Ewuraba - Professional African Women with Class and Style

Like many young students, June Arunga took time off from law school for a road trip. But it was no spring break. Working with a BBC TV film crew, she traveled 5,000 miles from Cairo to Cape Town, documenting a grueling journey that brought her from war zones, mining towns, and refugee camps to Desmond Tutu's living room. "I wanted to know, Why is Africa so poor?" says the Kenyan, from her current home in Ghana. To visit people displaced after a 30-year war over oil in Sudan, she had to hitch a ride with the relief organization Doctors Without Borders. While she visited with UN peacekeepers, she says, local rebels "threatened to slit my throat and eat my flesh." At the end of her trip, after praying with Tutu in his living room, she bluntly asked the Nobel Prize winner, "Where have Africans gone wrong?"

Arunga has since come up with her own answers. Now 27, she has made three other documentaries on Africa and has become an increasingly vocal presence at economic conferences -- pushing Ayn Rand solutions with a side of Norma Rae. "What should be encouraged is the fundamental right of people to own land and the products of their labor, which are then recognized by courts, and can be exchanged at the market." Asking for aid, she says, is part of the problem. "I doubt there is a parent that raises their child to become a beggar," she says. "Gain respect. Keep your promises."

In 2007, while researching a documentary on the telecom industry, Arunga became convinced that recent liberalization of the industry could result in new, affordable mobile services, particularly banking services, which could unleash an entrepreneurial spirit in Africa. "Here, people have leapfrogged from having no phones to widespread telephony," she says. "It's the only infrastructure we have that's world class." After watching Herman Chinery-Hesse, a software engineer known as the Bill Gates of Ghana, speak on the topic at a TED conference in Zimbabwe, Arunga decided to test her hypothesis. Undaunted by the serious competition that was clearly heading into the marketplace (the Gates Foundation has just donated $12.5 million to a mobile-banking program for the poor), she persuaded Chinery-Hesse to join forces to create a mobile-payment network for business owners. "It's not just banking we're offering," she says. "It's an entire marketplace."

• Read the concluding part at Fast Company

Source: Story by Ellen McGirt and Picture by Nick Turpin,  http://www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/june-arunga