Strive Masiyiwa

Strive Masiyiwa was born in 1961 in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. His family left for Zambia when he was small, and his mother, a trader, saved enough to send him to school in Edinburgh at twelve. He wanted to go home and join the liberation war at seventeen, but an officer told him the war was almost won and he would be more use with an education. He studied electrical engineering in Wales and returned in 1984.

He worked for the state telephone company, then left to start an electrical contracting business, Retrofit Engineering, with 75 dollars of capital. In 1993, having read about the new mobile technology, he applied for a licence to build a network. The state monopoly refused. He challenged it in court, and the case dragged through the system for five years. His business was starved of contracts; he has said he lost almost everything and was warned that he could lose his life. In 1997 the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe ruled that the state's monopoly violated the constitution's guarantee of free speech, and Econet Wireless made its first call in July 1998.

The company later expanded into Botswana, Lesotho, Kenya and Nigeria, and into fibre and mobile money. In 2000 he moved his family to South Africa, and later to London, saying the political climate had made it impossible to run an independent business from Harare.

With his wife Tsitsi he founded a charity that has paid the school fees of over 250,000 orphans. He has served on the boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and Netflix and as a trustee of the Gates Foundation, and writes long posts on business for young Africans.