Lulite Ejigu On Connecting The Global Ethiopian Diaspora To Progress The Emerging Start-Up Ecosystem
Lulite Ejigu is the CEO of Tevah Capital, a financial leader, and author of The Unexpected Global Shift.
She drives sustainable growth in Africa through economic development and financial inclusion. Previously, she was Executive Director of Risk Management at J.P. Morgan Chase, overseeing an $800 billion mortgage asset portfolio.
Her expertise in risk management and compliance makes her a trusted advisor on large investments. Passionate about women’s empowerment and financial access, she fosters community-centered growth. A sought-after speaker, she covers cross-border investments and African economic transformation. She holds an Executive MBA from Texas A&M and Harvard Kennedy certifications
Lulite discusses catalysing opportunities for the Ethiopian start-up ecosystem by drawing together members of the global Diaspora, and shifting existing narratives surrounding the African continent to accelerate progress and prosperity.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in social impact and financial inclusion?
[Lulite Ejigu] - Most of my career I've spent in finance working in the residential mortgage space. I also did commercial and automotive finance, but I think starting my career in mortgages during the financial recession had the biggest impact on me.
Most of my career I've spent in finance working in the residential mortgage space. I also did commercial and automotive finance, but I think starting my career in mortgages during the financial recession had the biggest impact on me.
This was when many people were losing their homes; there were high foreclosure numbers and huge devastation as people were losing their life savings. From the beginning affordability was at the centre of my work, both looking at affordability as far as mortgages and financial products, but also how it impacts different communities.
I was seeing which communities were impacted more across the U.S., but of course it was a global recession, so those waves were felt throughout the world. That was what I believe started my focus on affordability, talking to customers and hearing their hardships change overnight.
My major during my undergraduate studies was in psychology, so a big part of why I started working in finance at the time was because banks were implementing special programs because of the recession.
At the time they were looking for people with backgrounds in psychology, to be able to empathise with the people on the phones who were going through these drastic hardships.
There were high suicide rates and several other things going on during this time. I think my desire to help was always there, and so it continued as a theme throughout my career. I was more interested in focusing on risk, different strategies, and understanding the regulatory policies around affordability and consumer protection laws.
I wanted to make sure consumers knew what products they were buying and what their interest rates really were so that they could avoid the predatory lending that was happening prior to me started banking. At that time, there was a huge shift happening in the financial services world.
That was a key focus of mine in every job I took. Transitioning from that, I left J.P. Morgan, and I was traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Ethiopia right before COVID. I started looking at opportunities to invest in inclusion for women, jobs, and financial empowerment.
I was consulting on different projects when ‘social impact’ became a more common term. It was something I was already doing; I had already volunteered a lot, I had already mentored many people, and I would go to conferences for the firms I worked for.
I did that all on the side as it was a hobby of mine. I’ve always had a passion for understanding financial products and then communicating and educate others on how to use them to empower themselves.
As Chair of the Ethiopian Diaspora Trust Fund, can you share more about this organisation and how it’s driving innovation in emerging markets?
The Diaspora Fund was initiated seven years ago, and it was a product of thinking about how the Ethiopian Diaspora can mobilise itself globally to catalyse social and economic development in Ethiopia.
I think receiving direct foreign investment has always been a struggle because of how difficult it is to communicate what natural resources, talent, and capabilities are being offered. I think this is a struggle for most African countries.
There’s this narrative and stigma that exists on the African continent, so it doesn't matter what your GDP growth is, what advancements you've made, or what great investments or opportunities there are. The minute people hear Africa, they think investing would not be transparent or worth the risk; they are unsure if they’re investing in the right platform.
This narrative hinders development, so there was a huge initiative in Ethiopia to engage the Diaspora to help mobilise itself. This was to serve sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and education, which have all experienced tons of advancement across the world.
The Ethiopian Diaspora includes people in academia, authors, doctors, world-renowned chefs, and artists. The list is endless, so I think there was a huge opportunity to tap into the Diaspora first. They understand the cultural context because they've been to the country; they either were born in the country or are first generation like me.
I was born in America, so my parents are the ones who moved to the U.S. before I was born. I've been to Ethiopia, I've seen the people, I've seen the opportunities. I've also seen the struggle when I was a young girl visiting, and that stuck with me.
I think the call resonated with a lot of people in the Diaspora, because they understood where the story might not be clear. When I look back seven years ago, we had no real idea of how we could mobilise or help. Since then, we've made many strides, but it didn't come without many hurdles.
It was worth the risk, and I think there are thousands of people who we can say have been impacted by our decision to push through, even during our infancy when we didn't know how to mobilise our resources or engage with our Diaspora from across the world.
