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

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 Barcelona's fintech ecosystem realized it must learn from Kenya, how frugal innovation could rescue Europe's aging public health systems, and the three frictions that kill European business in East Africa: the information gap, financing, and lack of presence. Plus the talent bridges being built between Barcelona and Nairobi business schools. If you work in trade, investment or EU cooperation, this one is required listening. Share it with a colleague still selling the old way.

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, and the rare transcendent state where performance and wellbeing coexist. She shares her comeback nine months after giving birth, her Sankofa journey back to her ancestry, and why talent development, not hard skills, is the only edge that survives AI. A conversation about sovereignty, dignity and what you are really running for. Listen, and share it with someone chasing the wrong finish line.

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 researcher, she builds the case from inside the rooms she critiques.
We get into why adaptation keeps losing to mitigation, why Africa should industrialise with every resource it has, the real cost of exporting raw materials and importing finished goods, and what real economic sovereignty would take.
A sharp, contrarian conversation on industrial development, climate finance, and self-reliance.

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 Markets and The Profiteers, joins the show to talk straight. Why the Dr. Bronner's exit and the Nespresso certification forced B Lab to tighten its standards. Why a company's positives can no longer outweigh its negatives. Why regulation catching up is not a threat to B Corp but the highest form of success.
We also go where few sustainability conversations dare: China's dominance in clean energy despite its authoritarianism, the risk of a K-shaped world that leaves the Global South behind, and where Africa really stands.

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.
Sebastian Ferrari leads strategic initiatives at the International Chamber of Commerce, the world business organization representing an estimated 45 million companies across 170 countries. He argues the answer to fragile supply chains is not less trade but less concentration: more regional integration, especially across Africa and Latin America.
We cover EUDR, TradeRoots Africa and AfCFTA, food as social stability, and whether trade can still keep the peace. Listen and share at samueletini.com.

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.
Henry Kinyua, the Coffee Man of Kenya, is a trained agronomist and value chain specialist who has worked the Kenyan coffee sector from the smallholder farm to the auction floor. In this episode he explains why information asymmetry, not corruption, broke trust in cooperatives, why capturing value means controlling every step of the chain, and why the spread of coffee into new counties like Narok, Baringo and Uasin Gishu is as much a political shift as an agronomic one. He is blunt on the EUDR: Kenya was rated low risk because its farmers already reforest with macadamia and avocado shade crops, so the same goals could have been reached without the extra cost. He closes with the line that frames the whole conversation: buying Kenyan coffee is not charity. It rewards 800,000 households directly.
A masterclass on coffee, value chains, and economic agency. Listen and share.

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, why the real lever is changing the structures of everyday life rather than nagging individuals, and why it takes only 10 to 15 percent of people to drive change. He reframes the Global South debate around consumption classes instead of geography, noting that the elite in Nairobi and London now consume in the same way. A former Yale-NUS academic Maniates closes with Buckminster Fuller's trim tab idea: find the small leverage points, work with others, move mountains. Listen and rethink where your agency really lies.

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 smallholder farmers with hotels, restaurants, schools and food processors across Kenya through bespoke logistics, traceability and a 200-SKU catalogue that includes "grade rescue" produce too imperfect for conventional buyers. The business started as a COVID-era GoFundMe in 2020. Five years and one commercial pivot later, it is one of the most ambitious operational businesses in East African food.
In this episode of The Samuele Tini Show, Claire makes a case that cuts against most of the African startup conversation: the continent does not need more cloud-based platforms. It needs warehouses, trucks, cold rooms and the unglamorous logistics that physically move food from a farm to a kitchen. Investors prefer asset-light businesses. The real bottleneck is physical.
We talk about the fragmented food system, the multiplier effect on rural employment, the limits of traceability in a country with weak pesticide regulation, and the "Africa discount" that keeps Kenyan products underpriced on global markets. Claire also shares the hardest founder lesson of her journey: realising she had to stop being an entrepreneur and start being a CEO, and that the two are not the same job.
A direct, honest conversation about food systems, climate-resilient supply chains, and what it really takes to build operational businesses in Africa.

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 in the 20th century, becoming a creed we recite without questioning. Sam and Tim explore where this obsession came from, why technology alone cannot decouple growth from environmental damage, and how a different organising principle, care, could replace growth as the engine of the economy.
Tim makes the case that prosperity was never about income. It was about health, balance, and the ability to thrive within limits. Drawing on Wangari Maathai, Ubuntu, and the autonomic nervous system as a metaphor for governance, he reframes the role of rich countries: not to help the Global South, but to take their foot off the accelerator.
A conversation about economics, philosophy, indigenous wisdom, and the kind of business worth building.
 

"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, insurance, consultancy and trading, and now runs one of East Africa's newer investment firms.
In this episode we unpack why the real bottleneck in African SME finance is not capital but pipeline. Why smaller tickets are harder to raise than larger ones. Why Tanzanian banks demand 125% collateral for a loan. And why Burak sees Africa and Latin America as the only two regions left on the planet with genuine room to grow.
Burak shares two recent Afri Capital deals: a $15M refinancing for an Arusha agro-processor and a $3.5M facility for a Tanzanian bank servicing the education ecosystem.
Essential listening for founders, impact investors, DFI teams and anyone working on SME finance in emerging markets.