Eric is an investor and developer of new businesses with 20 years\u2019 experience spanning across 32 countries in Africa gained through a number of successful tech start-ups. Eric is a leading pioneer of internet in Africa having worked in multiple countries building internet service providers (\u201cISP\u201d) and ICT businesses. Some of his successful exits include iBurst in South Africa, One2Net in Uganda, BusyInternet in Ghana, etc. Eric also founded and ran the Africa ISP Association for eight years, during which the ISP industry grew by almost 120%. He then moved onto leading efforts to build submarine cables on the continent. Eric was part of a public-private partnership in Kenya that built and launched the TEAMS submarine fiber cable, the first to connect East Africa to the rest of the world. He subsequently contributed to the building of terrestrial fiber networks in Ghana and Nigeria.<\/p>\n
Eric has been seeding and investing early stage tech ventures across the continent. In 2013, he co-founded www.angelafrica.net, an Africa wide network of angel investors, and then www.angelfairafrica.com which brings select entrepreneurs to present to potential investors. Over the 7 years of organizing the event, US$23m of investments have being realized with one exit in 2019. He was an ICT Consultant for the WorldBank, Soros Foundations, UNDP, USAID, USDoJ, USDoS as well as African governments and private firms.<\/p>\n
He authored \u201cThe KINGS of Africa\u2019s Digital Economy\u201d, co-authored the \u201cOpen Access Model\u201d, adopted globally by the telecommunications industry, \u201cNegotiating the Net\u201d \u2013 the politics of Internet Diffusion in Africa and \u201cThe Internet in Ghana\u201d with the Mosaic Group. He was invited to contribute ideas to Prime Minister Tony Blair\u2019s Commission for Africa. He is an MIT, Stanford and Harvard fellow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eric is an investor and developer of new businesses with 20 years\u2019 experience spanning across 32 countries in Africa gained through a number of successful tech start-ups. Eric is a leading pioneer of internet in Africa having worked in multiple countries building internet service providers (\u201cISP\u201d) and ICT businesses. Some of his successful exits include […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":514,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/514"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/73"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/eric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}