding we’ve received. We want to scale BAF and ABLE, and we want to support the YALI Africa program, mentor them and create a more robust mentoring program at ADN.
You need to have funding to scale. So, we're looking for unrestricted funding to institutionalise a lot of these goals and vision, and to make ADN a home away from home for diasporans. We want to mobilise the diaspora in the United States and around the world around a very specific mission, which is to work together to make sure we have an impact on the continent, as well as the communities where we live.
ADN exists today because of the leap of faith we took, and the partnerships we developed with our funders, our ecosystem partners and our diasporan participants. We could not have done this on our own.
I'm proud of the African Diaspora. Our diaspora is beautiful and generous. We're out here without generational wealth, and we're trying to build our lives. It's not easy, and I'm very compassionate about that. It's hard to expect us to do everything, but we're doing the best we can to support each other, whether we are Nigerian, Eritrean, Kenyan or South African.
One of the most beautiful things in my life is this beautiful community we built together.
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