The Samuele Tini Show - where business, innovation, and sustainability converge

The system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: extract the maximum for the fewest. That is why Cindy Forde, founder of Planetari and former Managing Director of the Blue Marine Foundation, moved from boardrooms to classrooms. Her case for Earth-led education is simple: the same maths, science and history, taught so that children use them to steward the planet. She explains why a pizza and an orangutan can...

Before M-Pesa was M-Pesa, it was a pilot in Thika with a handful of women's groups and a piece of code written to disburse microfinance loans.  Catherine Karimi Gichunge was pulled out of the Safaricom call centre in 2005 to sit next to Vodafone's project manager, and she has never told this part of the story on the show before.

There was no API: electronic value was created by carrying cash to a single bank branch and uploadi...

Matt Orsagh spent 25 years inside mainstream finance, including as Senior Director of Capital Markets at the CFA Institute. Then he concluded that ESG was painting the house while it was on fire. Now, as co-founder of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance, he makes the case that a post-growth world is coming, by disaster or by design.

We discuss why degrowth is a diet, not austerity; why green growth collides with physics an...

A European trade director who sends his own clients back home. Robert Bach Casanovas has run the Nairobi office of Catalonia Trade & Investment (ACCIÓ) since 2017, and he is blunt: the traditional model of European companies exporting one-size-fits-all solutions to Africa is languishing.

What works now is demand-driven partnership, co-manufacturing and localizing solutions for the mass market, not the niche. We discuss why Barc...

Reina-Flor Okori competed in four Olympic Games. Three for France, then one final Games for Equatorial Guinea, where she carried the flag her parents fled under. In this episode, the hurdler turned leadership coach explains why the "win at all costs" mindset that took her to the top nearly destroyed her, and what she built instead.

We explore her three levels of leadership: survival mode, the hyper-competitive shark that burns out,...

What if Africa's biggest climate problem is the climate agenda itself?

Soha Benchekroun argues that for Africa, sustainability and industrialisation are the same project, and that thirty years of climate negotiations have delivered almost nothing for the continent. A climate and development policy re...

Six years ago, Christopher Marquis wrote that the B Corp movement was remaking capitalism. Today the movement is twenty years old, ten thousand companies strong, and in the middle of a reckoning.

Marquis, Sinyi Professor at Cambridge Judge Business School and author of Better Business, Mao and Market...

In 1919, a group of business people gave themselves a strange name: the Merchants of Peace. Their bet was that trading nations fight less. They had just watched Central Europe destroy itself, and they believed commerce could be a brake on war. A century later, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked and tariffs rising, that idea is being tested in real time.

For years, men gathered in Kenyan trading centres, read the Nairobi Coffee Exchange price in the newspaper, did some quick math, and concluded their cooperative leaders had stolen their money. Most of the time, nobody had stolen anything. They were using the wrong number.

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What if everything you do to "live green" makes almost no difference, and quietly makes things worse? Michael Maniates, author of The Living Green Myth and co-author of Confronting Consumption and Consumption Corridors, argues that buying eco products and living lean is a comforting story that commodifies our anxieties and parks conscientious people in dead ends of despair. He explains why technological efficiency only buys time, w...

Up to 50% of Kenya's fruits and vegetables never reach a plate. Not because farmers can't grow. Because nobody can reliably move, sort, price and pay.

Claire van Enk is the founder and CEO of Farm to Feed, a Nairobi-based agritech platform that today connects 6,000 smallho...

What if the obsession driving the global economy is not a strategy, but a religion?

In this episode, Professor Tim Jackson (University of Surrey, author of Prosperity Without Growth, Post Growth, and The Care Economy) argues that GDP has filled "the God-shaped hole" left i...

"There is no funding gap in Africa."

That is the provocation from Burak Buyuksaraç, CEO of Afri Capital and a 16-year business veteran in Tanzania. He arrived in Dar es Salaam in 2010 as a mining executive, stayed to build a diversified portfolio across tourism, security, ...

Oil above 100 USD. The Strait of Hormuz under pressure.The world scambling for energy. Again. and Again...

Every energy crisis sends us looking for the same answers: another pipeline, another terminal, another sanctions package. But what if the real way out is not on Earth...

73,000 sharks are killed every day. 16,000 chemicals are added to plastics, and only 1% are regulated globally. The ocean is in crisis, but almost nobody sees it.

Antoinette Vermilye (Co-Founder, Gallifrey Foundation & SHE Changes Climate) has spent over a decade conne...

What if the ethical framework AI needs was coined thousands of years ago in Africa?

Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman is co-director of the Inclusive AI Lab at Utrecht University and founder of the African Folktales Project. She grew up near Ngong Forest in Kenya, where her primary...

When Tonderai Njowera's father came home and asked, "Did you know you can own a highway?" it changed everything. That one question sent a young boy in Zimbabwe on a journey from civil engineering to investment management to venture building in Cape Town.

In this episod...

What if the most profitable climate investments aren't sexy at all? Costas Papayconomou, co-founder of Una Terra, spent a career in innovation consulting (including building and selling an agency to Accenture) before turning to circular economy investing. His thesis is simple and counterintuitive: don't disrupt old industries, clean them up. In this episode, Costas walks us through investments that sound boring but are brilliant: a...

What if the most powerful innovations don't come from billion-dollar labs, but from people who have almost nothing?

Navi Radjou left Silicon Valley after 13 years because he realized most innovation there serves the top 1%. Now based in Bangalore, he's spent two decades proving that resource scarcity breeds the most radical creativity. In this episode, Navi breaks down why Africa is set to become the world's innovation lab, not its...