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

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.

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.

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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, w...

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 smallho...

What if the obsession driving the global economy is not a strategy, but a religion?

In this episode, Professor Tim Jackson (University of Surrey, author of Prosperity Without Growth, Post Growth, and The Care Economy) argues that GDP has filled "the God-shaped hole" left i...

"There is no funding gap in Africa."

That is the provocation from Burak Buyuksaraç, CEO of Afri Capital and a 16-year business veteran in Tanzania. He arrived in Dar es Salaam in 2010 as a mining executive, stayed to build a diversified portfolio across tourism, security, ...

Oil above 100 USD. The Strait of Hormuz under pressure.The world scambling for energy. Again. and Again...

Every energy crisis sends us looking for the same answers: another pipeline, another terminal, another sanctions package. But what if the real way out is not on Earth...

73,000 sharks are killed every day. 16,000 chemicals are added to plastics, and only 1% are regulated globally. The ocean is in crisis, but almost nobody sees it.

Antoinette Vermilye (Co-Founder, Gallifrey Foundation & SHE Changes Climate) has spent over a decade conne...

What if the ethical framework AI needs was coined thousands of years ago in Africa?

Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman is co-director of the Inclusive AI Lab at Utrecht University and founder of the African Folktales Project. She grew up near Ngong Forest in Kenya, where her primary...

When Tonderai Njowera's father came home and asked, "Did you know you can own a highway?" it changed everything. That one question sent a young boy in Zimbabwe on a journey from civil engineering to investment management to venture building in Cape Town.

In this episod...

What if the most profitable climate investments aren't sexy at all? Costas Papayconomou, co-founder of Una Terra, spent a career in innovation consulting (including building and selling an agency to Accenture) before turning to circular economy investing. His thesis is simple and counterintuitive: don't disrupt old industries, clean them up. In this episode, Costas walks us through investments that sound boring but are brilliant: a...

What if the most powerful innovations don't come from billion-dollar labs, but from people who have almost nothing?

Navi Radjou left Silicon Valley after 13 years because he realized most innovation there serves the top 1%. Now based in Bangalore, he's spent two decades proving that resource scarcity breeds the most radical creativity. In this episode, Navi breaks down why Africa is set to become the world's innovation lab, not its...

In this episode, I’m joined by Alisa Sydow (Professor of Entrepreneurship at ESCP Business School) to unpack what women founders are really navigating in Africa’s entrepreneurship ecosystem beyond the usual “barriers list.”

We discuss:

• Why purpose is powerful—but can also limit growth if it makes founders neglect commercial fundamentals.
• The overlooked role of founder identity (and why some women ...

Syntropy isn’t about the tropics—it’s about the physics of life. In this episode, Samuele sits down with Sven Verwiel, CEO & Co‑Founder of Forest Foods (Kenya), to unpack syntropic agroforestry: a regenerative farming approach designed to compound productivity over time through stratification (vertical layers) and succession (time).

We go from field reality to unit economics: what it takes to regenerate degrad...

In this episode, Samuele speaks with Apollo Gabazira—Country Director at CARE International (Uganda) and an award‑winning regenerative farmer—about what it takes to make farming profitable, scalable, and youth‑attractive in East Africa.

Apollo shares the Asaba Farm System and its “quad model”:

1. dairy as a foundation

2. agronomy and circularity (turning waste into value)

3. skilling youth through hands‑on ...

When you clear a forest to plant maize and make charcoal, you’ve already put a price on nature—the future cash flows from the maize and the wood. The problem is that price is far too low.

In this episode of The Samuele Tini Show, I speak with Josep Oriol, Managing Partner at Okavango Capital Partners and a leading nature‑finance expert working across Sub‑Saharan Africa.

A Catalan who fell in love with African wildlife a...

We talk a lot about tree planting, but far less about what happens to all the agricultural and organic waste we burn or dump. That’s where biochar comes in.

In this episode of The Samuele Tini Show, I’m joined by Luisa Marin, Executive Director of the International Biochar Initiative (IBI). After 25+ years in conservation with organisations like Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, Luisa moved into car...

In most emerging markets, “sustainability” has been designed for big exporters, banks and multinationals. Everyone else – the micro, small and medium businesses that actually employ people and move the economy – is basically left out but more and more customers are asking for proofs.

In this episode, Luke Hayman, Executive Director of Sustainable Kenya, explains how his team is trying to flip that script wit...

Special Episode — Recorded live at the Oppenheimer Research Conference 2025. The global conservation debate is loud — but often poorly informed about what people who live with wildlife actually think. In this revealing episode, researchers Dr. Darragh Hare (Oxford) and Dr. Lovemore Sibanda share evidence from multi-country surveys exploring views on militarised conservation, ranger powers, trophy hunting, wildlife crime...