Marie-Reine Seshie

Speaker Bio

The dominant story about African MSMEs is that they lack capital. Marie-Reine Seshie's work argues they lack access to the right opportunities.

As Founder and CEO of Kola Market, she is building the intelligence layer for African retail distribution: AI infrastructure where retailers are treated as data owners, not data sources. Her opportunity gap thesis is field-built, first sharpened as a management consultant with IDH and now anchored in active partnerships with GIZ and GSMA. Kola Market powers retail intelligence across Nigeria and Ghana, with KolaAI free for MSMEs and KolaScale serving the brands that depend on them. She is a vocal advocate for evidence-based impact measurement over aspirational metrics in African tech.