Jerry Parkes & Dadié Tayoraud: Returning for Impact
In 2006, two evangelists of the informal movement, the ‘Move Back Club’, Jerry Parkes and Dadié Tayoraud, left the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the United States to wreak change upon their worlds.
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They spent their days speaking to as many of their colleague African students as possible to encourage them to think about things they could do back in their home countries in Africa, hence the ‘Move Back Club’ name.
It was this burning desire that would first lead them into a friendship. When time came for Jerry to start his “regional business”, the only person that came to his mind to partner was his friend in Abidjan, Dadié. It helped that Dadié was an agricultural entrepreneur, as he describes himself.
After his Wharton MBA, Jerry went into investment banking in London, with stints at Merrill Lynch and UBS, before moving to a smaller investment company.
It was all part of the plan, as he tended to take a long-term view of most of the things in his life. He was already plotting his return home by then. “I started working on the business plan for an investment fund on the side.
So while I was working on this fund opportunity, I had a bit of luck. An investor out there was looking to create a fund that would target SMEs in Africa, but they didn't have the people to manage that fund. So I engaged with them and in parallel, I called Dadié about it,” Jerry recounts.
Learning experience
Aside the mandatory national service after university, Jerry gained his only real work experience in Ghana during the few months he volunteered with Technoserve Ghana after his MBA.
Intent on making a huge difference in Africa, he took part in the Technoserve agri-business development programme – Believe Begin Become - where he was the consultant for business plan preparation. Technoserve would award funding to winning contestants for their businesses.
He would learn, during this period, about the many problems that entrepreneurs faced in agri-business. It was here he realised just how much opportunity there was and the interventions needed to change the face of agri-business in Ghana. So when he left for Europe, it was to get ready for his ultimate return.
Dadié though returned to Cote D’Ivoire, having spent just one year working for a pharmaceutical distribution company in New York after his MBA. He worked at a private TV content production outfit in Abidjan. But the business wasn’t having the best of times. It was struggling, having to compete against its own customers, the two government-owned TV channels that also produced their own content.
When the call from Jerry came through, Dadié was the more prepared of the two, for the African challenge. Years back, Dadié ran a rice milling business after he quit his job as assistant financial controller in one of Abidjan’s top hotels.
The business faced harsh difficulties when the coup d’états brought social and political upheaval in Cote D’Ivoire. He went into advertising – and there faced a different set of challenges. He soon realised he needed some international exposure to remain competitive on the job market. So he left the Ivory Coast for Wharton.
Their partnership
It wasn’t long before Jerry was on a plane to Accra, teaming up with Dadié to convince the investor of their plans to make great impact in agriculture with the fund they proposed to set up.
They called the fund Injaro, borrowing from Mount Kilimanjaro’s Swahili meaning, “mountain of greatness” - a literal reminder of their ambitions. The investors were pleased, and they got to work swiftly. The first few months, Jerry’s whole office set-up was a laptop, a seat in an Accra restaurant and his dongle for Internet.
Not a glorious beginning, but they were keen to get to work. They had to grow the fund and lay a solid financial foundation for their sub-region-spanning business. They had to find other investors, sit through several meetings and suffer rejection from potential investors - wealthy families, development funds, wherever money could be found. But they succeeded. They gradually grew their initial fund of US$four million dollars to the present US$50 million.
Injaro makes investments in small and medium-sized enterprises along the agricultural value chain in Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Sierra Leone. They are backing businesses that range from input suppliers to farmers’ fields, with funding and technical advice.
They are invested in a poultry business in Cote d’Ivoire for example, taking advantage of that country’s ban of poultry imports for some years. There is Sekaf, a shea butter business based and run out of Tamale, bringing the age-old beauty secrets of our women in the form of the natural cosmetic out for all.
The story of Injaro
The difference between a business that they get in and one that they don’t, “the entrepreneur’s passion”. They have seen it in Kona, a Ghanaian business that processes and exports cashew nuts, and in Neema Agricole and Comptoir 2000, which are both seed suppliers in Burkina Faso and Mali respectively.
“It's import substitution, local value addition and then just to make the value chain more efficient so that we can make food security a reality, so food gets cheaper and more affordable for people and more farmers can actually generate incomes from the food value chain and, therefore, have a better quality of life,” Dadié adds.
When he was young, Dadié was witness to his mother’s fresh vegetables business in Abidjan. Although her business grew from the low base of smallholder, roadside retailer to large scale, farm gate buyer and distributor, he saw just how much labour and inefficiency was endemic in agri-business.
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Having a fund that is 100 per cent focused on the notoriously difficult sector of agriculture in West Africa, is in itself laudable. But that is smallest of their aims. By 2023, their sights are on affecting and changing the lives of 1.2 million people involved in the agricultural value chain in the West African sub-region.
The story of Injaro is one that tells of the power of passion and the desire to bring change, planning, preparation and opportunity. The marks of true entrepreneurship. Today, the evangelists of the ‘Move Back Club’ are living their dreams, impacting agribusiness all across West Africa.