Africa's Growth: A Global Catalyst for Good

On this episode of The Shift Code, PMI CEO Pierre Le Manh sits down with co-founder and CEO of Jetstream Africa, Miishe Addy, to discuss how family wisdom and tools from her Stanford education helped her develop an effective approach to easing bottlenecks in trade and unlocking opportunities for broad business growth. Plus, learn about how Africa’s economic health is critical to the success of global markets, the value of purpose and growth mindsets, and the importance of spontaneity in innovation.  

Transcript

Miishe Addy  

Our ultimate goal behind Jetstream was to make something that’s very difficult for the majority of businesses in Africa to navigate, just to simplify it and make it faster. I’ve come to appreciate the value of being more risk-loving. The future will be surprising and volatile. I think that there are certain types of people that will thrive in that volatility and have the growth mindset where you’re willing to adapt. That’s the winning formula. 

Pierre Le Manh  

That is the voice of Miishe Addy. She is the co-founder and CEO of Jetstream Africa. Jetstream Africa is an innovative logistics and fintech platform that transforms the landscape for African entrepreneurs. 

I am Pierre Le Manh, the CEO of Project Management Institute (PMI). Welcome to The Shift Code, a podcast dedicated to the intersection of leadership, change management and real-world impact.  

In this episode, I talk with Miishe about how she is unlocking opportunity for broad business growth through easing bottlenecks in trade practices. And as she will explain, Africa’s economic health is critical to global markets.  

So by applying tools she’s learned at Stanford—and from her dad—she’s both doing good in the world and doing very well as a business. It’s a very inspiring story, so let’s get to it. This is The Shift Code. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION   

Pierre Le Manh 

I am Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI, and I’m here with Miishe Addy. She is the CEO of Jetstream Africa. Miishe, it’s great to have you on The Shift Code.   

Miishe Addy 

Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to join.   

Pierre Le Manh 

I’d like to start with the genesis of Jetstream, right? You created Jetstream originally to address a supply chain challenge for businesses in Africa. So, can you explain to us what that challenge was or is, and what inspired you to take it on?   

Miishe Addy 

Africa is really dominated by small and mid-sized businesses. Those businesses account for most of the employment on the continent, and most of the young people who are graduating from secondary school and university and looking for jobs will end up creating small and mid-sized businesses, SMEs. So that’s the most important sector of the economy, when it comes to the engine for economic development. At the same time, it’s difficult for SMEs to trade cross-border; import-export is a type of trade that favors big, big companies. And so, the observation behind Jetstream was just, generally, the mismatch between the economies of scale required to run an efficient logistics operation, and the average size of an African business. 

I personally came to the problem that we wanted to solve because I tried to create my own export company. So I’m half Ghanaian, half American, and when I moved from the United States to Ghana in 2017, I wanted to create an export business that would produce products in Ghana and then sell them just two countries away in Nigeria, which is the biggest, most populous country on the African continent. The distance between Ghana and Nigeria is like the distance between New York, Long Island and Baltimore. It’s pretty close. But unlike running goods from Long Island to Baltimore, you have to find a customs broker at the Ghana border, at Togo, at Benin, at Nigeria. You have to transact in three different currencies. The complexity required to run cargo between countries that are close together physically on the African continent is too complex for the average small or mid-size business to navigate. 

So, I found that in my own experience, and through talking to other smaller businesses, it’s nearly impossible for a startup company or a new company to figure out how to sell in a market that’s not their own on the African continent. And that was a compelling problem to solve.   

Pierre Le Manh 

Jetstream began as a logistics platform. Why did you decide not to operate the shipping itself and really focus on the technology play here?   

Miishe Addy  

So, the first reason is scalability. My desire in coming to Africa from the United States was to apply my mind and my energy to big problems. And for me, simplifying the supply chain is probably the biggest problem that nobody really understands. There are inefficiencies in the logistics process, but the bigger problem that we discovered was that a lot of the businesses that we serve weren’t getting capital from banks.   

