On July 15, Africa 2100 hosted Dr. C. Adam Callery, our venture formation lead and founder of Sagesse Lumiere, for a webinar that asked a question we don’t ask ourselves nearly enough: why not us?
Drawing on fifteen years as a business consultant and facilitator roles with Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses and the U.S. Small Business Administration, Dr. Callery challenged participants to rethink the relationship between the continent and its diaspora — through the lens of small business strategy, financial planning, and entrepreneurial ideation. The through-line was bigger than any single skill set.
He didn’t start with an opportunity. He started with history, and some of it was hard to sit with. Dr. Callery referenced the era of Jim Crow — the decades of segregation and legally enforced exclusion Black entrepreneurs had to build through — not as a history lesson but as a reminder of the ground earlier generations built on. James Forten, a free-born sailmaker worth $100,000 by the 1830s. Annie Malone, who built a commercial empire on hair care products. John Merrick, born into slavery, who founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance. He carried the thread forward to Janice Howroyd, Daymond John, Reginald Lewis, Shonda Rhimes, and Magic Johnson, and made the point plainly: this is a lineage, not a fluke.
Against that backdrop, he turned to resilience — the one thing, he said, that can’t be taught or trained into someone. It has to be lived. Citing psychological research on adaptation and recovery in the face of adversity, he argued that resilience is built through secure relationships and through the ability to find meaning in difficult experiences. For entrepreneurs, it’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the backbone of the journey, because the journey rarely goes as planned.
From there, he moved to something Africa 2100 thinks about constantly: what African communities and African-American communities actually share. He laid the two side by side — a strong sense of community, respect for elders, extended family networks, and oral tradition on one side; church-centered community networks, honored elders, storytelling and mutual aid on the other — and made the case that these aren’t parallel traditions, they’re the same root system expressing itself across geography. The gap between diaspora and continent, he argued, isn’t a gap in values. It’s a gap in dialogue. Establishing and maintaining real connection across that distance takes intentional conversation, not just shared ancestry. This is precisely the gap Africa 2100 seeks to help close — not simply through conversations, but through programs, partnerships, and trusted relationships that enable collaboration across borders.
He grounded the economic case in a live example: Damilola Olokesusi, who built Shuttlers into one of Lagos’s leading shared mobility companies after male bus operators laughed her and her co-founder out of the room. Shuttlers now helps more than 160 transport operators access financing and guaranteed revenue.
Stories like this reinforce a broader economic reality. Dr. Callery cited a McKinsey estimate that companies who expand access to goods and services for Black households, and tailor offerings to their actual needs, could tap $300 billion in value annually. Demand exists on both sides of the Atlantic. So does supply. The opportunity is in connecting them.
He was direct about what gets in the way, too — namely, us. He pointed to the small self-sabotaging habits that don’t get named often enough: skipping Black-owned businesses out of assumed distrust, driving further and paying more to avoid supporting a neighbor. Leveraging and serving your own community, he said, isn’t charity. It’s a trait already embedded in both African and African-American culture — it just has to be practiced deliberately instead of talked about.
He closed with a simple framework borrowed from Seattle real estate investor Dana Frank: Research, Expand your network, Amplify injustice, Leverage — REAL, for short — and with Maya Angelou’s reminder that none of us walk alone: “I go forth alone and stand as ten thousand. When I move through the world, I bring all my history with me.”
Thank you, Dr. Callery, for a webinar that connected history, culture, and hard economics without losing the human thread running through all three. Africa 2100 exists to build the trust and connection you described — between the continent and the diaspora, and within our own communities — and we’re grateful to have your leadership on venture formation driving that work forward.
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