BUILDING GLOBAL LEADERS. IN THE HEART OF AFRICA

Fostering impact investment in Côte d’Ivoire’s agricultural value chains

 

EMpact has collaborated with the International University of Grand Bassam and Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny to create a venture studio focused on creating startups that serve agricultural value chains in Côte d’Ivoire. Sami Lahoud, Co-Founder and CEO of EMpact joins CNBC Africa to discuss the impact of this development

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EMpact, a venture studio focused on creating startups that serve agricultural value chains in Côte d’Ivoire, has recently collaborated with the International University of Grand Bassam and Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny to launch its first venture on the African continent.

The co-founder and CEO of EMpact, Sami Lahoud, discussed the significance of this development in an exclusive interview with CNBC Africa. Lahoud highlighted the challenges facing agricultural value chains globally and the importance of entrepreneurship, job creation, and attracting investments in frontier markets. With a focus on West Africa, particularly Francophone Africa and Ghana, as well as Central America and Central Asia, EMpact aims to create startups that address the needs of the agricultural value chains and increase the resilience of the value chain within countries.

The venture studio partners with universities to access talent and faculty, enabling them to put together teams that develop solutions for key players in the ag value chain. Lahoud emphasized the importance of addressing the inefficiencies in the agricultural sector, citing the example of cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.

Despite producing a significant portion of the world’s cocoa, the combined value of these two countries remains low compared to global cocoa sales.

Through the collaboration with universities and local talent, EMpact seeks to create investable startups and job opportunities for young individuals in Africa

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Fatima Doumbia Koné is a Mathematics lecturer at the international University of
Grand-Bassam (IUGB). Among the courses she taught we have the following: Introduction to
Differential Equations, Elementary Statistics, Calculus(I,II,III), Transforms in Applied Math,
Introduction to Linear Algebra, Operations Research and Abstract Algebra.
She has a Bachelor degree in Mathematics (IUGB), a Master degree in Pure and Applied
Mathematics (AUST) and she is currently enrolled for a PhD in Mathematics at the African
University of Science and Tecnology (AUST), Abuja. She has also been an intern at the
Institutional Banking Group department within GTBANK CI (Garanty Trust Bank Côte
D’Ivoire).
She is a former IUGB student and she was the president of the science club in 2015.
Academically, her goal is to be a great researcher and innovator on the topics of asymptotic
theories in Fuzzy Probability Theory and their various applications to image processing. She
has good programming skills (JAVA, LaTeX, C++) and she is bilingual (French and English).
Over the years, she has been developing a method of teaching which not only put students at
the center of the learning process but also which deconstruct most of the stereotypes about the
inaccessibility of mathematical knowledge to everybody.
Regarding her research activities, she has been working since 2018 on the topic of integration
on Banach spaces and a preprint of an interesting work is available at
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.04480. She is continuing with her research on integration but now
her PhD studies focus on Random Sets Integration in Probability Theory. Professionally, she
is a very active lecturer at IUGB and she is currently the faculty advisor of the SHE CLUB,
which aims at promoting women empowerment by providing learning, leadership and
networking opportunities.

I am currently Associate Professor of computer and data science in the school of science technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at the International University of Grand-Bassam (IUGB).
From 2000 to 2018, I successively worked as a research scientist at Independent Computing Research in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Assistant Professor at the department of computer science and
engineering at Université Laval in Québec, Canada; Research Associate at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) where I also received a Ph.D. degree in computer science in March 2000. Upon receiving a master's degree in mathematical and computing science
from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) in 1990 in Japan, I worked as a research scientist at National/Panasonic, one of the most prestigious companies in Tokyo.
I am involved in research on Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Semantic Web and its applications in a wide range of fields. Besides, I designed the current Data Science program in effect
since September 2021 in STEM. In addition, I am also one the founders and current President of the
Ivorian Association of Artificial Intelligence and member of ORBICOM, the Network of UNESCO Chairs in Communication headquartered in University of Quebec in Montreal (UQUAM), Canada.

Kwame Simpe Ofori is an Assistant Professor in Finance at the school of Business and Social Sciences. He holds a doctorate degree in Finance, a master’s degree in finance and a master’s degree in Telecommunications Technology. He is also currently a PhD student at the School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He has taught courses in the areas of finance, computer science, computer and electrical engineering, and telecommunication engineering. Before joining IUGB he lectured in several universities in Ghana. He also worked with Ghana Telecommunications Company as a support engineer. His research interests are in the areas of consumer behaviour, technology adoption and trust in online systems and in recent times financial econometrics. His papers have appeared in several CABS-ranked journals such as Information Technology and People, Journal of Cleaner Productions, Quality Management Journal, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, International Journal of Bank Marketing, Total Quality Management and Business Excellence, Journal of African Business, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology and Society and Business Review. 

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