So, in the world, about 60 to 80% of cross-border trade is underwritten by banks. It’s a normal thing. The norm is to trade on credit. But in West Africa, that percentage is more like 24%. So, the norm is not to get credit from banks, and the result of that is that you have a lot of businesses that are slowing down their commercial activity until they can save up enough money to buy product. And that just takes all of the demand that’s in the continent. The African continent will be the consumption capital of the world by 2050, and we’re taking all of that latent demand, and we’re just slowing it down. And the result of that is you see a lot of inventory, stock outs, empty shelves, people who have money to pay for food and necessary products that aren’t able to buy those products. So, there’s a real impact of not being able to get finance into the supply chain. 

So, from our experience working in the logistics industry and seeing our clients struggle with finance, we saw that the finance problem was just primary. It was just the first problem we needed to solve before logistics can even get interesting.   

Pierre Le Manh  

Can you share with us how things played out during COVID? Like, how did it affect your business at the time? 

Miishe Addy  

Before COVID, we had been in business for about 18 months, and we were exporting. So, we were taking agricultural products from the north of the country and then running them down into the port. When we were hit with COVID, we started to get introductions to companies that were in the healthcare space. Those were pretty much the only companies that were trading actively during COVID. So, they were importing PPE (personal protective equipment), they were importing COVID testing machines. That part of the economy grew substantially. So, our own business grew by 10.25x, like it just became a different company during that period.   

Pierre Le Manh 

Transporting tests and vaccines.   

Miishe Addy 

Exactly. And to this day, we still do the imports. It wasn’t just a one-time surge; it pulled forward a shift in our business that became permanent. We served some of the biggest pharmaceutical distributors in West Africa. And that sort of helped us deliver the capacity to serve the mid-sized. The year after COVID, we actually doubled the size of the company. We did electronics, food imports, etc. Our growth rate slowed, but the size of our business, it continued to be a lot bigger than it was before. 

Pierre Le Manh  

You mentioned before that there was this big need for exporters to be financed. Is that what triggered your shift to lending or to fintech? 

Miishe Addy  

The first time we experimented with lending formally was when one of our export customers in the north of Ghana, he came to the ports to supervise his cargo. And at that time, I spent a lot of time personally at the ports, watching the trucks be loaded, etc. We had a long discussion about his business and kind of struck up a rapport.  

And at that time, Jetstream was doing a lot of freight discounting, sometimes just below cost, to try to gather more business. And the discounting wasn’t working. He pulled me aside, and he said, “Miishe, I want to tell you that it doesn’t matter how much you discount logistics. If I can’t buy enough supply to fulfill a big purchase order, it’s not helping me.” And he actually showed me a purchase order from a company in Florida, and he said, “I can’t fulfill this purchase order. That’s demand that I can’t supply, because I can’t get a loan from a bank.” That was, for me, the “aha moment.” 

We had venture capital. We had some money on our balance sheet in our bank account. And at that time, I thought, “Oh, well, we’ll just fund this container and then we’ll get more logistics business.” So, I wasn’t thinking about the financing as a primary product yet—I was thinking about it as a way to fuel more logistics business. But once we did it, we understood that our position in the supply chain made us sort of a natural lender. We have more data about these trading businesses than even the banks do.    

Pierre Le Manh  

Oh, can you explain that?   

Miishe Addy  

The best way for us to assess whether the person has the basic level of credit worthiness that we need is to bring them in through a partner that has experienced their payment history. Today, when we do lending, the majority of the time we’re lending to companies that are served by other logistics companies. So, we work with global shipping lines and local logistics operators, and they refer their customers to us. And the benefit of that type of referral is that they have a track record with that particular customer. So, they know how often the customer pays on time. They know what commodities that customer trades, etc.    

Pierre Le Manh  

And that data becomes your data, or is it confidential data? Is it data that you can resell? 

Miishe Addy  

We can use the data for insights, for credit scoring, to make decisions internally and also to provide value to our customers to help them understand what the trends are in their own supply chains. We cannot sell it, though, to a third party.  

Pierre Le Manh 

How do you refinance yourself? Do you syndicate? Do you issue financial products that you put on the market? How do you get the money to lend?   

Miishe Addy  

So, syndication is on our roadmap. This type of lending that we do is asset-backed. It’s backed by the inventory that our customers are moving; it’s a natural candidate for syndication in the future. Today we raise money, and we’re lending off of our own balance sheet.   

Pierre Le Manh  

Okay. So if we compare your traditional logistics business, the technology that you developed for the platform and now this whole financing business, what’s the future? Are you going to keep those two very different businesses together, because they have some synergies as explained? Or do you envision just doing one of them, financing, for instance, going forward?  

Miishe Addy 

Our ultimate goal behind Jetstream was just simply to make something that’s very complex and very difficult for the majority of businesses in Africa to navigate, just to simplify it and make it faster. And if you look at the number of processes involved in a cross-border shipment, there’s something like ninety-something processes. More than half of those processes relate to finance: paying someone, getting paid, raising money, etc. So by tackling the financial aspect of cross-border trade, we are simplifying cross-border trade. So I feel very happy to say that the future of Jetstream is 100% in deepening our expertise around simplifying embedded finance and leading with these financial products that enable our customers to secure credit at very fair interest rates and at low risk to investors.   

Pierre Le Manh 

When you made that shift, right, between what you were doing before and what you’re doing now, or this combination that you’re doing now, how did it transform your organization? Like, did you have to hire completely different kinds of people? Did you have to redevelop entirely your IT systems? What is the magnitude of such a transformation?   

Miishe Addy  

The biggest shift, honestly, was a mindset shift. It’s sometimes easy to write the story about a big pivot after the fact when you look back. But when you’re in it, it was very hard for us to admit, internally, that we were basically a fintech company. We started out as a logistics company, and then we became a fintech company. So, I think the way that we were helped along was basically just looking at the difference in value that we were able to create for our customers. And so, if you believe that your markups or your commissions are an expression of what your customers value, if you compare the markups that we’re able to achieve on the logistics side with the commissions that we’re able to achieve on the financing side, it’s a difference of seven times. There’s more value being created on the finance side for our customers than there is on the logistics side, and that’s the market’s way of telling us this is what is needed.    

Pierre Le Manh  

I like this idea that you’re in a different business now, but it’s still serving the same purpose, right? You’ve been referring a lot to the problem that you’ve been trying to solve and just found a different angle—that turns out to be more profitable as well—to do it. But you’re basically a for-profit business, right? With also this attention to trying to address a real problem that people are facing on your continent, how do you personally as a leader, and how does your company balance those financial goals with your mission, with the problem you’ve been trying to address? And how do your investors respond to that? 

Miishe Addy 

That’s been a delicate dance, to be honest with you. My dad was a social entrepreneur, so he was one of the first recipients of funding from a social impact investor called Acumen Fund. He left a long career in Johnson & Johnson to work on water purification projects in West Africa and in India. And one of his pieces of advice to me is just to solve a problem in a place that you care about and run it like a business. And so, I think that my approach to building Jetstream has been, as long as we conduct ourselves ethically and we continue to run the company with values that we believe in. So we believe in a growth mindset, we believe in results, we believe in integrity, etc. We shouldn’t be bending over backwards to meet ESG KPIs over and above building a sustainable, high-growth business. There’s certain guardrails that we won’t cross, and that’s what it means, in my view, to be a mission-driven business.  

Pierre Le Manh  

So what kind of guardrails?  

Miishe Addy  

There’s a lot of corruption and bribery at the ports, and that’s something we don’t participate in. So I do remember a specific case. We were migrating from the small businesses into the mid-size and enterprise businesses, and we found that some of those bigger businesses, the way that they compete is by undercutting their competitors at the ports. And that requires some level of side dealing with customs officers. 

