Durotoye, Monye speak out of the box at Oxford University

Tara Fela-Durotoye, the CEO/founder, House of Tara International, and Chukwuka Monye, founding partner, Ciuci Consulting, were hosted at Oxford University to speak on a different Africa.

Durotoye joined other African business influencers at the Oxford Business Africa Forum, hosted by the University business school in March.

The conference themed “unreasonable Africa” was aimed at discussing out-of-the-box thinking that is required to successfully conduct business on the continent with real life examples from a panel of experienced speakers.

The forum canvassed key opportunities and challenges in agribusiness, energy, health, infrastructure, security, trade facilitation, ICT, finance and other sectors.

Durotoye has built her organization to a multi-billion naira business that has empowered over 5,000 women through its rep program.

Stanford University recently published a case study on the beauty company, which has 19 stores across the country.

Monye, who is also the director general Delta Economic Summit Group also took his wealth of ideas to the business forum.

He shared the ideas behind over 180 projects that have led to the growth of many products, services and organizations including financial institutions, telecom value added companies and others such as city of Lagos monopoly and Luxe Bath and Body.

Durotoye spoke about mentoring as a critical component in empowering youth as typified in House of Tara’s sale representative model.

Monye approached the forum from a capacity building perspective, advising that employers must invest in training their employees.

Both business leaders who started their companies while young encouraged the youthful audience to be tenacious about being excellent at whatever they choose to do.

Other representatives from Nigeria were Wale Olokodana, enterprise services director, Microsoft Nigeria; Ladi Delano founder, Grace Lakes Partners and Akinwole Omoboriowo II chairman/CEO, Genesis Electricity.

The Keynote speakers at the event were Trevor Manuel, senior advisor, Rothschild Group and former South African cabinet minister; Dolika Banda, former acting MD and regional director, CDC Group.

“Although some of us will go back to Africa and physically put back together the pieces, we must understand that some of us do not have to be in Africa to help Africa,” Banda said.

The forum was able to effectively engage participants on the issues of enabling, navigating and scaling businesses in Africa towards sustainable growth and development.