Across Africa, low cost housing is too often treated as a numbers game. But this episode leans into a different vision: design that is practical and low cost, yet still protective, dignified and rooted in local life.
Drawing from work with Ghana’s Ga communities along the West African coast, we explore how thoughtful choices can help increase safety, strengthen communities, and confront everyday environmental pressures like climate constraints and plastic in waterways. We also look at why seemingly simple architecture can create a sense of pride and cultural belonging.
Joining us are Julian Mowbray, Partner at Mowbray Architects, and Maria Alonso, Partner at Mowbray Architects. Together, we unpack how architecture can turn big development ideals into spaces that expand people’s freedoms in daily life.
Across the world, small and medium enterprises carry the greatest financial risk, even when they are the least able to absorb it. What if finance could be rebalanced to make opportunity fairer for everyone?
In this episode, we explore how rethinking foreign exchange (FX) risk and moving it from local entrepreneurs to global markets could unlock billions for sustainable projects in developing economies. Joining the discussion are Roopal Kanabar, CEO of Sustainabar, and Christopher Hunter, Chief Risk Officer at Pharo Management.
Together, they discuss how innovative financial tools could bridge the worlds of development and finance, lowering the cost of capital, empowering small businesses, and creating a fairer, more resilient global economy.
Africa holds some of the world’s most fertile land, yet more than 340 million people face hunger and over 80% of staple food is still imported. Why has a continent with so much potential struggled to feed itself, and what will it take to change that?
In this episode, we explore whether agriculture can drive Africa’s next economic transformation. Joining us are Dr Linda Davis, Founder and CEO of Giraffe Bioenergy, which is building East Africa’s first integrated cassava-to-ethanol ecosystem, and Professor David Luke, Professor in Practice and Strategic Director at the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.
Together, they unpack how innovation, trade policy, and local entrepreneurship can help Africa move from dependence to resilience, turning its farms into engines of food security, climate-smart growth, and sustainable prosperity.
Good teaching means something different to everyone, and in this episode we ask our guests what constitutes good teaching to them, how to systematise it, and how it can be scaled up.
We are delighted to be joined by two teaching experts in this episode. The first is Dr. Fay Hodza, the Global Senior Director of Programmes at PEAS (Promoting Equality in African Schools). PEAS believe that every young person should have access to a quality education which provides them with the knowledge and skills they need to lead fulfilling and successful lives after school. They support young people to succeed from the moment they start school, right through to graduation from secondary. They run one of the largest school networks in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on secondary schools. Each year, 20,000+ students learn at their 38 schools.
Alongside Fay, we have Pharo School’s own Majiwa Benson, the School Principal of Pharo School Homosha. This is our girls only, free boarding school in the remote province of Benishangul Gumuz Region, Ethiopia. Despite its remote location and the challenges that come with this, the school is one of the highest performing at regional and national level, with 100% of pupils achieving a grade above the 50% pass rate vs only 8.4% of pupils at national level, for two years in a row. Majiwa joins us to offer his thoughts on how this has been achieved and to share the teaching methods that have served him well across his career.
In this episode we continue under our ‘scaling-up’ theme and explore the work of Street Child, an organisation which supports children's safety and education in low-resource environments and emergencies across 25+ countries in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
We examine their Early Childhood Education programme in Moldova and how it was turned into a national priority. The programme was introduced after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when large numbers of Ukrainian families sought refuge in Moldova. Estimates show 1/8 children in Moldova are Ukrainian refugees. So Street Child launched an initiative to provide education to refugee learners, but they also scaled up Early Childhood Education for Moldovans, enabling many women to join the labour force. On this episode, we talk with Ramya Madhavan, Global Director of Advisory for Street Child, and Mihaela Iurascu, Coordinator of the National Program on Childcare at the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of Moldova. We look at the Moldovan experience, how Street Child's Early Childhood Education programme was turned into a national priority, and how we can learn from their initiative in other contexts.
Welcome back! Season 2 of Afri-CAN is starting on the theme of what it takes to scale up good ideas in development. In this episode, we will concentrate on the policy environment and how one can create a platform which resonates with policy makers and obtain the funding that follows from that. Specifically, this episode looks at Education in the context of decreased development funding globally, and the political deprioritisation of education funding relative to other aspects of development.
To help us understand how we have gotten to this point and what can be done to remedy the situation we have three expert guests joining us: Laura Savage, the Executive Director of the International Education Funders Group, Joseph Nhan-O'Reilly, the co-founder and executive director of the International Parliamentary Network for Education, and Geoff Adlide, previously the Director of Advocacy and Communications at the Global Partnership for Education.
After a short summer break we are introducing to season 2 of Afri-CAN.
Watch this space for full episodes out soo.
Join us for the final episode of season 1 of Afri-CAN!
At Pharo Foundation we understand the critical role savings can have and this is integral to our third mission of Productivity - part of which is to remove financial barriers to employment. Indeed, we have seen firsthand what savings can do for people in Savings Groups which we have set up for farming communities in Ethiopia.
To discuss savings in more detail we have two guests on this episode:
The first is Kenyan entrepreneur, Samuel Njuguna, the CEO and Co-Founder of Chumz - a Kenyan savings platform designed to build better financial habits using behavioural psychology and gamification to encourage its users to save.
With him, we have Wangui Kimaru, Senior Programs Manager at Emerging Leaders in Kenya. This is an organisation with a purpose of empowering youth. Wangui initially used the Chumz platform in her personal life and then approached Samuel to integrate this platform at Emerging Leaders.
Thanks for listening to season 1 - we look forward to recording season 2!
According to the World Bank, a 1% increase in female education participation, can result in a 0.3% increase in average gross domestic product and gains of up to $15-30 trillion in lifetime productivity and earnings. In Africa specifically, we see the highest rate of female entrepreneurial activity globally, with approximately 24% of women engaged in business ventures. So, for Pharo Foundation, it is clear that educating girls is indeed an investment worth making and particularly where we work in East Africa.
We share our commitment to educating disadvantaged girls with the renowned Malala Fund - an international, non-profit organization that advocates for girls' education. To highlight the critical impact of investing in girls education, this episode explores this topic with Malala Fund's, Saba Zewdu, Manager of their Ethiopia programmatic grant portfolio and Pharo Foundation's Head of Education in Ethiopia, Milkyas Solomon.
This episode takes place in-person at Pharo Management's London Office - the emerging market hedge fund which finances Pharo Foundation. In this special episode we take a look at philanthropy from the perspective of the philanthropist - discussing how they choose their causes and how they allocate their resources.
To discuss this, we have Pharo Foundation's own founder, Guillaume Fonkenell. With him we have Jonathan Bayliss, the Co-Founder of EMpower UK, a charity which supports vulnerable young people in emerging market countries.
n estimated 250 million children in low and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their full developmental potential. Given Early Childhood Development (ECD) is one of Pharo Foundation's flagship programmes this is an important topic to us and we were keen to bring in Saving Brains experts to discuss this further.
Saving Brains invests in bold, evidence-based innovations that nurture healthy brain development and strengthen caregiving in the earliest, most critical years of life—from pregnancy to age five. To discuss this and what we can learn from their work, today we are talking with Sanjana Janardhanan, Portfolio Manager, Saving Brains at Grand Challenges Canada and Dr. Vishwajeet Kumar, Chief Scientist at Community Empowerment Lab.
This episode explores how we can optimise and increase access to healthcare through innovation, in contexts which are resource poor, such as Africa.
To discuss this, we have brought on Niek Vesteegde, a tropical doctor turned entrepreneur, and Founder and CEO of Goal 3 - a social enterprise dedicated to transforming paediatric and neonatal healthcare through scalable, sustainable and data-driven solutions that are fit for context. With him, we have Alef Meulenberg, who is the co-founder of Rhiza Babuyile and Rhiza Holdings which implement an innovative sustainable developmental model in disadvantaged African communities.