And one of our customers brought us into the office and said, “I’m comparing your rates, the customs duties, the taxes you’re paying at the port with other forwarders, and you’re paying too much.” And we explained, “No, no. This is the actual code for the commodity, and this is the tax.” And she said quite clearly, “You need to work on that,” which means, specifically, you need to strike a deal with customs. And we lost that customer. I just couldn’t do it. And that is just one example of what it means, I think, to be values-based in a sincere way. It’s not, “We’re values-based until there’s an economic opportunity.” It’s, “This is how we do business, and we will lose business, we will make sacrifices when it comes to that.” 

MUSICAL TRANSITION  

Pierre Le Manh  

Miishe will do almost anything to help expand the African economy—she will take risks, she will pivot her business—but not if it violates important values. So what risks are ahead for Jetstream? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us. 

I am Pierre Le Mahn, and this is The Shift Code. Before the break, we heard Jetstream Africa CEO Miishe Addy talk about how logistics and lending can change the African economy. Now she talks about what people most misunderstand about business in Africa, how she learned to be more innovative, and the value of being scrappy. Let’s get back to it.    

MUSICAL TRANSITION    

Pierre Le Manh  

You said you were both from Ghana and from the U.S. You sound more like you grew up in the U.S., maybe I’m wrong. And you definitely studied in the U.S. So why did you go back to Ghana?   

Miishe Addy 

It’s funny that you’re talking about my accent. When I first moved back to Ghana, someone once said that my accent is very American, very aggressively American. So I acknowledge that. My dad is Ghanaian, and he moved to the United States in university to study. And his plan was always to come back to Ghana, but he started building his career in the U.S., and Ghana was still going through coup d’etat after coup d’etat. And the economy just was no good for careers. And so he didn’t come back to Ghana until he retired, and he always said it was too late. He felt that there was so much he could have done if he had come back just a little earlier.  

So for me, I had graduated from graduate school, at Stanford, actually, law school in 2010. And as soon as I paid my debt, I just knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. It helped me focus on, what is my purpose here in the U.S.? It’s to get my education. It’s to build these wonderful networks. It’s to make real friendships. But to take everything that I’m learning and doing here and apply it to a place where the problems seem harder, but also more basic.   

So at the time when I came to Ghana, the technology applications that were popular in Silicon Valley were like pizza delivery apps. They were figuring out how to deliver your food to your house in 10 minutes rather than 30 minutes. Ghana and Nigeria and the countries where we are, the question is not optimization, it’s infrastructure. We just need infrastructure. And so that for me just felt more compelling and a more exciting way to use the resources and the privileges that I gained in the U.S.  

Pierre Le Manh 

So you came with these big ideas, more ambition than just optimizing a pizza delivery system. How did you turn that vision into reality when you started? 

Miishe Addy 

So when we started at Jetstream, our first customers actually came from Instagram. My co-founder and I, we would look at Instagram posts of people who were trying to sell things to Americans, and we would contact them and say, “Who’s doing your logistics? How do you get your stuff over to the United States?” We would also go to the ports, just look at the labels or the names on packages and see who was shipping. So, we were very scrappy, very inefficient about customer acquisition.    

Pierre Le Manh 

So you took the names on the labels, and then you contacted those people?  

Miishe Addy 

We did. We did.   

Pierre Le Manh  

Yeah, okay. That’s smart.   

Miishe Addy 

Eventually we got into the referral machine that we have now, but at the very start, it was all scrappy. Just a question of talking to people and understanding, “Well, is this thing that I have to offer, is this idea of running faster, more simplified logistics, is that compelling to you?” And when we started doing this type of freight forwarding in 2019, our sales, it was just… Ghana is often thought of as a poor country. It’s actually a middle-income country, but we were making tens of thousands of dollars a month in a country that was "poor."  

Pierre Le Manh  

Wow.   

Miishe Addy  

So, for me, it was just crystal clear there’s value here. 

Pierre Le Manh  

I’m sure you had to adjust to a very different world from what you learned doing law in Stanford. How have you been able to survive that, in a way, and work under that kind of pressure in a very different environment? What kind of advice would you give to other people going through a big shift like this in their business environment and have to adjust to something so different? 

Miishe Addy  

I was once talking to a software developer and engineer about our backgrounds, and I was saying, “I enjoy working in technology. I enjoy working with engineers.” And he said, “You know why?” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “It’s because you’re a lawyer, and lawyers and engineers both have a high tolerance for pain.” 

Pierre Le Manh  

That’s very good. 

Miishe Addy 

And I don’t know if that’s true, but there is something about, first of all, problem solving, just breaking a big problem into its component parts and addressing each part in sequence. That’s what engineers do. That’s what lawyers do. It’s what a lot of people in other disciplines do, if you’re doing it with rigor. 

The second thing is just the ability to be resilient and stick with things. I think that one thing I like about having grown up in the United States, and especially at Stanford, is this idea of living an interdisciplinary life or a cross-disciplinary life, where just because you studied law or as a philosophy major in college, it doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to be a philosopher. You can be many things. And I think the lesson that you’re learning in school and in your trade is how to think. It’s how to address certain problems. And so, if you think of yourself as a lifelong learner, then you can take the discipline that you’ve acquired, or the ability to look at problems from a certain angle and apply it to new challenges. It’s really about, I think, the growth mindset and understanding that the trade that you practice at any given time is just a way of applying an analytical framework that can be applied to many different things. 

Pierre Le Manh 

So, do you like to plan carefully?

Miishe Addy  

I do. I do, but I have to give credit to my co-founder, Solomon, for really shaking me out of the over-planning habit.  

Pierre Le Manh 

So what is the right balance? Like, how do you combine this need for controlling and anticipating and planning, and then having the agility that takes you to a port to check labels and just call the people?   

Miishe Addy  

If I had started Jetstream by myself, it wouldn’t have scaled to the size where it is today. I’ll just be honest about that. It might have been a good, small company. We’ve raised a total of $21 million. We wouldn’t have done that if I were just doing it by myself.   

I’m less of a planner. I’m more spontaneous. I’m more innovative today than I was seven years ago. But at the very start, there were times where a customer would propose a certain type of transaction or something, a new opportunity would come up, and I would sit and try to think about it, and Solomon would come in the office and say, “Oh, I’ve already done it. It’s already happened.” 

And so, I think from experience, just seeing that you can take a risk 10 times and the horrible event that, as a lawyer, you might worry about, really only happens one time.   

Pierre Le Manh  

Right.   

Miishe Addy  

And nine out of 10 times, there’s actually a great outcome or just a mediocre outcome, and you’ve learned something. So I think it’s through experience that I’ve come to appreciate—the value of being more risk-loving. 

Pierre Le Manh 

As someone who’s deeply connected to African trade and logistics, what’s your perspective on the potential impact of tariffs, both in Africa and globally on your business? 

Miishe Addy 

So I’ll speak a little bit to the impact of the tariffs that President Trump is planning. We’ve already seen a shift toward Africa. As the African population grows, the demand for goods, for anything from food to clothes to computers, it’s growing faster than the continent’s ability to produce those things. So the role of importation, I believe, over the next 20 years is actually going to increase rather than decrease. The big question is, which countries? Is it going to be some of the countries that are able to supply this demand? Are they going to be somewhere on the African continent? Will it be Nigeria and Egypt and Kenya, etc.?  

A lot of Chinese and even Southeast Asian exporters actually come to the African continent looking for customers. And that’s something that I don’t think a lot of people appreciate. It’s very proactive, right? There’s a Korean company that sells goods at the shopping malls in Ghana and Nigeria, and one of the products that sells is hair extensions for African women. That type of product reflects such insight into the demand and the preferences of specifically African women, that it’s hard to state how sophisticated these sales efforts are and how tight the feedback loop is between customer demand and customer preferences and manufacturing in Asia, which I think is something that Americans don’t appreciate, is how sophisticated the Chinese are in understanding what the African consumer wants.   