Now that I look back on it, you never think you can do enough. When you start out in social impact, the numbers are never high enough so you never feel satisfied.
If you're truly passionate and have a heart for impact work, it never feels good enough, and so one thing I've challenged my board and team with is to celebrate every step of the way. This is so we can understand that helping one person is valuable. Anytime we can multiply that impact and make it a hundred, a thousand, or a hundred thousand people, that’s wonderful, but we never need to discount the impact we can make on one person.
I think that's hard to accept when you're in the impact space, because it's often all about the numbers. Sometimes you end up losing sight of the fact people start to become disengaged when they stop to see those big numbers.
People start to think smaller impacts are worthless and that they don’t want to give their time or money because, “what's $1 going to do?” $1 can do a lot, so we need to understand that by combining our collective power, resources, and experiences together, there's nothing we can't accomplish.
That's something I think is important that we've really thought through, and we've been reached out to by other African countries to discuss how we developed our organisation.
That conversation began early on, and because we were in our infancy it was hard to give that guidance then. Now we will be connecting and sharing our blueprint and why we believe the Diaspora is so important for creating change.
A lot of people forget there are many members of the Diaspora around the world who didn't want to leave their home country. There's this constant longing and desire to give back and by using their experiences to help others, their brothers and sisters from their home country. That's a beautiful thing.
Recently you wrapped up the inaugural Great Rift Valley Innovation Summit. Can you share more about the summit, its purpose, and what it accomplished?
We just did our first inaugural GRV summit, which is Great Rift Valley Innovation Summit that was held in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia last week. It was the largest funding event for start-ups in the country ever by sheer dollar amount.
Our top winner received $150,000 USD. We supported over 18 start-ups that each have 2-5 founders, so certainly over one hundred people and families were directly impacted. I don't say this just to highlight the numbers but the sheer impact this summit had.
To give you some colour as to what types of start-ups we selected, our finalist was a home health care company that has created an app. If you're in the Diaspora, you can request to have home health care support using this app. Then, a medical team will reach out to your family members or friends who are living in rural areas, and they'll be visited by a doctor or nurse to support them around the clock if required.
This is important when you're across the world from your loved ones, and we have a generation experiencing significant chronic disease and health issues who are often unable to access medicine or travel to an urban city. Just having the ability to get someone to your loved one, friends, and family is amazing.
They shared a story about how they weren't making enough money during the COVID pandemic, because there was a period when people didn't want to travel. People didn't want people in their homes at that time, and there was a certain number of patients who they were having a hard time getting to.
Even people in the Diaspora during the pandemic were saying, "it's okay, don't worry about it.” However, regardless of them receiving enough money or not, they would not give up on their patients. They went to them, saw them, and stood by them, whether it was during their last days or to take care of them in critical conditions. That story stuck with us.
This event was a social impact grant fundraiser, so all the companies were impact start-ups working in health care, education and agriculture. These are the foundational sectors of a developing country like Ethiopia and many others across the continent.
It's so critical to have access to health care, medicine, and education. We have a lot of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia (approximately 70% are based rurally), so supporting innovative agri-tech initiatives is crucial. These ventures help local farmers to access marketplaces, distribute their goods effectively, and to manage post-harvest losses, so they don't lose their harvests but instead reuse waste for fertiliser and other things.
If we are just focusing on that renewable agriculture sector, we’re talking about impacting 125-130+ million people. What we expected was to have several smart founders of great companies at summit.
We knew they were going to do great things, but what we ended up with was 18 companies who are now our family that we feel invested in. We already have ideas on how to not only help them with their initial funding, but also how we can get them to access other investors who may want to invest for equity.
Also, amongst the 18 companies, there are lots of potentially complimentary partnerships. For example, maybe there’s a product being produced in one company that another can provide to their users or customer base. It was beautiful to visualise these partnerships and to know they probably would have not gotten this chance had it not been a part of this first event we put on.
It was beautiful to see that we had speakers and panellists from all over the world, including Canada, the U.S., Europe, India, and South Africa. It was exciting to see our participants, such as speakers, panellists, and judges, literally donating their time.
They all wanted to meet with the finalists to coach them through their pitches. They wanted to look through their business strategies and plans.
Now, the United Nations Development Programme are providing an accelerator to all our finalists, to make sure they have a better understanding of financial and capital readiness.
There have now been some new proclamations and laws implemented for the start-up ecosystem in Ethiopia. The fact that people wanted to donate their time to help these companies succeed was completely organic and authentic. It was so exciting to see and just be a part of this program.
What do you believe is the next big step that's required to help advance global impact and the innovation and business for good movement in emerging markets like Ethiopia?
Firstly, we’re in the AI revolution. I’m not saying that because it's a buzzword, it's just the reality of where we're at. For emerging markets, AI is a game changer. We haven't seen a revolution like AI that could flatten the divide between the developing and developed world for a long time.
It you look at something like the Industrial Revolution, which spawned huge manufacturing, machinery, and investment in R&D, this is not that. This revolution involves a lot of open sourcing, and if you are a great developer and researcher, you can find so much support online it's ridiculous.
We've never seen anything in our or our parents’ lifetimes like AI. It has created a huge opportunity for impact and partnerships when you look at ongoing policy changes, trade tariffs, and how the evolving geopolitical climate is changing trade relationships.
Evolving trade relationships are not about allies becoming sworn enemies, but instead that the economy and trade flows are changing so much. That shift creates a huge opportunity for the developing world, so now it's about how can the developing world tell their story?
Can they show up and show they have an international standard both in delivery and quality products and quality services, and if they can, then it will become the question on what's the pricing, what's the logistics, what is the alignment, why would we choose Ethiopia versus China?
That's going to be a big question over the next few years. When we look at advancements which have happened in India and China in recent decades, I think we're also going to see those shifts happen in Ethiopia over the next five years.
That’s not just because people are thinking about AI, but also because the world is so much more connected, and information flows so much more openly. This creates a competitive marketplace that the developing world can access.
In Ethiopia for example, 70% of the population is under 30 years of age. We're talking about young, energetic people who don't have a lot of opportunities as far as regular jobs, so they are often entrepreneurial. If you're not an entrepreneur, you're not necessarily living above a low income like in other countries.
This has become the standard for Ethiopia, whereas in the Western world, it's more about pushing the corporate model of working for a company. When you're tapping into a young workforce that’s entrepreneurial, learning online, and reading all day, even if they don't have many options, they have a bigger passion and focus to want to learn quicker and be aggressive in the competition landscape.
Ensuring this continued progress will rely on effective communication, narrative building and taking advantage of ongoing shifts in the geopolitical and trade policy landscapes. We need to be sharing our value proposition to shake things up a bit, because if there was ever a time where things may be different, it's going to be right now.
There's so much change and disruption in the markets that it gives me a lot of hope, because I don't think we've had a proper reset in forever, not in any generation that I can remember.
It’s exciting to not just see the innovation, tools and the new inventions that are emerging, but how communities will rise to share their story and compete on the global stage.
That's what I think is next for impact around the world. There’s also going to be a huge transfer of wealth to women over the next 5-10 years, and that's going to change impact because you're going to have a lot more women taking these trillions of dollars and using them in a purposeful way.
These women will still want to be profitable, but they will also want to be purposeful. That's a great opportunity for the developing world to start crafting that value proposition, while still being aggressive in the competitive business landscape by delivering quality products and services.
To finish off, what inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?
The biggest focus for me is to firstly continue supporting innovative companies, because by doing this you can help grow larger sectors like healthcare, education and agriculture while also supporting innovation, technology, and women.
I like our recent Summit because what you can do with one clinic is help hundreds or thousands of people all year long. But, what you can do with one healthcare technology company is immeasurable. Last week just confirmed my hypothesis, and so I’m a believer in innovation.
I am excited about helping these companies be successful and making sure we have the right sustainable, engagement model with our Diaspora who are volunteering and serving all these sectors. I want to use this as a pilot case to see how we can maximise impact throughout the Diaspora.
This is a huge bridge for people internationally to make a difference, and I think if you can do it for one Diaspora, you can do it for all of them. I think that's how we're going to create peace and support sustainably. There are so many gaps globally that I think Diaspora’s can contribute to solving, and I think that they can do that through investing in the social impact space.
My other focus is just changing the narrative surrounding the African continent from a place that's unsettled, disorganised and starving. There are all these different existing stereotypes about our continent, and I think providing more education, information and communication around what the African story is will contribute to demonstrating what opportunities exist there.
People need to remember the fact that one in four people will be African in the next 10-15 years. That's a quarter of the world, and I think this growing population is dynamic and very young population. The rise of Africa is not a suggestion, it's already happening.
If you study the demographic population growth in India and China, you will realise it's inevitable the African continent is also going to grow. The African continent is going to advance and continue to improve their value chain of natural resources, but how will they do that, who will they partner with, and what will that looks like in the future?
That’s what I'm excited for, the forging of these partnerships, especially with the United States. I'm from the U.S. so I have a particular soft spot in advocating for U.S.-Africa partnerships.
I want to see that advancement because I feel like it is going to be a partnership for the future. The U.S. is particularly poised for that, it has the largest African diaspora.
I think it's a huge opportunity and it’s a key space I am advocating in. Our Diaspora Fund is advocating for and understanding what role the diaspora will play in advancing Ethiopia.
