Thiery’s Story

Growing up as an orphan in a rural town in Benin exposed me to hardships and fuelled my pursuit of education. I lost my mother at two years old, and my father often left home looking for different opportunities across Benin.

I lacked a robust support system to supply some of my basic needs. Still, I learned strategies to overcome challenging family dynamics and the difficulties of often relocating to unfamiliar environments to pursue my education.

Empowered by my desire to attain knowledge, my passion for entrepreneurial thinking, and my unshakeable resilience, I successfully navigated my academics. With the knowledge I gained in my mining engineering degree from the University of Exeter and my experience learning about African leadership, I made it my mission to rethink the management of natural resources across Africa. 

From a young age, I used entrepreneurial thinking to achieve my educational goals. I always valued education and was grateful to start school because it was a luxury. With an extended family, I appealed to my uncle, who could potentially support my education. To convince him to invest in me, I made a pitch demonstrating my academic potential and commitment to giving back. As a result, he relocated me to the biggest city in Benin to complete my studies. In Cotonou, I adapted to a challenging new environment and became the top student in my class. Simultaneously, I was committed to my peers and provided regular tutoring and coaching sessions for more than ten students annually.

My intellectual and cultural curiosity motivated me to seek opportunities abroad. After two years of looking for scholarships, Ashinaga selected me. My participation in the Ashinaga Africa Initiative (AAI) exposed me to cross-cultural dialogues with peers from 15 different African nations that reshaped my understanding of Africa. While in the program, I engaged in formal debates and workshops with peers, which helped me realize the complexity of different issues facing the continent. Supplementing this, I had the opportunity to intern at a gold mine in Mali as part of the AAI.

My academic focus on mining engineering, the debates with other African youth, and my internship experience in Mali invigorated me. Consequently, I became passionate about addressing African leaders’ mismanagement of natural resources and changing government policies and business relationships that disenfranchise African nations or lead to conflict. These experiences inspired me to reimagine systems to extract natural resources to empower Africans to build effective partnerships locally and globally.

After graduating from university and due to the difficulty for recent graduates to find a job on the continent, I decided to spend a few years in the UK to gain valuable experience. I am currently working as a Tunnel Engineer in London for the High Speed 2 (HS2) Project, one of the largest infrastructure projects in Europe.

Furthermore, my value for servant leadership motivated me to give back to my community in Benin. To do this, I set up an initiative to provide school supplies to disadvantaged youth. I partnered with churches and schools to identify low-income students with potential and developed a process for delivering supplies with distributors on the ground, which resulted in me sponsoring more than 100 primary students over the past 3 years.

On top of this, I also co-founded a medical company in Dakar, Senegal. The company sources affordable medical diagnostics equipment from suppliers around the globe and makes them available to medical school students and junior doctors. In future, we plan to scale up and become one of the major diagnostic equipment suppliers to hospitals in Senegal and other African countries.

Regarding my future career plans, I would like to transition into mineral economics to advise African governments on how to effectively manage their countries natural resources.

— Thiery Gnimassou