Karibu Nyaggah
Founder | Caytree
Karibu Nyaggah was born and raised in Kenya before moving to the US as a young child. After attending University of California at Berkeley, Karibu worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers in their Advisory group focusing on Corporate Investigations and Dispute Analysis. After PwC, Karibu attended Harvard Business School where he received his MBA.
While in college, Karibu visited Kenya after a long hiatus, and continued to do so more frequently through business school. With every visit, he developed stronger passion and heart for his native homeland. Each time, he continued to explore how he could put his business skills to use in Kenya while meaningfully applying his faith to address some of the most pressing challenges entrepreneurs were facing. During one of these visits, he met Courtney Rountree Mills and they both discovered a mutual interest, rooted in their shared love of Jesus, in leveraging entrepreneurship to catalyze economic growth across emerging markets. This led him to start Sinapis, and subsequently, Caytree in Kenya.
In addition to his startup endeavors, Karibu has also consulted with the World Bank in Kenya where he made valuable contributions to investment policy development and manufacturing industrialization in East Africa.
Karibu enjoys travel, writing, and photography and lives in Oakland with his family.
Huge opportunity for impact… How can faith driven entrepreneurs can get involved in supporting entrepreneurship in Africa.
— Karibu Nyaggah
When I was a child, I emigrated to the US from Africa with my family and never looked back. When I finally did go back in college, a deep desire was planted, growing stronger with each subsequent trip, to use my position of privilege and the skills I had gained to make an impact on the continent. On one such trip to my native homeland of Kenya, I met Courtney Rountree, one of my co-founders at Sinapis, and we began discussing the pressing problems we were seeing in front of us and how we could leverage the power of business to create positive economic and social impact. Although we did not know it at the time, Africa was truly on the cusp.
Indeed, its coming ascendance is well researched. In June 2010, McKinsey released a seminal report on Africa that projected by 2020, Africa’s GDP would reach $2.6 trillion, up $1 trillion from 2008. With increasing urbanization, Africa’s labor force is projected to reach 1.1 billion by 2040, overtaking China and India. By 2020…