What is your background?
I am French-Togolese, born and raised in Lomé. After completing my bachelor's degree in private law in Poitiers, I enrolled at EM Lyon Business School, specializing in innovation and strategy. Over the past 10 years, I have had the opportunity to alternate between professional and community experiences in France and several other countries (India, China, Senegal, Canada, etc.).
Today, my job as a consultant allows me to get involved in solving complex issues, such as access to financing for women entrepreneurs and the digitization of international donors.
Finally, civic engagement plays a big part in my background and my daily life. That's why I also work with African and European elected officials and decision-makers.
Can you tell us about your JMA initiative? What activities does it involve?
A little over a year ago, my co-founder Amina Zakhnouf and I launched JMA, a public policy incubator. We support young Africans and Europeans in rethinking public policy, from ideation to action in various forms.
Today at JMA, we carry out three activities:
– Incubating ideas by enabling young experts to formalize their ideas into concrete recommendations (for example, our book Contresens sur le financement des économies africaines [Misinterpretations on the Financing of African Economies]).
– Advocacy actions with African and European decision-makers and the media (for example, my co-founder's participation in the Africa-France Summit alongside President Emmanuel Macron).
– Providing information and analysis to make public policy everyone's business (for example, our podcast Notes vocales allows young people to analyze a topic related to the African continent by taking a critical look at it through the lens of public policy). Feel free to subscribe to our podcast
!
What are your motivations and ambitions?
I firmly believe that young people in Africa and Europe must take part in public debate and decision-making. Even though civil society and young people are often not invited to certain summits and major meetings, it is up to us to challenge our decision-makers and make our recommendations. This was again the case two weeks ago at the last EU-AU summit in Brussels. Fortunately, we have social networks and the media to make our voices heard.
I am also convinced that young people are at the heart of this new relationship between Africa and Europe that everyone is talking about. The challenge is to transform this political will into concrete action. To do this, we need to create real spaces for exchange and dialogue on all the issues that bring us together (financing our economies, the environment, security, culture, digital technology, etc.). Today at JMA, we are working particularly on the sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean, and Europe axis, because at the institutional level, this is still a challenge. For example, at the Africa-France summit in Montpellier, the Mediterranean countries were not very visible, and conversely, at the Mediterranean Worlds Forum, they were.
Our biggest challenge today is to sustain our project and scale it up. We have succeeded in proving that it is entirely possible to bring together young people from different backgrounds who are willing to volunteer their ideas and who are trained to present these recommendations to decision-makers and the media. Our public policy incubator model works. We need to find funding to ensure our growth!
You have just launched your media outlet. What motivated this launch?
Indeed, for the past month, JMA has also been a media outlet, because we want to make politics everyone's business. Our goal is to provide every young African and European with useful tools and insights (economic, environmental, geostrategic issues, etc.) to fully exercise their citizenship.
What is your editorial line? What topics will you cover?
JMA's DNA has remained the same since the beginning of the adventure. We provide recommendations on issues that we consider essential. We will talk about financing African economies, popular ecology and the environment, relations between Africa and Europe, sustainable tourism, the French-speaking world, entrepreneurship, but also geopolitics, etc.
Is this a project that is part of JMA's evolution and growth? Do you plan to expand into other formats?
Today, JMA has 50,000 impressions per month on LinkedIn and 1,000 monthly views on its website. These KPIs are encouraging, and we need to go even further!
That's why we're developing several new formats:
– Analysis and advocacy formats on Instagram: https://instagram.com/jmafrique?utm_medium=copy_link
– New podcast formats: a series of direct conversations with decision-makers and discussions with entrepreneurs from a public policy perspective[1]
– A new newsletter that will highlight the players working for the development of Africa and Europe-Africa relations
Above all, we are working on creating a media platform that will be launched very soon, focusing on both content and the search for partners!
* Je m'engage pour l'Afrique is a public policy incubator dedicated to the development of the African continent and the promotion of dialogue and cooperation between Europe and Africa.