Q&A: Entrepreneurship with Abby Aidoo
Abby Aidoo is currently the Program Manager at entrepreneurship@UBC, working with the Black Advisory Hub (BAH) to deliver national services over four years to support 8,500 entrepreneurs and 750 Black-led businesses, while creating 175 new businesses and an estimated 1,000 jobs. Abby is a management accounting professional, with experience in leadership, operations, business development and project management. Born in Ghana and living in Africa for most of her life, Abby moved to Canada in 2020 to pursue her Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from UBC’s Sauder School of Business, where she worked to expand Sauder’s Social Entrepreneurship Program, LIFT AFRICA, to Ghana. She is a STEM enthusiast – having worked on an AI4Good Hackathan project in Ghana and is currently spearheading her newest venture, Zerone Analytiqs, a data analytics company to promote tech and innovation in Africa.
Juneteenth, observed on June 19, honours the day that slavery ended in the U.S – marking the beginning of African-American freedom. We sat down with Abby and asked about her experiences as a Black woman in entrepreneurship, what Juneteenth means to her and how she navigates her intersectionality into the entrepreneurial space in Canada.
Can you share a bit with me about your journey as an entrepreneur?
“I often joke that I actually started my own entrepreneurship journey when I was in primary school because my mother would sell things at markets and then I would take some of the items she sold, bundle it in a package, and sell for a fixed price. People like buying stuff from kids because, well, they’re cute, so it worked out quite well for me. Even going into high school and university, I knew I wanted to do some sort of business – I just wasn’t sure of what quite yet. I also knew that I wanted to do something that would be impactful, and not just about making a profit. When I finished my undergrad, I started an e-commerce business, which took products from farmers and sold them to busy users in the city. My relatives were farmers so I knew what it took to be a farmer and how they struggled to get their crops to the markets. After running that business for a while in Ghana I wanted to use my experiences to help other entrepreneurs. I then started an NGO in Ghana, to help train entrepreneurs.
When I moved to Canada and started to do my MBA from the Sauder School of Business, I partnered with the department to actually provide free entrepreneurship training to small businesses in Ghana and in Kenya. I also started working for the Black Advisory Hub (BAH) after learning in business school how to actually provide training to others and the interesting thing is, as I did that, I also learned a lot and it really helped me. When I started my new and current venture, I had also learned so much from just helping others and from just interacting with so many businesses – I was able to be more successful this time with entrepreneurship. The venture is a data analytics company and the idea is we want to be able to help organizations who want to do business in Africa by providing them with market intelligence business insights on industries and markets in different areas of Africa. Still, the impact aspect really drives what I do. But I think also on my journey, I have learned that the more you open up and share with others, the more you learn – knowing that has really been very profound in my learning as an entrepreneur.”
How has your experience as a Black female entrepreneur impacted your path to success?
“I am Black. I am a woman. I am an entrepreneur. I can persevere through whatever situation life throws at me. Yesterday I was telling a couple of young Black students at UBC that it's a good time to be Black and be a woman. I think that post-George Floyd, people are more aware of the challenges Black people face on a daily basis. I like to remind myself of the intersectionality of the two, being Black and being a woman, as it allows me to recognize those challenges and presents me with opportunities as well. That has really helped me on my journey as an entrepreneur because I see a lot of resources available to support Black women or the Black community in general. Of course there are a lot of challenges just by the color of my skin that I face every day, but I think that when you are an entrepreneur, there's a voice that lives in your head telling you to push past the barriers and to not give up. I remember going to one entrepreneurship event and I was the only Black person there so I spoke up and asked how to get more women that look like me into these spaces. After the event, a lot of the people in the room were reaching out to me to see who they can mentor and how they can support me in achieving that goal.”
How do you infuse your identity as a Black woman into your success as an entrepreneur and what are some of the challenges the Black community faces? Furthermore, how can we support the Black community?
“Well, I like to always look at what sort of support I would have needed when I was learning how to be an entrepreneur and then I try to provide those things. It's already stressful being a minority in this country so I try to also tailor towards minority groups. I like to look at my journey, the challenges I faced, the information I couldn't access, and I tried to infuse that into the business I'm doing. While there is a lot of support available, especially when it comes to Black-led businesses, there's a lot more we can do. It can be pretty easy to access funding for a lot of people if you grew up here in Canada because you have such a wide network of friends, but for the Black community, this can be quite difficult. Through interacting with people in the community, I know that access to finances and overall networks is hard to access. Many
Black businesses start a company from the ground up because they just don't have the network that non-minority people do. There's a lot that can still be done when it comes to supporting Black-led businesses, because what we are doing is already going back to impact on our community. I think that we can do more by providing financial grants – whether it's equity, non equity, or loans. The Black community cannot raise those funds by themselves. There's already a gap or a barrier when it comes to Black people just being able to access funding and that's something that needs to change. In order for that to change, we need more people from the Black community in entrepreneurial spaces. I'm always thinking about how what I'm doing can support others and how I need to push myself so I can help others like me.”
How do you think that the entrepreneurial landscape is changing for Black women? Where should we be in 10 years?
“If we keep up this pace of growth awareness and building representation, then we're going to see a lot of progress. We are going to see a lot of Black businesses being launched that can generate generational wealth for Black communities. But, I'm also aware that usually after any sort of movement, it dies out and gradually fades away over time. During 2020, people were very focused on supporting Black people, and that is fading away. We can’t just accept this as a normality. I think that if we are able to keep pushing for awareness and conversations around both policy and support for entrepreneurs, then we'll see a lot of Black enterprises in the future. If that happens, then we are going to see entrepreneurship within the Black community really blossoming how it should. Having an entire community of non-Black people supporting us is really crucial.”
How do you honour Juneteenth in your personal professional life?
“I think Juneteenth is an opportunity to educate. I take that time to educate the people close to me who are interested in knowing about Black history. It gives us the opportunity to actually educate people once they understand where we've been through our journeys and they are able to empathize. They know their story well. You don't expect people to just understand you if they don't understand your story – if they don't know where you've come from or the origin. I think Juneteenth, even if we don't celebrate it in Canada or as an organized nation, is still an opportunity to educate others on how they can approach it with humble curiosity. For a lot of Black people, when you approach us with that curiosity to learn about our journey, challenges, and experiences, I think a lot of people would want to share that journey and I think this is what Juneteenth presents to us both in our personal and professional lives.”