Recently in Guinea, Adama Sy, a former market stall operator, came up with a recipe for converting used cooking oil into a powerful detergent. She and partners formed a cooperative named SOVAREH and hatched a plan to harvest used oil from hotels in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, then sell their detergent back to the hotels for cleaning purposes.

But they needed financing, so last year they reached out to Niandan (named for Guinea’s main river), an Amsterdam-based investment firm founded by Alexander Tounkara ’12.
A native Guinean, Tounkara had just launched, within Niandan, the Nimba Fund, his homeland’s first impact venture capital fund. The fund gave Sy not only a series of training sessions but also $9,000—enough to expand production and hire three more workers. “That helps us unlock access to larger markets and enhances our products’ credibility,” says Sy.

That’s one of many stories of how Tounkara is giving back to the country he left as a toddler, having fled with his mother and seven siblings to Belgium during ethnic violence. “Every time we help an entrepreneur overcome a barrier,” he says, “we’re reshaping the narrative of what’s possible here.”

Tounkara’s own narrative is striking. At 14, he was shipped off with his brother to the U.S., where they lived outside Philadelphia, sometimes with relatives, sometimes with other Africans. They took under-the-table jobs at a pizzeria, where they were also fed, before Tounkara moved with a family who knew his mother to a New York City housing project and went to high school on Staten Island. There, he became a talented wide receiver on the football team, which led him to Brown, where he arrived with two suitcases—“everything I owned,” he says—as he watched, agog, while classmates arrived in fancy cars loaded with goods. “I didn’t know how to hide the embarrassment of my poverty,” he says. “I couldn’t buy a laptop my first day or pay $20 for a hamburger.”