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

Hosted by Samuele Tini

Business Science

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201

Latest episode

Jul 2026

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About the show

The Samuele Tini Show-Where business, innovation, and sustainability converge to shape our future. Join Samuele and global changemakers as they uncover bold ideas, share inspiring stories, and explore actionable solutions. Tune in and be part of the quest for progress!

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60 recent

September 9, 2026Episode 20345 min

Inside M-Pesa: The Story Before the Success | Catherine Karimi Gichunge

Before M-Pesa was M-Pesa, it was a pilot in Thika with a handful of women's groups and a piece of code written to disburse microfinance loans. Catherine Karimi Gichunge was pulled out of the Safaricom call centre in 2005 to sit next to Vodafone's project manager, and she has never told this part of the story on the show before. There was no API: electronic value was created by carrying cash to a single bank branch and uploading a CSV file. The first big agent was a chain of petrol stations. Launch day meant sacks of pens and T-shirts in Nakuru, ten minutes per customer. Catherine, now CEO of Redant International, explains why this groundwork is the reason M-Pesa succeeded where Airtel Money and M-Pesa South Africa failed, and why Kenya still has no alternative. Listen and share with anyone building payments in Africa.

July 29, 2026Episode 20250 min

A Post-Growth World Is Coming, by Disaster or by Design | Matt Orsagh

Matt Orsagh spent 25 years inside mainstream finance, including as Senior Director of Capital Markets at the CFA Institute. Then he concluded that ESG was painting the house while it was on fire. Now, as co-founder of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance, he makes the case that a post-growth world is coming, by disaster or by design. We discuss why degrowth is a diet, not austerity; why green growth collides with physics and the Jevons paradox; and his answer to the Global South objection: Africa should be allowed to grow, it is the Global North that needs the diet. Plus a radical rethink of pensions, a third of the world's assets, built on natural and social capital, not just piles of gold. Listen, then share it with someone who still believes efficiency will save us.

July 16, 2026Episode 20132 min

Stop Selling to Africa. Start Building With It | Robert Bach Casanovas

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.

July 9, 2026Episode 20034 min

Winning at All Costs Is How You Lose Everything | Reina

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.

June 29, 2026Episode 19940 min

Does Africa Need to Industrialise Before It Decarbonises? | Soha Benchekroun

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.

June 19, 2026Episode 19834 min

The B Corp Movement at 20: Reinvention or Retreat? | Christopher Marquis

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.

June 9, 2026Episode 19725 min

Merchants of Peace: Can Trade Still Prevent War? | Sebastian Ferrari

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.

May 29, 2026Episode 19634 min

Stop Calling It Charity. Kenyan Coffee Is an Economy | Henry Kinyua

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.

May 19, 2026Episode 19545 min

The Maze, Not the Mouse: A Smarter Theory of Change

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.

May 9, 2026Episode 19435 min

Stop Funding Apps. Fund Warehouses. | Claire van Enk

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.