The Salary Scramble With Lee Kasumba

From drafting buildings to designing bags. From Lagos to the world.

This week on The Salary Scramble, Lee Kasumba sits down with Omobolade Kolade Mayowa, the "Crochet Bag Architect" and founder of Hooked by Lade.

Lade is a trained architect from FUTA who turned a childhood skill into a global luxury brand. She launched in March 2021, left her 9-to-5, and has since shipped over 1,000 orders to more than 15 countries. Her work has bee...

She walked into an industry where no one looked like her. She built a company that keeps people alive.

Valerie Mpholle, founder of Consuweld. Her first major contract was back home in Lesotho. Today, she supplies oxygen to 11 hospitals across 8 African countries.

She's seen what happens when the cylinder is empty. She made sure that stopped.

Watch the montage from her raw, unfiltered conversation on The Salary Scramble with Lee Kasumb...

She founded the business by herself.

But that didn't stop them from asking: "Is she fronting?"

Valerie Mpholle walked into an industry where the room was built for older white men with engineering degrees, people who had opportunities her relatives never could have dreamed of. She dropped out of science. She studied psychology for 11 years. And today, she runs Consuweld, a gas distribution company spanning 8 African countries, supply...

Sharna Darko from Kingston Kitchen GH joins us this week, and we went there.She started with just two dishes, jerk chicken and curry goat, pre-order only. No storefront. No grand plan. Just cooking and hoping someone would buy. Then word spread. Then queues started forming before the market even opened. One Saturday, someone in the crowd asked, "What is that lady selling?" and that's when she knew she was onto something.

But here's ...

Ohene Twum once said architecture can solve social issues. We asked him to break it down. His answer? The essence of architecture is people. If there were no people, there would be no need to create spaces that inhabit them. So the basis of architecture starts with listening. Listening to the homeless. Listening to those in wheelchairs who can't get around their own homes. Listening to communities never asked what they actually nee...

Ohene Twum joins us this week, and we went there. He's the architect behind some of Ghana's most meaningful projects, from the Savannah Dialysis and Maternity Hospital in Tamale, the first of its kind in Ghana's five northern regions, to markets that honor local culture and homes that prioritize dignity over luxury. He believes great architecture should never be a luxury reserved for the rich, and that dignity can live in the small...

Louise from EarCandy has spent over 20 years in the business of language and culture, taking stories from one place and retelling them for another audience. She's localized over 1.5 million minutes of content into 28 African languages, worked with Netflix, Disney, and Paramount, and built a female-led company from the ground up.

This conversation goes deep. We talk about the scramble behind the scenes, the harsh truths about the loc...

"I want the world from you. But I don't pay you the best. That's the difficult part."

Musa Jesse, founder of Pilgrims Specialty Coffee, gets honest about the guilt of firing someone when you couldn't afford to pay them what they deserved.

He talks about the "duty feeling" that weight at the back of your mind. The question that haunts you: Did I fail them because I couldn't give them more?

This is the real, messy truth of building a bu...

"Africa grows your coffee. You get the profit. That's theft."That's the kind of bold statement Musa Jesse, founder of Pilgrims Specialty Coffee in Zambia, isn't afraid to make. In this unfiltered episode of The Salary Scramble, Lee Kasumba sits down with Musa for a real founder-to-founder conversation about building a business in Africa without safety nets.

Musa's journey is unconventional. Musa Jesse went from making music as Frazy...

Building a business in Africa often means navigating a brutal contradiction. You need to attract top talent and demand excellence, but the numbers on your balance sheet simply won't allow you to pay what they’re worth.

In this raw episode of The Salary Scramble, Musa Jesse, founder of Pilgrims Specialty Coffee in Zambia, gets brutally honest about that tension. He dissects the guilt of expecting the world from a team you ...

The global fashion industry is worth $2.5 trillion. Africa's share? $31 billion, barely 1%.

Papy Kaluw knows what that gap feels like. He left Congo as a child, dropped out of university, taught himself fashion, and built Urban Zulu from nothing. Today, he's dressed celebrities and opened pop-ups in Manhattan. But the journey from selling T-shirts outside Market Theatre to running a global brand has been anything but glamorous.

In th...

Oma Areh has worked with everyone from Coca-Cola to Davido to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She's a PR powerhouse, film producer, and now a pioneer in the $26 billion micro-drama industry. But her journey started with a column called "How to Get the Man of Your Dreams" at age twenty and a father who announced the end of the Biafran war at sixteen.

In this episode of The Salary Scramble, Oma sits down with Lee Kasumba to talk about why A...