Innohub CEO wins two awards at Forty Under 40 Africa Awards
Nelson Madiba Amo, CEO of Innohub Limited, has emerged as the winner of the Investment category at the just ended maiden edition of the 2022 Forty Under 40 Africa Awards held at the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City in Accra-Ghana.
He also won the “The People's Choice Award”, representing the nominee with the highest number of votes across all the categories.
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The prestigious award in the Investment Category was in recognition of his dedication and commitment to support Small and Growing Businesses in Ghana and on the continent to design robust scaling plans and help them to unlock investment capital for growth.
As Founder and CEO of a leading Business Accelerator and Growth Consulting firm, Nelson has a very strong view on the need to support the growth of businesses as an avenue for job creation and economic development.
Speaking to the media after receiving the award, Nelson Amo was really grateful to his family, friends, Innohub’s partners, Board and team members, and everyone who had supported his dreams thus far.
Madiba Amo took the opportunity to urge governments across the continent to be very deliberate about creating the right strategies and policies to drive investments into ventures that can promote innovation, create jobs and decent incomes for the ever-increasing youth population, which has been described as a “ticking time bomb” in Africa.
He also called on African leaders to be intentional about removing the artificial barriers of trade and mobility across the continent. He explained how he was recently invited to attend a meeting in an African country and the processes involved in the visa application were so tedious that he missed that opportunity to attend the meeting in the said African country while his friends from non-African countries could easily acquire the visa to attend the meetings. He described it as pathetic and shameful, especially as it was much easier for him to secure a visa and travel outside Africa. He concluded that such artificial challenges will limit the potential of the AfCTA provisions to yield desired results.
He called on the need for “Africatalysts” to stand up and promote investments into the growth and development of the content.
This year's events which saw dignitaries across the continent was in partnership with the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture in Ghana and the Ministry of Youth and Sports which seeks to identify, honour and celebrate a cross-section of the continent's most influential and accomplished business leaders under the age forty from a wide range of industries which includes people committed to business growth, professional excellence and community services.
Nelson has experience in business development, growth consulting, grant management, business model innovation, design of enterprise support initiatives.
He is an alumnus of the Oxford Social Finance Program from the Oxford University Said Business School. He has an MSc. in Development Studies from LSE, with a special interest in Business Model Innovation at the bottom of the Pyramid.
He also has a certificate in “Unlocking Finance for Emerging Markets and Developing Economies”, a World Bank course, as well as a certificate in “Startup Accelerators in the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” from the Golda Meir MASHAV Carmel International Training Center in Israel.
He is the Grant Manager/Program Lead for mLab Ghana, a project under Ghana’s Ministry of Communication with funding from the World Bank, with the objective of promoting the development of digital start-ups, supporting them develop their prototype and launching on the market. He also led the Ghana Climate Venture Facility project with funding from the World Bank.
Nelson is also the Founder of Accra Angels Network, an entity dedicated to driving investments into early-stage startups in Ghana.