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

When people hear "wildlife trade", they picture rhino horn and ivory. David Newton, Director for Southern and East Africa at TRAFFIC, starts closer to home: if you eat tuna from a tin, you are part of it. Recorded live at the Oppenheimer Research Conference 2026 in Midrand, South Africa, this second episode of our special series explores the trade we rarely see. David explains how TRAFFIC weighs permits, seizures and consumer markets to separate legal from illegal, why timber and medicinal plants suffer from "plant blindness", and why enforcement alone often just pushes the trade elsewhere. The real question is who is trading and why: a hungry family and a commercial operator need very different answers. And he shares a rare success: a medicinal plant that took twenty years to trade sustainably. For now.

Doom sells. Stuart Pimm has had fundraisers tell him so. He also wrote the 1995 Science paper that first put a number on how fast the planet was losing species. Yet his message at the 15th Oppenheimer Research Conference was blunt: the doom narrative is not true, and it is doing harm. In this opening episode of our ORC 2026 series, the Duke University and University of Pretoria professor explains why Southern Africa has more elephants than 25 years ago, why most large mammals in savanna Africa are stable or increasing while the human population has more than tripled, and why writing Africa off is “not fair, not right, and not helpful”. He takes apart fortress conservation, argues for connecting land, and shares his rule: all conservation is local, and the community has got to buy in. Listen, then decide whose numbers you believe.

Fabio Petroni does not recruit entrepreneurs on the strength of their business plan. He recruits on the person: how resolved they are, and whether they have skin in the game. It is one reason, he says, why businesses that go through E4Impact survive at a rate above 90%. Fabio is General Director of E4Impact Foundation, the Università Cattolica spin-off that has run MBAs, accelerators and micro-business programmes in more than 20 African countries since 2010. He explains why failure is a certainty and how to learn from it, why impact funds with $500,000 tickets miss entrepreneurs who need $50,000, how small funds manufacture "virtual exits", and the three trajectories that leave aid out of his ten-year plan: fee-paying growth companies, European business angels, and circular labour migration that has already taken 150 workers from Kenya, Ghana and Tunisia to Italy. Listen and share.

African startups raised close to $1.4 billion in the first half of 2026, almost flat on last year. Maxime Bayen says the headline hides the real story: mega rounds are back, but pre-seed cheques are at their lowest in years, and the companies not funded today are the large rounds missing in five years. Maxime co-founded Africa: The Big Deal, the reference database of African startup funding, and is General Partner at Catalyst Fund, which backs climate adaptation startups at pre-seed. He walks through where the money goes (fintech 41%, climate tech 39%, 94% to all-male teams), why the Big Four will not become the Big Five, how exits work in an ecosystem not yet 15 years old, why his founders refuse dollar debt in Nigeria and Egypt, and what he asks before writing a cheque. Listen and share.

Bright Simons built the first system that lets anyone verify a pack of medicine with an SMS. Then he spent twenty years learning that no entrepreneur fixes more than a sliver of any problem. The founder of mPedigree and Honorary Vice President of IMANI explains why trust is the real supply chain, why fake seeds are a regulation problem before they are a product problem, and why the hero entrepreneur story is overdone. He then lays out katanomics, his diagnosis of the fracture between politics and policy that leaves Africa rich in slogans and short of implementation, applied to Gen Z protests, digital sovereignty and the myth that Africa holds 30% of the world's minerals. A conversation for anyone building, funding or regulating on the continent. Listen, share, and tell me: who are the connectors in your ecosystem?

How do you tell someone not to poach when they are poaching to eat? Rendani Nenguda, Senior Research Associate at Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation, grappled with that question early in her career. Her answer reframes the whole debate: nature underpins everything, so the choice is not whether Africa grows but whether it grows in a nature-supportive or a nature-erosive way. This episode opens a series recorded around the 15th Oppenheimer Research Conference in Midrand (7 to 9 October 2026), where African scientists present African research. Rendani explains why 1.5 degrees globally means far more in Southern Africa, how 747 early-career applicants became three finalists for one USD 150,000 grant, why a new fungus may be named after a schoolchild, and why the cities Africans will live in are not built yet. Share it with anyone who calls conservation a luxury.

The system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: extract the maximum for the fewest. That is why Cindy Forde, founder of Planetari and former Managing Director of the Blue Marine Foundation, moved from boardrooms to classrooms. Her case for Earth-led education is simple: the same maths, science and history, taught so that children use them to steward the planet. She explains why a pizza and an orangutan can teach systems thinking, why children in Kenya or Borneo often understand climate better than children in London, and why most corporate sustainability is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Now co-founding a Centre for Systemic Change at Cambridge, she closes with one line: there is no hope without the courage to change. Share it with a teacher, a parent or a leader who needs it.

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.

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.

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.