From Scarcity to Scale
From Scarcity to Scale is a podcast about what it really takes to build and back enduring ventures in Africa. Hosted by Daniel Maloba, it moves past startup hype to examine entrepreneurship, investing, infrastructure, capital, trust, distribution and scale in African markets. Each episode features candid conversations with founders, investors, operators and ecosystem builders who work within constraint and imperfect systems. The show argues that scarcity can be turned into strategic advantage, because Africa is not a smaller Silicon Valley. The core message is simple: scarcity changes the rules, so build from reality and build to last.
Episodes
Africa Is Not Silicon Valley: How Should We Invest in African Startups? | Tomi Davies
Africa does not only need more capital. It needs investment frameworks built for the realities of African markets.In this episode of From Scarcity to Scale, Daniel Maloba speaks with Tomi Davies, one of Africa’s most experienced angel investors and a leading voice in the continent’s startup ecosystem, about what happens when venture principles travel but the assumptions underneath them do not.The
What a Korean Entrepreneur Learned After a Decade in Africa | Yuha Jin
Yuha Jin has spent more than a decade building businesses connected to Africa, moving between Korea, East Africa and the wider global startup ecosystem. Her experience gives her a rare perspective on what changes when founders and investors operate in African markets rather than in the conditions that produced the Silicon Valley venture model.In this episode, we discuss what Yuha learned from buil
Turning Used Cooking Oil Into Cleaning Products | Sabrine Chennaoui, MONSAPO
In this episode of From Scarcity to Scale, I speak with Sabrine Chennaoui, founder of MONSAPO, about what it takes to build a circular-economy hardware company from Tunisia.Sabrine started MONSAPO from her kitchen, producing natural cleaning products from used cooking oil. The business later evolved into SapoCircle, an automated system that enables hotels and other commercial customers to turn use
How to Build Precision Agritech That Farmers Actually Use | FG Adriaanse
What does it take to build agritech that works in the realities of farming — not just in a pitch deck?In this episode of From Scarcity to Scale, Daniel Maloba speaks with FG Adriaanse, Co-Founder of Adagin Technologies, about building precision agritech from the farm up.FG shares how Adagin started with a simple grape-picking harness designed to solve a real labour-efficiency problem, then evolved
Africa’s Corporate Venture Capital Gap | Nada Shaheen
What happens when African corporates say they want innovation — but still treat startups as a risk?In this episode of From Scarcity to Scale, Daniel Maloba speaks with Nada Shaheen, Founder and Managing Director of GB Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of GB Corp, about what it really takes to build corporate venture capital in Africa.Nada explains that CVC is not simply corporate money i
Who Builds Africa’s Investors? | Mark Kleyner on Dream VC
Mark Kleyner is the co-founder and co-CEO of Dream VC, an Africa-focused venture capital institute and ecosystem platform helping train and connect the next generation of investors across African and emerging markets.In this episode of From Scarcity to Scale, Mark explains how venture capital really works — from the role of VCs, LPs and GPs, to fund mandates, limited partnership agreements, return
Obsessed With the Problem | Cecil Nutakor on Building eCampus
Cecil Senna Nutakor is the founder and CEO of eCampus, a Ghanaian edtech company helping people measure, analyse, and predict readiness for exams, employability, and compliance.In this episode of From Scarcity to Scale, Cecil shares his journey as a founder, father, non-conformist, and education entrepreneur.This conversation goes beyond edtech. It explores parenting, education, applied knowledge,
Making Champagne on a Beer Budget | Wessel Myburgh on African Biotech
Biotech founder Wessel Myburgh reveals what it really takes to build African deeptech with limited resources and why founders on the continent often have to make “champagne on a beer budget.”Wessel is the co-founder and CEO of Urobo Biotech, a South African biotech startup developing biological recycling technologies for bioplastics. Urobo is working on enzymatic and microbial processes that break
Building Biotech Where It’s Hard | Diego Castillo on Scaling Deeptech in Africa
Today’s guest is Diego Castillo, PhD, co-founder and CTO of Biomine Health, a South African biotech company working at the frontier of microbiome science, personalised health, and deeptech commercialisation.Diego’s background sits at the intersection of genetics, microbiome research, metagenomics, and bioinformatics. Through Biomine, he is helping turn complex microbiome science into practical hea
