20/01/24
THE MAVERICK
Co-Founder & CEO Asilimia + Leja
“I wanted to prove to my friends that anything is possible.”
His story embodies the grit and insight that makes LEJA an essential tool.
TEKWANE MWENDWA, the mind behind LEJA, started out as an independent hustler from a small village. He evolved into a tech visionary, leading an African revolution in micro-finance. Leja’s visionary founder Tekwane Mwendwas' unlikely path to the world of high tech micro-finance began with a goat. Raised in a small village in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, Mwendwa was eighteen-years-old and still in high school when he took his first foray into “business”. Determined to prove to his despondent schoolmates that they could rise above their limited prospects, he decided to lead by example. He headed to the market twenty kilometers away to purchase a goat. The idea was to buy it cheap, bring it back to the village, cut it up and sell the meat pieces at a profit. With the money, he would begin to prove to his friends what his father had always told him: all men and women are equal and with effort and persistence, anything is possible. It didn’t quite go as planned. His first mistake was underestimating the goat herders at the market. The business men knew how to tip the scale to their benefit. “It was a pump and dump scheme, actually,” Mwendwa recalls wistfully. “The herders fed the goat grass and water the night before knowing how elastic their bellies are and then waited for the first fool to come along. That fool was me.” He literally had to drag and carry the stubborn goat back to the village, where he discovered the further dangers in doing business.
“I lost money on the goat and then when I attempted to sell the meat, some would not pay or pay less than it was worth knowing that without refrigeration your product lost value every second. So I lost money in every possible way.”
His initial attempt failed but a true entrepreneur was born. Undeterred, he tried another angle: bread delivery. He convinced a local baker to give him bread on consignment and found a bike which was sometimes not easy to control. People on the street sometimes took bets on whether he would crash or not. Starting out was difficult but when the venture began to show some traction, he expanded to other produce. He further extended his work to developing irrigation and feeding rabbits. “I had an early smart phone,” Tekwane remembers, “and I discovered I could download magazines about business strategy. I discovered the Harvard Business Review. I read the tales of American business and how they came from nothing and grew into leaders of industry. So that inspired me to try more and learn more.” He learned how to fail quickly, pivot and continue to push into both the formal and informal economies of Kenya. By the age of twenty-one, Tekwane, still searching for an opportunity to do the kind of business he read about in Harvard Business Review, found various ways to earn a living. He developed tours of Kenya for people he met in online business forums. But when Nairobi’s Westgate Mall suffered a terrorist attack, tourism dried up. Tekwane pivoted to retail. He found a job in a mall at a store that sold high-end fashion to mostly tourists. Tekwane, however, focused on how to increase sales to local clientele. He used psychology to drive sales.
“I would meet people at the ATM and chat them up or engage with couples and increase the pressure on the boyfriends to purchase an item.” He laughs. “There was probably a special place in hell for me at that time.”
It was an enjoyable job, he admits, and he made many friends at the mall but Tekwane was ready to get back to business. He found his chance while researching ways to increase foot traffic to the store. It was an eureka moment. He noticed most malls in Africa were built to push customers to the anchor franchises on the ground floor — major supermarkets like SPAR or Shoprite. Retailers who were on different floors would be at a distinct disadvantage. Tekwane realized touchscreen maps with 3D modeling offered a technological solution. The scalability and opportunity for steady corporate advertising revenue excited him. Armed with only a pitch deck, he chased after investment for months. He finally found an angel investor and corporate advertisers lined up after the launch. But the project hit a snag. “My investor refused to take on partners, which made it impossible to scale beyond a single mall.” The project foundered but Tekwane had made a conceptual leap. He now actively sought out tech solutions for uniquely African challenges. Soon Tekwane started to make a name for himself as a business savant. He was hired as an adviser and consultant for various projects. He was evolving from hustler to the kind of businessman he aspired to but there was a catch. “Something bothered me,” he remembers. “I was progressing but my friends from the mall who I came up with were stuck. It made me want to help.” He decided to start Sidehustle.co.ke to assist his friends convert their extra time into income. He started with hairdressers, using the tech to book clients. He realized sidehustle.co.ke solved a growing question in Kenya. How do you give the everyday Kenyan more financial options? But in addition, how does one make the application self-sustaining? The questions led him briefly to the world of social impact funding. But he quickly found himself uncomfortable with the dynamics. He attended conferences where they spoke about the issues in Africa in ways that distorted the people and the place he called home. “I didn’t like the image of myself on the conference screen.” There was an inordinate amount of poverty porn. It felt like high-tech begging and “a bit dehumanizing.” The pitches he heard were riddled with negative descriptions of his home.
“Bad this, bad that. I didn’t see anything bad about us. I thought, let me not join this band wagon.” He recognized he needed to take another route.
“The question remained, ‘How do I make this work?’” The answer came from an unexpected source. By this time, the groundbreaking phone banking app M-pesa became ubiquitous in Kenya. It revolutionized money and transfers in the country but it wasn’t perfect. “I noticed I was always struggling with the app. Mpesa was useful but the fees would sometimes force me to walk home.” Through his experience with the app, he saw an opportunity. His reasoning was simple. “I read about Amazon and how in the US, the richest country in the world, the app was leveraging technology to make things cheaper, easier and more convenient for its clients. For some reason, it wasn’t quite working that way in Kenya.” He recognized this as an opening. He had an idea. He used rent money to pay a developer. After some difficulty, he introduced Asilimia, an app which featured a cashback scheme for SMES. He conceived it as a people’s app, leveraging technology for the average Kenyan and following the business models he read about. It was a runaway success.
His vision broadened with Leja, an app created to open the flood gates of African enterprise. Building off the success of Asilimia, Leja is something for the market women, the drivers and the shop owners. Leja’s micro-financing provides the fuel necessary to transform hustle and soloprenuers into small businesses and small businesses into bigger businesses.
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