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Sheriff here.

Today, I want to tell you one of the most inspiring stories I’ve heard in African tech.

Like all great stories, it starts with unlikely characters.

This one features a small West African country, a ten-year civil war, and a lot of motorbikes.

I’d like to tell you that it ends with growth, rebirth, and hope for a country with 60% of its population under 25.

But that won’t be accurate, because the story hasn’t ended yet. And today, I’ll be telling you all the chapters of it.

It went on to gross $171 million worldwide and pick up five Oscar nominations. 

The film is set during the Sierra Leone Civil War, and it follows Solomon Vandy, a Mende fisherman forced to work in rebel-controlled diamond fields. 

He discovers a massive pink diamond, hides it, and spends the rest of the film trying to use it as a ticket to freedom for himself and his family.

The film ends with Solomon at a conference table in Kimberley, South Africa, testifying against the blood diamond trade and reuniting with his family. 

It is a redemptive ending, the kind Hollywood packages well.

But Blood Diamond was fiction. The real Sierra Leone had no such clean resolution.

The Sierra Leone Civil War lasted from 1991 to 2002. 

The war happened because citizens were frustrated with government corruption.

By the time it ended, the country had been gutted. 

Over 50,000 people were dead. 

Nearly half of the country’s 4.5 million population had been displaced. 

An estimated 100,000 people had been mutilated, many of them women and children who had their limbs amputated by rebel forces as a terror tactic to discourage voting. Tens of thousands of children had been recruited as fighters.

While many people know of the physical effects of the war on people, not many know about the structural damage.

The war wiped out what little economic infrastructure the country had. 

Before the war, Sierra Leone was already one of the world’s poorest countries. 

By the time the war ended, it sat at the very bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index. Firms had collapsed or shrunk. Skills had eroded. 

Researchers at Oxford would later describe this as “forgetting by not doing,” a phenomenon where prolonged conflict destroys not just capital, but the knowledge of how to use it.

The question after the war was straightforward but enormous: how do you restart a country?

The standard answers showed up. 

International aid flowed in. Debt relief came through. And the bauxite and rutile mines reopened. 

Between 2008 and 2018, public investment averaged 6.5% of GDP, and Sierra Leone’s GDP grew 10% each year on average. 

Then in 2014, Ebola struck, infecting over 14,000 Sierra Leoneans and killing 4,000.

The ensuing lockdown devastated the economy once again. 

The recovery was slow, fragile, and top-down. 

While aid built roads and airports, it could not build livelihoods. And for most of the country’s young people, it did not build opportunity. 

As recently as five years ago, about 60% of Sierra Leone’s 5.5 million youth were not in employment, receiving education, or training. 

The unemployment numbers were low on paper, hanging around 4%.

But that’s because most of the population was too young, with half the country being 19, and they simply lived outside the formal economy altogether.

They were surviving on subsistence activity like farming, with no education, jobs, or access to upward mobility.

One company looked at this situation and saw something different.

Watu did not start in Sierra Leone. 

It was founded in 2015 in Mombasa, Kenya, by Andris Kaneps, a Latvian entrepreneur who saw a gap in asset financing for Africa’s informal transport sector. 

The model was simple: finance motorcycles (known as boda bodas in East Africa) for riders who could not access traditional credit, and let them pay back the loan through flexible installments as they earned income from the bike.

In Kenya, this worked. 

Watu scaled quickly, expanding into Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. 

By 2021, it had disbursed hundreds of thousands of loans and built a reputation as one of the fastest-growing asset financiers on the continent. 

Today, the company operates across eight African countries and has financed over six million assets.

But when Watu entered Sierra Leone in February 2021, the playbook had to be rewritten.

Sierra Leone was not like Kenya or Uganda. 

The infrastructure for a lending business simply did not exist. 

Internet penetration was at 27%. And digital literacy was limited.

Only 25% of people knew how to save or delete a contact from their phone. And only 21% could send a text message. Most of the population had no bank account, no credit history, and no formal employment record. 

The youth population, in particular, was largely uneducated, unskilled, and excluded from the formal economy.

In a conventional market, a company assesses the credit profile of a potential customer, determines their ability to repay, and makes a lending decision. 

In Sierra Leone, there was no credit profile to assess. There were no bank statements to review. There was, in the most literal sense, nothing to work with.

Watu’s answer was unorthodox. 

They started financing motorcycles, known locally as okadas, to young Sierra Leoneans based on trust. No credit assessment happens upfront, and no collateral beyond the bike itself. 

The customer would ride the bike as a taxi, pay a daily or weekly installment to Watu, until they owned the bikes outright.

The surprising part? People paid the money back.

Not only did they pay, but many of them paid off their first bike, came back for a second one, and started hiring other young people to ride for them in exchange for a cut of the daily earnings. 

A small but real employment chain began to form, one bike at a time.

One of Watu’s early customers in Sierra Leone is a case that Mohamed Bah, Watu’s Head of Growth in Sierra Leone, has referenced publicly. 

The man used to work in the mines to pay his way through pharmacy school, earning barely $2,000 a year. With a Watu-financed okada, he was able to generate enough income to cover his tuition and living costs. 

He is now a licensed pharmacist.

But Watu did not stop at motorcycles. 

They moved into connectivity. 

