Strive Masiyiwa: journey of a visionary who changed the face of mobile telephony in Africa

Birth and Studies

Strive Masiyiwa is a billionaire businessman, philanthropist, founder and executive chairman of Econet Gbobal. Today, his fortune amounts to more than 1.5 billion USD, and he is one of the most influential people in the world. But who is he really? When did it start? And how did he achieve such success in the business world?

Strive Masiyiwa was born on January 29, 1961 in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, into a family of entrepreneurs. Due to the political instability in the country, his family decided to leave his land to settle in Kitwe, Zambia. It is in this city that he goes to school primary school until the age of 12, before continuing his studies in Edinburgh, Scotland.

As early as 1978, he plans to return to his native country to join the anti-government guerrillas by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. He ends up abandoning this project and going back to School: He graduated in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wales in 1983.

He briefly did lesser work in Cambridge, before making the decision in 1984 to return to Zimbabwe, hoping to help in the country’s recovery after the end of the war in Rhodesian Bush and universal franchise elections in 1980.

 

The return to Zimbabwe

So, after 17 years of absence, Masiyiwa is making a comeback in his native Zimbabwe, with the intention of putting at the service of the people his knowledge acquired during his many years of study in West.

A telecommunications engineer, he began his career in Zimbabwe with a position with the public telephony. He resigned quickly enough to set up on his own, setting up a large electrical engineering company. But with the rise of mobile cellular telephony, it is diversifying
quickly in telecommunications, a paying choice, and certainly the best choice he would have could do. A catch however: the Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe, refuses to grant him a license to operate its Econet Wireless business because at the time there was a state monopoly in several business sectors including telecommunications.

 

Clashes with the authorities of his country – Exile and rise

This marks the beginning of a legal battle that lasted 5 years and ended with a decision of the Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe in favor of Masiyiwa.

This moment is seen as one of the key milestones in opening up the African services sector. telecommunications to private capital.

In July 1998, Masiyiwa decided to list Econet Wireless on the local stock exchange.

Persecuted by the authorities, he decided to leave the country to settle in South Africa where he founded Econet Wireless Group, a holding company reputed to have operations and investments in more than 20 countries around the world especially in Africa (Econet Wireless Nigeria (now Airtel Nigeria), Econet Satellite Services, Lesotho Telecom, Econet Wireless Burundi, Rwanda Telecom,
Econet Wireless South Africa, Solarway and Transaction Processing Systems (TPS)), in the USA where he associated with one of the main American entrepreneurs John Stanton, in a company called Trilogy International Partners.

He is also the founder of Liquid Telecom Group, a large satellite and optical fiber company covering more than 14 countries in Africa.

 

The philanthropist

A shrewd businessman, his human qualities and his passion for the development of the black continent are equally remarkable.

He illustrated himself very well in January 2020, during the strike of doctors in Zimbabwe in their paying each a subsistence allowance of approximately $300 (£230), in addition to transport to get to work. Most striking doctors earned less than $100 a month.

He is also involved in a wide variety of humanitarian actions as important as than the others, particularly in the field of health, with campaigns against HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, malnutrition, EBOLA and more recently COVID-19.

In 2014, the President of the African Union (AU) Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma asked him to help mobilize funds to fight the Ebola epidemic. With the help of other leaders, he manages to set up a pan-African campaign that raises millions of US dollars
to combat the spread of the pandemic.

With his wife Tsitsi Masiyiwa, with whom he has 6 children, they launched a non-profit organization, the Higherlife Foundation through which they established one of the largest scholarship programs in Africa, which pays the tuition fees of thousands of students each year in Zimbabwe, Lesotho and in Burundi whom they call their “history makers”.

Over the past 20 years, it has provided scholarships to over 250,000 young Africans through of his family foundation, and is also the basis for the creation of one of the largest programs of support for the education of orphans in Africa.

 

A beloved man

This whole fight against poverty in Africa, and the many strong gestures it shows have won numerous awards. In 2014, he was listed by Fortune Magazine among the 50 chefs most influential companies in the world. In 2015, Forbes magazine cited him in the list of 10
most powerful men in Africa, and the freedom prize awarded to him by the International Committee of Rescue (IRC). In 2020, he was named by Bloomberg as one of the 50 most influential people in the world, and in 2021, he appears again in Fortune Magazine on the list of the 50 most great leaders of the world.

Now 61 years old, Strive Masiyiwa is an emblematic figure of Africa. He is an actor major part of the economic life of the continent, and is part of the elite class that sustains the continent African in this global economic ecosystem ruled by the industrial powers European, American and Asian.