This article is one in an AFKInsider series that follows some of the young African leaders chosen to participate in U.S. President Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). The initiative is a U.S. effort to invest resources in the next generation of African leaders and entrepreneurs.
Dziedzorm “Jay Jay” Segbefia owned a successful tourism business in Ghana but needed money and know-how to take it to the next level.
He got both when he was accepted to President Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative in 2014.
BraveHearts Expeditions is an adventure sports business offering hiking, trekking and mountaineering adventures in Ghana. He’s something of a tourism pioneer, Segbefia told AFKInsider. His business is something that had not been done before in the sub-region.
Segbefia is general partner of BraveHearts, and he was already getting attention from angel investors and startup funders in Ghana before he caught the attention of the YALI. He won the StartUp Cup Ghana Business Model Competition and the Ghana Angel Investor Network’s coveted Most Promising Entrepreneur Award in 2013.
The timing was great when Segbefia was invited in 2014 to study business and entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College in the U.S.
Segbefia is a graduate from the Ghana Institute of Journalism. Before founding BraveHearts, he worked in public relations at Kings University College in Accra and in communications at the African Cashew Initiative, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Germany.
Dziedzorm “Jay Jay” Segbefia told AFKInsider about his YALI experience.
AFKInsider: How did you get into YALI?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: I applied together with 86,000 other Africans. My work to create economic opportunity from Ghana’s great outdoors and my need to understand how outdoor adventure works in developed countries (the lesson book to scale up my business) got me selected both for the six-week academic institute and the three-month industrial internship.
AFKInsider: What did you learn from the YALI experience?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: I received a high-level problem-solving business education from the academic institute at Dartmouth College. Plus a first-hand experience in how outdoor adventure and education works hand-in-hand with higher education in the U.S. through the institute’s Outdoor Programs office.
My home-stay weekend was a great opportunity to live with an American family as if I were one of their own, and understand life and culture, at a personal level, of what it means to be American.
Afterwards, I received priceless instruction from interning with the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming. I put together in my head all the keys necessary to a great outdoor learning curriculum and logistics infrastructure for my firm in Ghana. Above all, the experience heightened my desire to succeed against all odds after finding out that I was constituted of the same stuff that contributes to America’s enviable entrepreneurial success.
AFKInsider: Was what you learned transferable to the realities of your African country?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: More than 89 percent of all I learned from my YALI experience was transferable to the realities of Ghana. This is because the outdoor adventure sphere is technical and metaphorical in nature, and lessons learned in safety, for example, are transferable anywhere else on the globe.
Transferring the business education lessons (was) tricky owing to Ghana’s high bank interest rates (more than 40 percent) and overall hostile environment for young business (owners), but the applications of the principles are yielding results, albeit not as rapidly as I would want it to.
AFKInsider: How would you describe the experience?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: The YALI experience is the most phenomenal experience I have had as a young business person. And the lessons remain with me today (almost two years since) — as if I returned only yesterday from D.C.
AFKInsider: Did anything unique happen for you?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: My first brush with rock climbing was with a female instructor from the National Outdoor Leadership School. Having lived in a mostly patriarchal society where adventure and outdoor sports are concerned, putting my life in the hands of a female instructor was a unique experience that has translated into 80 percent of BraveHearts Expeditions’ staff being female.
AFKInsider: How and when did you start BraveHearts Expeditions?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: I started validating the BraveHearts Expeditions adventure tourism business model in 2010 while I was working as a public relations officer of a university in Ghana. My desire to start an adventure tourism company was fueled by earlier brushes with outdoor adventure opportunities that left a hungering impression on me that adventure tourism was the best way to protect Ghana’s fragile ecosystems and prevent biodiversity loss.
AFKInsider: How did you fund the startup?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: I funded BraveHearts Expeditions with sales from customers and the savings from a meager salary.
AFKInsider: Did you face any obstacles being a young entrepreneur?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: I faced many obstacles being a young entrepreneur, the biggest of which was the lack of seed funding to so much as validate my business model. Because my training was in law, the humanities and journalism — not business — I signed up to business plan competitions and incubator programs in order to equip myself with the requisite business skills I knew were integral to business success. Once that was taken care of, it came down to business financing. Fortunately, happy clients contributed to a robust revenue-generating drive that more or less dealt with the lack of financing problem at the startup stage.
AFKInsider: How does your company work?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: BraveHearts Expeditions’ Adventure Tourism involves one-day to three-week hiking, trekking, biking and mountaineering adventures in Ghana. Our modern day explorers sleep in canvas tents, eat camp-cooked food, hike on some of Ghana’s most breathtaking land forms, slosh through knee-high rivers, hack their way through jungle thickets and engage waterfalls on experiential learning adventures. (The business) provides royalties to, and boosts the economies of rural community destinations.
AFKInsider: What are your business goals for 2016?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: My business goal for 2016 is to win the biggest adventure tourism concession ever awarded in this country within the Shai Hills Resources Reserve near Ghana’s capital city, from Ghana’s Forestry and Wildlife Commission. That concession will give us the rights to lead out intense adventure tourism activities within an area of the most representative coastal savanna ecosystem in the country, and contribute to a whopping third of our revenue-generating efforts.
AFKInsider: What are your long-term business goals?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: Our long-term business goals include the following: to be the firm of choice for Ghana’s biggest companies and organizations when it comes to team-building and outdoor leadership; to remain West Africa’s leading adventure tourism and experiential learning firm, offering the best outdoor adventure services of the safest, cutting-edge technology in the industry; and nursing and sustaining the hitherto non-existent love of the Ghanaian outdoors we have helped to create.
AFKInsider: What do you like the most about your business?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: I love that my business pushes people beyond their regular limits of physical, educational, cultural and mental endurance in ways that put down mediocrity and extols excellence of thought and action – the lack of which has become the cause of Ghana’s economic woes.
AFKInsider: What has been the biggest surprise since starting your company?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: The biggest surprise was receiving a $25,000 grant from the U.S. African Development Foundation to scale up my business. In a country where banks will never give me so much as a cursory glance as a start-up, I was overwhelmed that USADF would not only believe in the potential of our business model but fund its expansion as well. BraveHearts Expeditions and I work hard each day to prove that their belief in us was worth it. Thankfully, we have not disappointed yet.
AFKInsider: What makes your company so unique?
Dziedzorm Segbefi: BraveHearts Expeditions is the sole firm offering the cutting-edge adventure services we provide in the West African sub-region. We are unique in the ways our women lead in an industry that did not exist ’til we acted. We are unique in the provision of economic incentives (through the creation of market linkages for the farm products of our environmentally conscious rural beneficiaries) to halt the process of environmental degradation and prevent biodiversity loss.