Pierre Le Manh  

And do you think this is going to play in favor of Africa in the end? The Chinese needing to shift their markets from, let’s say, the U.S. to Africa, for instance? Do you think it will push them to have cheaper products, to serve the African consumer better? Like, in the end help Africa out? 

Miishe Addy  

It will if the governments insist on local production. I think that there’s a huge opportunity, and the countries that are likely to do this are countries like Rwanda, which has already banned the importation of used clothing. Countries like Côte d’Ivoire, which has banned the export of cashew so that the raw cashew can be processed locally into a finished product. So there are certain countries around the continent that get this. That say that “You’re welcome to sell to our people, but you’ve got to come, and you’ve got to bring your machines, and you’ve got to produce locally.” 

And I think that’s the most exciting thing long-term about this importation race. If the governments—and this is the responsibility of African governments—look at the folks who are importing or who are sending products into their countries and say, “You know what? We want to help you build a manufacturing plant so that you can continue to enjoy the population growth in Africa. But you can also share some of your knowledge, share some of your technology, with the people in our country and hire them to help you produce these goods.”  

Pierre Le Manh 

Today, Africa is the only continent where 70% of its people are under 30, and by 2035, more than 400 million young people will enter working age. So how do you think these people will find jobs?   

Miishe Addy  

So, the reality is there’s going to be a sea change. This is actually where I’m optimistic because there’s a lot of training and software development and things that [have] missed large parts of the continent of Africa. But in the future, we’re going to have a bigger need than ever for care work. There’s going to be a bigger need for entertainment or a bigger desire for entertainment and sports. I think that there’s actually an opportunity for African people to redefine or to embrace what productivity will look like in the 22nd century. 

Pierre Le Manh  

You think they can do this even faster than, I don’t know, Americans, for instance, who have to adjust? 

Miishe Addy  

Exactly. Leapfrog, leapfrog. There’s a silver lining here. Sure, there are a lot of factory jobs that we need to create. There’s a lot more that needs to be done in education, etc. But my cousins and the people that I’m around here in West Africa are some of the most creative people I have ever met, in part because of necessity, and I think we’re going to figure out something new.   

Pierre Le Manh  

So with all these opportunities for the continent, all these things that you could think about where transformation will happen in Africa, what is next for Jetstream? 

Miishe Addy  

So Jetstream is completing its transformation into an embedded fintech company. My vision is for us to enable anyone at the African continent to be able to tap into our system, to inject capital into their own supply chain. So that the norm, the global norm, of being able to rely on credit and financiers to trade becomes the reality in Africa. And I think long-term that will enable, even if not everyone is involved in manufacturing, it’ll enable most people on the continent to be affected, to be impacted by the efficiency and the speed that we’re bringing to the continent’s supply chains.   

Pierre Le Manh  

Any parting advice for leaders who are navigating transformation in their industries?   

Miishe Addy  

I wouldn’t dare to give any other leader in any other sector advice, but I just think the future will be surprising and volatile. And I think that there are certain types of people in certain types of companies that will thrive in that volatility, and the ability to stick to your values but have the growth mindset where you’re willing to adapt to whatever comes your way. That’s the winning formula.   

Pierre Le Manh 

Purpose and growth mindset.   

Miishe Addy  

Yeah.  

Pierre Le Manh  

Wonderful. Miishe, thank you so much for sharing your journey, your insights. It’s been a real pleasure having you on The Shift Code. So best of luck with Jetstream Africa and your mission to transform African trade and finance. Thank you. 

Miishe Addy 

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.   

MUSICAL TRANSITION   

Pierre Le Manh  

Miishe has so many insights for us about meshing purpose and a growth mindset, about how spontaneity helps innovation, and about how opportunity can be discovered almost by accident.   

Unlocking the code to progress is not always a straight line. And while it’s important to have a plan, it’s just as important to change that plan, to keep looking for new and better ways to reach your goals.    

Listening to Miishe, I’m also reminded how vast the potential is for African business and talent, even though it remains underappreciated. As Miishe represents, there is a shift underway, and it is definitely worth paying attention to.   

I am Pierre Le Manh. Thanks for listening.