Eric Osiakwan is an Entrepreneur and Investor
He is an MIT, Stanford and Harvard fellow. Eric is an investor and developer of new businesses with 20 years’ experience spanning across 32 countries in Africa gained through a number of successful tech start-ups. He is a leading pioneer of internet in Africa having worked in multiple countries building internet service providers (“ISP”) 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.
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, we have realized US$23m of investment and 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.
He authored “The KINGS of Africa’s Digital Economy”, co-authored the “Open Access Model”, adopted globally by the telecommunications industry, “Negotiating the Net” – the politics of Internet Diffusion in Africa and “The Internet in Ghana” with the Mosaic Group. He was invited to contribute ideas to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa.