Fortune on Wednesday released the names of individuals who made its annual 40 Under 40 List. The list featured old favorites, such as C-suite executives, startup founders, and congress people. It also feature people doing much of the work that has been crucial to 2020: a science communicator, an athlete standing up for racial equality, and the executive director of an organization that helps women run for office.
This year’s package is a swerve from the norm as it highlights 40 influential people in each of five categories: finance, technology, health care, government and politics, and media and entertainment.
Fortune in a blog post said, “It’s been a year of monumental change. The coronavirus pandemic has touched every aspect of our lives—fundamentally altering the ways in which we work and socialize. Sparked by a series of tragedies, people in cities across America and around the world have taken to the streets and social media to push for justice and racial equality. Executives have moved quickly to support and empower employees while grappling with daunting challenges to the way their businesses operate.
“To reflect this wave of transformation, we decided that we needed to embrace change in this year’s 40 Under 40. We needed to go bigger—and search more widely. Just one list of 40 emerging leaders wouldn’t be enough.”
Five Nigerians alongside 200 other global trailblazers made the list for their impact in their various sectors of calling. The Five Nigerians are:
Obi Ozor
Group CEO and Co-Founder of African technology-enabled logistics startup, Kobo360.
Launched in 2017, Obi Ozor, alongside his co-founder Ife Oyedele II, built Kobo360 to reduce cost, time and carbon emissions, as well as increase visibility in the supply chain to ensure the safe and seamless movement of goods. With presence across six African markets including Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, the company serves over 1,000 SMEs and large corporations such as DHL, Maersk and Unilever, and has welcomed over 23,000 affiliated truck drivers on its platform. Backed by global investors including Goldman Sachs, International Finance Corporation and Y Combinator, Kobo360’s aims to build a Global Logistics Operating System [G-LOS] that will power trade and enterprise across Africa and emerging markets.
On receiving the recognition from Fortune, Obi Ozor Group CEO and Co-Founder of Kobo360 says “It’s an absolute honour to be named in Fortune’s list alongside some of the world’s greatest high impact leaders. At Kobo360, we’ve spent the last few years fixing Africa’s supply chain using technology and along the way, have realised that the problem we’re solving is global. To have an international platform recognise our innovative approach to solving global logistics challenges is a tremendous honour and I hope this accolade inspires other young African business leaders”
Olugbenga Agboola
CEO and Co-founder of Flutterwave. Flutterwave headquarted in San Francisco and Lagos is a fintech company that provides payment services for businesses operating in Africa. Earlier this year, CEO and cofounder Agboola led the firm through a Series B funding round, which injected $35 million into the company. That will help Flutterwave, founded in 2016, provide more payment products. Prior to Flutterwave, Agboola, a graduate of the MBA program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, worked as an application engineer at PayPal and in product management at Google Wallet.
Helen Adeosun
Helen Adeosun, age 35, CEO of digital training platform CareAcademy. Adeosun, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and a former Teach for America volunteer, got a master’s in education policy at Harvard before founding her Boston-based business in 2013. Seven years later, health care organizations (including fellow 40 Under 40 member Lily Sarafan’s Home Care Assistance) use its online video coursework to help their employees stay up-to-date on their certifications and other training requirements. More than 110,000 caregivers have completed 400,000 CareAcademy classes, and the company is aiming to reskill more than 1 million new home-care workers by 2023. It will have some support from venture fund Kairos, which is placing job candidates who go through CareAcademy training, and from investors led by Impact America Fund, which in June committed $9.5 million in Series A funding to Adeosun and her company.
Margaret Anadu
Since becoming Goldman Sachs’s youngest female Black partner in history at age 37 in 2018, Anadu has spearheaded much of the big bank’s efforts to invest in underserved areas and particularly communities of color. As head of Goldman’s urban investment group, she oversees a $4 billion portfolio dedicated to investments that address racial inequities, unemployment, a lack of affordable housing, and other problems—with more than $1 billion invested so far this year. Anadu also took a leading role in disbursing the bank’s capital for the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal government’s stimulus initiative for small businesses: So far, Goldman has committed $750 million to PPP loans, with almost half the money deployed going to predominantly minority areas.
Abasi Ene-Obong
Ene-Obong, a Nigerian with a masters’ in business and management as well as human molecular genetics, a Ph.D. in cancer biology, and experience working with health care organizations at home and in the U.S. and U.K., is working to change that with his pan-African biobank.
54gene, which raised $15 million through a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–backed venture fund, is hoping to “spur a biotech revolution” on the continent, collecting and analyzing the data that can advance discovery and relevant drug development as well as building the talent and infrastructure needed to power a homegrown industry. Ene-Obong has built relationships with researchers across Africa; the company has biobanked tens of thousands of Africans’ genomes. As with many companies, COVID-19 has brought some change: When the crisis started, 54gene provided equipment to public labs in Nigeria, as well as testing, setting up molecular diagnostic labs across states within the country.
The full list of Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 honorees can be found here.