… alongside Buffet, Clinton, Branson, Obama, Gates
Nigerian-born economist, investor and philanthropist, Tony O. Elumelu, has been named among ‘The 200 Most Influential Philanthropists & Social Entrepreneurs 2017’.
Elumelu is among the few Africans on the list that included Warren Buffett, chairman/CEO, Berkshire Hathaway; George Soros, chairman, Soros Fund Management LLC and founder of the Open Society Foundations; Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft; Richard Branson, founder, Virgin Group; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Barack Obama, immediate past President of the United States; Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the US and founder, Clinton Foundation; and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The list published by Richtopia, an online business magazine covering a mix of valuable content on success, future investments, new technologies, work/life balance, inspirational people, finance and economics, also has Julie Bishop, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs; Arianna Huffington, founder, Huffington Post and founder/CEO, Thrive Global; Caterina Fake, founder & CEO, Findery and co-founder, Flickr & Hunch; and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, among others.
Elumelu, a renowned philanthropist and social entrepreneur, chairs privately-held investment firm Heirs Holdings, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, and Nigeria’s largest quoted conglomerate, Transcorp. He is also the founder of Tony Elumelu Foundation.
In 2015, the Foundation seeded $100 million through its Entrepreneurship Programme to champion entrepreneurship across Africa over the next 10 years. The programme, adjudged Africa’s largest business incubator with its $100 million commitment being the largest endowment in Africa focused on entrepreneurship development, also provides successful applicants with business skills training, mentorship, information and access to a vast network of African entrepreneurs.
A firm believer that the private sector can lead Africa’s economic renaissance and that investment should create both economic prosperity and social wealth, which is encapsulated in his Africapitalism, Elumelu invests across Africa, primarily in the oil and gas, financial services, hospitality and power sectors.
Elumelu sits on several public and social sector boards including the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All Initiative (SE4ALL) and USAID’s Private Capital Group Partners Forum (PCG). He also serves as co-chair of the Aspen Institute Strategy Group on Global Food Security, sits on the Global Advisory Board of the Washington DC-based think tank, the Wilson Center, and is a member of the Global Advisory Council of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership as well as the World Economic Forum Community of Chairmen.
Derin Cag, founder and CEO of Richtopia, in a post announcing the list, said, “Our Philanthropists and Social-Entrepreneurs list is an automatic algorithm based on social media influence, Klout scores and a secret recipe.
“We take into account various metrics from Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, LinkedIn and Instagram. This list gets updated once a year.”
Richtopia, he informed, does not measure net-worth, but rather social-worth.
“This list is not about how rich these people are, but rather how influential they are,” he said.
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