The Sustainable Finance Podcast: “I’m Committed to Africa”

The Sustainable Finance Podcast is a weekly program featuring conversations with sustainability thought leaders such as cleantech entrepreneurs, VC investors, CEOs, NGO executives, and creators of the ESG indices and analytics platforms.

EPISODE 250: I’m Committed to Africa’s Youth

Paul Ellis: Hello everyone and welcome to the Sustainable Finance Podcast. My name is Paul Ellis and I’m your host for these programs about developments in this fast-growing industry.

Amina Zakhnouf is an investment officer at the Fund for Innovation in Development, which is hosted by the French government to fight poverty and promote sustainable economic growth. Zakhnouf supported the creation of the Hellenic Development Bank in Greece and backed the Tunisian government’s efforts to create a favorable investment ecosystem for startups. Amina is also co-founder of I’m Committed to Africa.

Amina, can you pronounce the name of your co-founded organization for us in French for our listeners.

Amina Zakhnouf: ‘Je m’engage pour l’Afrique.’

PE: Terrific! Thank you very much for taking that off my shoulders. And this is a public policy incubator launched in 2020 with the mission of giving youth a seat at the table when it comes to Euro-African policymaking. Hello. Amina, and welcome to the Sustainable Finance Podcast.

AZ: Hey Paul, thanks for having me.

PE: We’re going to jump right into the questions that we have for you because we’ve got a lot to cover. We’ll start out from an ESG and sustainable finance perspective. How should we measure and consider African youth inclusion concerns in the private sector?

AZ: Well, there’s a few ways to go about this. But I think there’s three paths that can emerge from how you do it. And thankfully they work better when you combine them.

The first thing is to make the young generation part of the core investment strategy and so be able to invest in new jobs, better jobs for the youth in improving livelihoods, in increasing sustainable agricultural practices that the young generation can then partake in, as well as leverage in technology and innovative banking models that can allow younger generations to participate in the overall system that we’ve created. And of course, invest in youth employment dynamics that can also be your core investment strategy and business.

These can be part of any company’s mission. I’m very inspired by models like the ones that were developed by Village Capital, if you’ve heard of them.

PE: I have not. Can you tell us a little bit about them, Amina?

AZ: Yeah, it’s a wonderful organization that’s been working on something called Smarter Systems Initiative in which they provided their clients with a list of ideas and tweaks that they could make in their investment evaluation process, to increase or to better the gender representation of their portfolios and to lessen the gender gap.

What they provided is a more consistent, comprehensive and data driven system to make sure that they were not overlooking great opportunities for investment just because there’s a gender gap that’s overwhelmingly present in most investment systems.

And I’m wondering how we can create that for young generations. Access to credit, access to financial services, access to employment, access to investment. A lot of these things are about process and that takes me to my second point, make them part of company operations by creating more inclusive hiring practices, promoting diversity, and not just performative diversity but actual diversity within the teams as well as career growth opportunities within the teams.

I know that some countries fare way better than others in that system, but I am still kind of hopeful to see more initiatives to include more different people within an organization, which generates so much wealth not just in culture, but also in actual financial results.

And the last bit of it, which I think is really important, and we’ve been dabbling in it here in France, is to make them part of the decision making process. Having young diverse asset managers or investors or anyone working in the financial system being part of the decision making is really paramount to be able to transform the system.

So in France we created a model called mission companies, which are mission driven companies that do not just have profit alone as an end goal but also social and environmental causes as end goals. In their mission committee, which is kind of the shadow mirror of the board of directors, they can have intergenerational conversations.

I am part of one of these in an investment fund here in France, and you can see how powerful that becomes when different generations working in the same area or in different areas have structurally important conversations that lead to actual decisions. So if you provide them with the space to be part of the strategy, the decision-making process and operations, I think you can alleviate most of the African youth concerns by making them actors and not just making them subjects.

PE: What’s your outlook now on youth engagement in the public policy debates, specifically in financial sustainability conversations? We’re at a point in the capital markets now where there’s so much capital ready to be deployed around these kinds of growth issues across every economy on the planet. And one of these issues, of course, is how do we get that capital flowing and how do we get younger people engaged in that dialogue and process?

