Tag: African business owners in America

Culture

Celebrity chef, Marcus Samuelsson, films in Houston with West African community

By Eric Sandler

Chef Marcus Samuelsson spent this past weekend in Houston filming for his PBS reality series No Passport Required. Slated to air later this year, the episode will focus on Houston’s West African community and its rapidly growing presence on Houston’s culinary scene.

Houston will be one of six cities featured in season two. The show will also cover Filipino food in Seattle, Italian food in Philadelphia, Armenian food in Los Angeles, Chinese food in Las Vegas, and Brazilian and Portugese food in Boston.

Samuelsson tells CultureMap that he visited a few spots in Houston to complete his tour, including Safari, the Nigerian restaurant that’s operated in southwest Houston for 30 years.

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People

This Israeli-Ethiopian woman brings the food of her cultures to Harlem

By Josefin Dolsten

At Tsion Café in Harlem, visitors can order a vegetable injera, an Ethopian sourdough flatbread topped with vegetable, lentil and chickpea stews. There is traditional shakshuka, a dish common in Israel and the Middle East where eggs are cooked in a hearty tomato sauce. And then there’s the scrambled eggs with caramelized onions and lox.

The assortment of menu items — random as it may seem — tells the story of the eatery’s owner, Beejhy Barhany, an Ethiopian Jew who moved here by way of Israel.

Tsion Cafe, which is located in the historic Sugar Hill district of the Manhattan neighborhood, represents all of Barhany’s identities.

“It’s a celebration of the Ethiopian, Israeli and American [cultures], so we are encompassing and celebrating all of these together,” she said last month.

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People, Science and Tech.

Many U.S. Cities Lack Sufficient Tech Talent. This Nigerian-Born Entrepreneur Wants to Change That

Last year, Amazon took one long, highly publicized look across the U.S. and came to a simple but devastating conclusion: For the most part, American cities did not have an adequate number of talented tech workers to support its planned second headquarters.

One Nigerian-born, St. Louis-based entrepreneur wants to change that.

Five years ago, Ola Ayeni was struggling to find enough full-stack developers for Eateria, a digital marketing tool for the restaurant and hospitality industry. Faced with an almost insurmountable problem, Ayeni did what all natural-born entrepreneurs do: He tried to solve it himself.

In October 2014, Ayeni launched Claim Academy. Initially, its mission was to train developers for Ayeni’s startup.

Today, Claim Academy is one of the fastest growing, most accomplished coding schools in the country, placing graduates in startups and large multinational companies.

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News

South Africa’s Elon Musk achieves milestone as SpaceX Dragon Capsule returns to earth

South African-born Elon Musk achieved another milestone in commercial space travel as his SpaceX Dragon capsule re-entered earth after a 7 day sojour at the International Space Staion.

Already the most successful private space entrepreneur in the world, Elon Musk watched nervously as his new commercial astronaut capsule completed its demonstration flight with a successful splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.

The SpaceX Dragon vehicle left the International Space Station after being docked there for the past week, and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

It had a heat-shield to protect it from the high temperatures of re-entry.

Four parachutes brought it into “soft contact” with water about 450km from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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Business, News

Nigerian-American Chamber of Commerce set for trade mission to US

The Nigerian-American Chamber of Commerce (NACC) is set to lead delegates on a five-day trade mission with the theme: ‘Turning Promises to Action,’ to the United States. The event holds between April 28 and May 3, 2019, at the Silicon Valley.

This annual commitment of the NACC, according to a statement, was geared towards promoting trade, commerce, investment and industrial technological relationships between the public and private sectors of in Nigeria and the United States.

It added that the trade mission would attract businesses in information technology, banking, agric-tech, cloud technology solutions, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, blockchain, smart contracts, amongst others.

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Business

Memphis’s Goal: To Grow Revenue At Minority-Owned Firms By $50M In Five Years

By Elaine Pofeldt

The future of entrepreneurship in America will include many more people of color than in the past, as recent data shows. The city of Memphis is making the most of the trend. It is working to accelerate the growth of minority-owned businesses in a flagship program that could potentially become a model for other cities to emulate in their economic development programs

Under the leadership of Mayor Jim Strickland, The 800 Initiative, launched in May 2018, has set a goal of growing the revenue of 800 minority-owned businesses with paid employees that the city has identified by $50 million by 2023.

The program is offering business coaching, technical assistance, education and access to loans and grants to help the businesses scale. The program also aims to help 200 minority-owned businesses without paid employees to grow their revenue into the six figures and start hiring employees.

The 800 Initiative, hosted by the city’s Office of Diversity and Compliance, is funded in part by a $500,000 allocation in the city’s 2018-2019 budget, and a $1 million commitment over four years by FedEx.

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Business

U.S.-based Nigerians to attract $3bn investment to Nigeria

A Nigerian professional forum in the U.S. have put measures in place to attract an estimated $3 billion investment into the Nigerian economy in the next three years.
The Nigerian American Business Forum (NABF) stated at its 2019 Investment Conference with the theme: Entrepreneurship in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities at Tampa, Florida.

The President of the forum, Mr Kenneth Shobola, said the forum aimed to impact the wealth of experience of accomplished Nigerian Diasporas for the rapid development of their homeland.
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People

Kassy Kebede: the Ethiopian private equity guru who was married to a super model

Kassahun (Kassy) Kebede is founder and Managing Partner of Cepheus Growth Capital, an Ethiopia focused private equity fund started in 2016. He has been a player in the private equity business in New York for over twenty years. He is also famous for the former husband of Ethiopian super model Liya Kebede.

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People

Meet Nigerian Handbag designer, Joy Egbejimba, of Nuciano™
Seattle based Nigerian handbag designer Joy Egbejimba of Nuciano™ has been in the news lately.
She recently won the  Audience Fan Favorite award at Independent Handbag Designer Awards,  which held in Manhattan, New York.
As interest in her grows africans-in-america.com sought more information about her  and came across this interview she had with Lesley Haenny  of Whatsupnw.com 

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