Stéphane Akoki On Creating Self-Reliance Through Remote Work And Financial Literacy In West Africa

Stéphane Akoki is a multilingual leader with a diverse background spanning social entrepreneurship, technology, and real estate.

Having navigated challenges across West Africa, China, and the United States, he embodies resilience, adaptability, and a global perspective.

As the founder of Elevate Côte d'Ivoire, a nonprofit organization, Stéphane is dedicated to empowering talented yet underprivileged individuals by providing training and remote job opportunities as virtual assistants for U.S.-based companies.

His work not only transforms lives by offering financial stability but also fosters economic development in his home country Cote D’Ivoire.

Beyond social impact, Stéphane is passionate about real estate investing, financial literacy, and education. He believes in creating sustainable opportunities that uplift individuals and communities, ensuring long-term economic growth.

His mission is to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity, empowering people to build a brighter future.

Stéphane discusses why remote jobs are unlocking economic mobility across West Africa and his personal journey from necessity entrepreneur to social innovator reshaping employment for under-resourced communities.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social entrepreneurship?

[Stéphane Akoki] - I was born and raised in Côte d'Ivoire and I spent most of my life there. Growing up in Côte d'Ivoire, we faced lots of challenges. As is the case for most countries in West Africa, we faced poverty, lack of educational opportunities, and even war has been a part of my lifetime.

I've kept asking myself the question, what can I do to make this a better place? Why are we poor as a country if we have so many resources? How come humanitarian aid given to our countries has still not led to an impact? Why hasn’t there been a change?

Having faced those challenges myself, from not being able to afford school or college and going on to become a necessity entrepreneur to be able to provide for myself, I thought there has to be a better way. There has to be a better system. How can I, as a person that understands this reality, create opportunities for my people?

I journeyed to China to get a better education, but with those questions still in my mind. I’d look at China from different angles, thinking, what have they done differently? Moving to the United States, I did the same thing. That led me to researching what countries have done in the past to take them to where they are today. Why are there poor countries? What makes a country rich? Ultimately, what can I learn from the collective lessons of those nations to be able to bring prosperity to Côte d'Ivoire and the rest of Africa?

More importantly, I wanted to work on the people side of things. I wanted to be able to bring opportunities to the people in Côte d'Ivoire that I didn’t have access to growing up. That's what led to the creation of Elevate Côte d'Ivoire.

As the founder of Elevate Côte d'Ivoire, could you share more about this social enterprise and how it is generating economic empowerment?

Elevate Côte d'Ivoire aims to empower under privileged Ivorians and extend this to Africans as a whole. Our goal is for them to be able to achieve self-reliance and economic empowerment. The questions I’d been asking myself led directly to that focus. Why hasn't change taken effect? We've gotten food, water, and plenty of resources from different organisations, but it hasn’t created lasting changes.

I found myself wanting to help people not just in the moment, but for the future as well. Following the proverb, how can I teach someone to fish so that they could have fish for an entire lifetime? That's what Elevate is trying to do.

There are two different aspects to that: the people level, and the macro-economic level. How can Elevate lift up Ivory Coast as a whole nation? It’s a daring and daunting task, trying to speed up the development of the nation as one private organisation. However, by lifting up the country, we lift up the people. By elevating the people, we elevate the country. That's the big picture.

How do we do that in practice? One of the things I learned from economics development is, as basic as it sounds, for a country to rise out of poverty and become prosperous, that country needs to be able to export more than import. You need to bring in more money than you spend.

We had to consider what Ivorians could give to other nations, whether that be goods or services, to bring in more money for themselves. That led us to remote jobs. We started a social entrepreneurship initiative, called Elevate Virtual Assistant. It's an entity within Elevate Côte d'Ivoire, whose mission is to drive job creation as part of the broader strategic goal to further economic empowerment. We started in Côte d'Ivoire and now we have people from Ghana and Nigeria. We vet them, train them, and then match them with US-based companies that are willing to pay higher wages for those people.

It has had a tremendous impact on the lives of these people. The average income in Côte d'Ivoire is about a hundred to a hundred and twenty. It’s lower in Ghana and Nigeria and not enough for a person to live on. With the remote job program, we could increase that by as much as five times that income. Suddenly they go from barely surviving, being unable to afford rent, unable to eat, or take care of children, to living comfortably. Now they can afford to dream and chase all of these new opportunities.

They’re able to take care of their basic needs now and that's really our main goal. How could we bring an opportunity, such as a job, that will change someone's life and enable them to lift themselves out of poverty?

Could you provide more context around how these remote job opportunities lead to economic growth in Côte d'Ivoire and some of the challenges you've faced in implementing this model?

With remote jobs, there is so much power in money coming into the nation. At the individual level, remote jobs enable people to grow their income, therefore changing their lives.

Ruth is one of our virtual assistants from Nigeria, who was making about sixty to seventy dollars a month. She’s been able to make five times that amount now. Ruth is a single mother of two and she struggled to afford basic necessities while keeping her children in school. Suddenly, Ruth doesn't have to worry about food and housing.

At the individual level, she’s experienced a transformative impact that’s drastically improved her quality of life. On a wider level, Ruth now goes out with her increased income and spreads it throughout her community while buying fish and water.

All the markets where our virtual assistants are living are now benefiting from the money brought in through the Elevate remote program. It creates this incredible ripple effect within the economy, where impacting one person uplifts an entire community through their increased spending power.

The currency exchange in Côte d'Ivoire is also important to consider. The dollar is very strong in West Africa. When I go home, I’d always give out dollar bills and it’d make people so happy. There are two reasons for that; one, because they say it gets them closer to the United States that they love so much, and two, because of its spending power.