AZ: Well, I think it’s a really fascinating topic because we’ve seen more young people engaging in these types of conversations, but it’s always quite anecdotal or exceptional, exceptional enough for me to be able to name them. Which is crazy once you come to think about it. There are clearly not enough to be able to have actual structural conversations. It’s what I call the ‘speaking up paradox.’

More people are calling on the young generations to be part of the public debate. They are worried about these nonvoting, noncaring generation Z people that nobody understands, which is my generation actually. They are  scared of what’s to come with this new generation.

And then, the second  the generation speaks up we’re quite respectfully asked to not say anything that we’re not experienced enough to understand. They ask us to go for a walk and come back in a few decades once you’ve experienced whatever capital market conversation you’re in.

So it’s an open and closed door all of the time, which creates either the frustration to not want to engage anymore or, in my case and that of the people that we work with, creates the frustration to kick the door open. This is not a feasible situation and we want to be able to have conversations that are not just about ourselves, social media or climate change, which are the hyper youth topics.

I really do find it regressive and a bit laughable to be honest that we’re still stuck in these same systems. And so for us, the strategy that we’ve undertaken to be able to have more youth engagement in public policy is to, I wouldn’t say force it but to provide proof that we can. And so to support younger generations by writing policy that works in creating the spaces for conversations and destroying the mindset that there’s such a thing as too complex an issue, because there’s not too complex an issue.

There’s complex explanations to normal issues. And the second you hold that thought in your mind and that you can consider making all things accessible, you’ll make them more accessible. So we really are fighting a mindset, but we’re also kind of trying to create new content, new knowledge, new policy briefs, new conversations to make sure that there is actual youth engagement.

PE: I want you to know that our podcast platform is all about kicking the doors open and being disruptive, so you can count on us to be part of your team going forward.

AZ: Thank you, Paul. I’m happy with this.

PE: Amina, we’re now talking about the African youth population and the human population explosion that’s going to be happening on the African continent over the next generation. In fact a third of the African continent human population will be below 25 years old in the next half century, the youngest on the planet, by the way. How should the global financial ecosystem be preparing for this transition?

AZ: I think the in the same way that we’ve overlooked so many factors when we went through our first Gen Z massive demographic transitions, whether it be the job creation speed or the evolution of our capitalist markets, we need to take a step back and make sure that we’re taking into account all sorts of parameters, and one of them is behavioral, understanding how younger generations actually behave.

What’s their response to specific things, to a crisis, to inflation, to fear-mongering to new polarizing conversations. That should be the baseline of how we prepare for this. So it takes lots, in my opinion, lots and lots and lots of investment in education and skills in making sure that this new generation does actually find a job.

We’ve seen cases, for example, in Indonesia where the job market was not at all in coherence with the educational market, and we ended up with hundreds of thousands of Ph.Ds who were unable to find an entry level job, which created even more of a frustration because they were supposed to be at the top of the ladder in terms of competitiveness.

Make sure that we deconstruct the perception of what success looks like as a postgrad over grad and create new environments where people can feel safe in looking at different crafts, trades, and trying on different things, being temporary entrepreneurs and not being stuck in the same environments. And that will take a lot of financial flexibility. Actually trusting younger generations to make sure that they can use money and they can get money and that they can re-get money.

I don’t think this generation is specifically looking for land ownership or property. They’re looking for opportunity first and for personal growth first. How we finance these is the main question.

And then of course, with entrepreneurship, we need to make sure that those opportunities are inclusive, that there’s enough capital to make sure that we sustain it. That we’re not just letting them run into a wall. And those can be created with the level of, as you said, the capital that is currently flowing in the world financial system is absolutely humongous.

There are ways to level it correctly. And the one thing that I think should be considered across the board is climate smart investments. Making sure that these young people, when they get old, have a life they can live on a livable planet would be really nice.

PE: Thanks for joining me, Amina Zakhnouf, co-founder of ‘I’m Committed to Africa.‘ We’re proud to join your team with our commitment to a healthy and livable planet for Africa’s youth and all the young generations of Planet Earth!

Read more: Climate change is spurring young investors to rethink their portfolios.