As Pharo Foundation's missions progress and we look to scale up our cost effective and evidence-based interventions, it's clear to us that utilising a range of innovative financing instruments to scale up our missions is critical. Among these instruments, outcomes-based financing is gaining traction and proving very effective. At its core, this method relies on a pre-agreed set of outcomes being achieved in order to trigger payments.
To explore how this method works, and its benefits, we have spoken with Adriana Balducci, Head of Programme Development at the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF), and Chloe Edleston, Regional Lead for East Africa at Social Finance.
In a previous episode we spoke with Oxfam about how far we should go in introducing innovations that challenge local culture. In this episode, we focus on how this translates to the education that we provide to our youth. We explore how we can leverage local culture to shape our youth into unique critical thinkers.
To address this question, we are focusing on Somaliland and our guests are two respected members of the local community: Muna Ahmed Jama, Pharo Foundation's Head of Education In Somaliland, and Dr. Jama Musse Jama, the founder and organiser of the Hargeisa International Book Fair and Director of the Hargeisa Cultural Centre.
This episode focuses on one of the most important questionsin philanthropy: how do philanthropic organisations go about ascertaining that they are indeed doing all the good they set out to do in the first place? While most development philanthropists are well-intentioned, whether these goodintentions end up improving development outcomes is not a foregone conclusion. So, to help us look at how to carry out effective impact assessment and all this can mean, we have three experts joining us in this episode: Fabio Bezerra, Director of Design, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning at ForAfrika, Lina Henao, Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning Director at iDE Mozambique and Ken Lee, Chief Research and Evaluation Officer at Pharo Foundation.
In this unique episode we are joined by Kidus Asfaw, Founderand CEO of Kubik - an Africa-based start-up transforming plastic waste into low-carbon construction materials that are cheaper and faster to build with than cement. Joining Kidus is our youngest guest to date, Helen Tekalign. A prodigious young student and already the winner of many local STEMcompetitions, Helen is in 8th grade at Pharo School Assosa located in a rural area of the BGRS state on the western edge of Ethiopia. The two discuss their entry into the field of STEM, and Kidus shares his journey from young tinkerer to CEO of his own successful start-up, and how he hopes to see Helen and other Ethiopian students like her do the same.
This episode focuses on innovation in the most basic sense: the introduction of something new into an existing cultural context. Oxfam's Raissa Azzalini and Zakarie Abdi discuss sustainable, culturally appropriate, and environment-friendly Water, Sanitation and Hygiene solutions in fragile contexts.
This episode examines whether there are any lessons for Africa to learn from the development experience of East Asia. We want to look at what factors led relatively poor East Asian countries to develop so quickly and even saw them become technological innovators in the space of just a few decades.
To make comparisons between these two continents and see how East Asia’s history can apply in Africa, we have brought on an expert in Development Studies and one of Pharo’s own leaders in innovation in East Africa. These are: James Putzel, Professor of Development Studies in the International Development Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Bethel Tsegaye, CEO of Pharo Ventures and Country Director of Pharo Foundation Ethiopia.
There is a cliché that the diaspora’s migration crowds out opportunities for home grown talent and national innovation through the so-called ‘brain drain’. However, there are many initiatives that defy this cliché and in this episode, we explore the many modalities through which the diaspora can make a positive difference both at an individual level and on a national scale, leading to increased innovation. To help us look at this we have brought on three expert guests who have each experienced the catalytic power of the diaspora. These are: Loksan Harley, Independent Migration and Diaspora Specialist and Executive Director at Homelands Advisory, Dominic Mwenja, CEO and Program Director at Miramar International Foundation and Funsho Allu, Board Member at Pharo Foundation and Founding Partner of TIA Capital.
In this episode we explore the various existing models of philanthropy and whether those working in this sector can/should innovate in the way they do philanthropy. We cover a variety of models from direct delivery to effective altruism through flexible funding, and we reflect on their implications for measuring impact. Our expert guests are David Nash, Community Director at Effective Altruism UK, and Dr Steph Hayden a researcher from the University of Kent.