We have companies that will pay us a thousand dollars a month to hire a virtual assistant, which is much lower than they'd pay a person living in the United States. For people in Côte d'Ivoire, that is ten times the average income. The currency exchange means their money goes so much further.

We do however face a lot of challenges in our work. Côte d'Ivoire is a French speaking country with almost a hundred dialects. Initially, it was difficult navigating the language barrier between French speaking Ivorians and staffing them with English speaking US-based companies. We've worked hard in educating and training our people, and we happened to start at a great time with the rise of AI. All of those tools have aided in removing that barrier.

There are cultural barriers as well; obviously two different countries have very different ways of life. We have to help our American audience understand the work culture in Ivory Coast, and our Ivorian workers to understand what it's like to work in the United States. As we’ve evolved the program, this has been baked into our training. We want our assistants to be well prepared for the jobs here.

In general, education in Ivory Coast has a lot of room for improvement. It's not designed for remote jobs. We had to create a brand new curriculum to help people work and collaborate online. Access to technology can also be really difficult. Computers are hard to afford for the majority of people and the internet is unstable. On top of that, there’s plenty of issues with technological infrastructure that we have to deal with.

We were fortunate enough to work with people that were passionate to make it work no matter what. They’re willing to go to internet cafes, to borrow a friend's laptop, use their phone, whatever it takes. There’s a real hunger to give this opportunity their all, and that’s helped our process to become a success.

How do you see financial literacy and education playing a key role in ensuring long-term economic stability for individuals?

Elevate has five pillars. The bottom pillar is education and the next is jobs. We create this, but it’s dependent on that initial groundwork of education. The rest of the pillars are essentially the basic of life, much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. There’s healthcare, food, and housing at the top.

We believe education is the most essential part of this plan. It does not work without educating people and teaching them new skills. To achieve economic empowerment, we have to be able to provide something of value to the rest of the world.

Financial literacy goes hand in hand with that. For someone making a hundred dollars a month and unable to afford necessities, increasing their income to five hundred brings a lot of temptations. That's true for anyone who’s had to live in scarcity.

Suddenly, you have all this extra money, and you get the urge to spend it. All the things you’d wanted but couldn’t afford now feel within your reach. It’s a natural response, but if you multiply your income by five and your expenses by ten, you’ll end up back where you started.

To effectively break the cycle of poverty and create long-term financial stability, we need a foundation of financial literacy. We can boost someone’s income and unlock brand new opportunities for them, but it cannot be sustained unless they also learn that with more money, comes more responsibility.

What opportunities do you see to help people transform disadvantaged communities and what advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur hoping to create impact?

There are endless opportunities as there are so many problems to solve in the world today. It’s bittersweet, but if you look around, those problems have already been solved. Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most nations were considered poor by today's standard. After the industrial revolution, many countries began to grow wealth and prosperity. It’s all been done before.

A lot of what we do today is replicating history. It’s the case for issues concerning healthcare, migrants, and housing. There's so much to learn from in the actions of other nations, historical and present.

The question becomes, where do I start? You should focus on your passion. Find what energises you. For me, it's the problem of poverty because I believe no one can live a fulfilled life beneath the trials of poverty. They’ll be stifled with worry about how they’ll eat the next day, and the day after that.

Removing that barrier unlocks the door for people to go beyond survival instincts. Talents are being wasted because they're so focused on affording their next meal, instead of inventing, or becoming the next Einstein. That's my passion.

The question I have for you is what is your passion? What's the problem that keeps you up at night? Start with that problem statement and learn about what has been done. Find out what people have tried, read about the failures, and learn from the successes. Connect with individuals in those spaces. Talk with them, understand their backgrounds, and volunteer your time.

From there, you can craft your own plan. You have to work towards your goal and never quit. It will be hard. This is one of the hardest things I've ever done but, it's also the most rewarding because it changes people's lives. I can go to bed knowing that I've helped one person transform their life and their community with my actions.

What are some inspiring projects or initiatives that have recently been creating social change?

Of course, you've heard about the remote job opportunities that we're working on. We're always looking for partners, companies, and enterprises that are willing to employ some of our workforce. We're also looking into agriculture in Ivory Coast and exploring how we can create food security programs with local entrepreneurs. We've learned that for nations that have previously traversed the path of poverty to prosperity, food is incredibly important. If you can't eat, you're not productive.

There are so many other opportunities and organisations doing amazing work. Kiva Micro Loans empowers local entrepreneurs with startup funds and resources. I've worked with them previously. They provide entrepreneurship education, which is very helpful and they adapt it to the local circumstances of those nations.

Elevate Côte d'Ivoire Job Sustainability.png

Skep Foundation is a partner of ours, we recruit our students from them. They focus on skill-based training, which helps us significantly. I like to say, if someone is doing better than us, why should we reinvent the wheel? We go to them and recruit their best students, add a bit to their training, and then we find them jobs.

Working with local entrepreneurs in Côte d'Ivoire and other places has been incredible. It’s awesome seeing how many Africans are trying to make a change in their communities. There’s so many out there that it’s more that I can cite, but I'm happy to say there's a lot of good happening.

To finish off, are there any books or resources that you would recommend for our audience to check out?

The first thing I would recommend is the MITx MicroMaster program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy. They provide free learning for those who are interested in economic development, and it was a great insight into what I do today. They have a huge amount of research which has saved me a lot of time. Instead of trying and failing in various areas myself, they’ve done it for me, and it allowed me to jump straight to the next step. It covers a lot of issues too, such as food, agriculture, and healthcare. It’s a great program.

I’d also recommend Poor Economics. It’s a really good book. It looks at nations as a whole and initiatives that have worked and ones that haven’t. Why Nations Fail is one of my favourite books. It's more of a historical view on poverty and why some nations are rich, along with all the historical context behind the progression of nations and their economies. Those are my top recommendations, and I hope you enjoy them.