The company began selling Samsung smartphones on credit to young okada riders, many of whom had never owned a mobile phone. 

It also recruited young people as sales agents, paying them commissions to sell phones in their neighborhoods. 

This pushed mobile adoption, which in turn pushed internet access, which in turn opened the door to digital financial services that Watu itself provides through its app.

Today, according to the company, one in every 25 Sierra Leoneans using a smartphone uses a Watu-financed one.

If Watu sounds like a different kind of company, that is because it is. 

It is not disrupting an existing market. It is not competing with incumbents. It is building a market where none existed. And there is a name for that.

In 2019, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen co-authored a book titled The Prosperity Paradox.

He laid out a framework that grouped innovation into three types.

The first is sustaining innovation.

This is the kind that makes an existing product better for existing customers. Think of the shift from manual to automatic transmission in cars. It improves the experience, but it does not change who the car is for.

The second is efficiency innovation. 

This is the kind that reduces cost and streamlines operations. It often eliminates jobs in the process. Think of automation in manufacturing. It improves margins, but it does not create new demand.

The third, and the one Christensen argued was most consequential, is market-creating innovation. 

This is the kind that takes a product or service that was previously inaccessible and makes it available to a large population of people who could not afford or access it before. 

It creates entirely new customers, and in doing so, creates entirely new markets.

The difference between the first two and the third is structural. Sustaining and efficiency innovations build companies and balance sheets. Market-creating innovations build countries. And there is a pattern to how they do it.

When you create a market from scratch, you cannot just ship the product. 

You have to build everything around it. Christensen called this the “pull” effect. 

The innovation pulls in infrastructure, distribution networks, supply chains, jobs, and eventually regulation.

Christensen’s favorite African example was Tolaram’s Indomie Noodles in Nigeria. 

When the Tolaram family arrived from Indonesia, there was no noodle market in Nigeria. Noodles were culturally alien. 

To create the market, Tolaram had to build factories, develop a local recipe, construct a distribution network that reached every corner of the country, and hire massive numbers of people to move the product. 

Today, Indomie is one of the most recognized brands in West Africa, and Tolaram’s Nigerian operations generate billions in revenue annually.

When MTN launched in 2001, there were fewer than 500,000 active phone lines in the country. 

To build the business, MTN had to install cell towers in places that had never seen them, manufacture and distribute prepaid airtime, sell handsets at accessible price points, and hire tens of thousands of people to do all of the above. 

Today, MTN Nigeria has 94 million subscribers and leads an industry that accounts for 8% of Nigeria’s GDP.

This pull effect is what separates market-creating innovation from aid or standard entrepreneurship.

Aid pushes resources into a country. Market-creating innovation pulls them in because the business demands it.

And the evidence for its impact is hard to ignore. 

Christensen traced the economic transformations of South Korea, Japan, and China to specific waves of market-creating innovation. 

South Korea in the 1960s was poorer than many African countries today. 

The rise of companies like Samsung, Hyundai, and Kia, all of which started by targeting low-end domestic consumers before becoming global powerhouses, pulled the country upward. 

As South Korea got richer, its institutions got better. Corruption declined. Education expanded. Healthcare improved. The Human Development Index climbed. 

The prosperity was not a precondition for innovation; it was a consequence of it.

This is the lens through which Watu’s work in Sierra Leone starts to look less like a corporate success story and more like a case study in national development.

In typical business logic, companies see markets ripe for entry and move in. 

When Watu arrived in Sierra Leone, the market was anything but ripe. 

The customer base was poor, unbanked, and largely unconnected. By every conventional measure, this was a terrible place to build a lending business.

But that is precisely the point. Market-creating innovators do not wait for conditions to be right. They build the conditions.

Watu’s impact in Sierra Leone extends well beyond motorcycle financing. 

The company directly employs over 60 people and indirectly employs around 1,500. 

The average age across the company is 24, in a country where youth exclusion has been one of the most stubborn legacies of the war.

In 2025, Watu experienced a 37% drop in sales in Sierra Leone. 

For most companies, that would be a crisis. When Watu investigated, it found the cause.

A significant portion of its dealers, many of whom were school dropouts who had used their Watu earnings to return to education, were now sitting for the WASSCE (West African Senior School Certificate Examination). 

They had not left the business because it failed. They had left because it worked. The money they earned had given them a second shot at education, and they took it.

Mohamed Bah, Watu’s Head of Growth in Sierra Leone, said this was a deeply emotional moment for the team. 

It reminded them that the company’s impact was not just economic. 

It was reshaping the life trajectories of young Sierra Leoneans in ways that the business metrics alone could not capture.

Today, Sierra Leone is far from fixed. 

Its HDI remains among the world’s lowest. 

But the trajectory has shifted. 

Youth employment is higher than it was five years ago. More young people are going back to school. Mobile penetration is climbing. Digital financial services are taking root. 

And at the center of several of these trends sits a tech-enabled company that started by giving motorcycles to young men who had nothing.

This is not a savior story. Watu did not rescue Sierra Leone’s development story is still unfolding.

But Watu’s part in it is proof that the right kind of innovation doesn’t just solve problems. It could create the conditions for national development. 

What do you think about Watu’s story? And what other market-creating innovations have you seen in Africa?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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