Changemakers: Nick Hughes

Nick Hughes SEMBA2001 is a man who lives to solve problems. Intractable, socially significant, complex conundrums. “What interests and excites me is change,” he says. “How we find ways to change what is clearly broken.”

Early in the era of environmental awareness, Hughes was combating climate change and global warming, developing carbon-trading models. As the UN targeted global poverty, Hughes enabled financial inclusion for millions of Africans, creating the highly innovative M-Pesa mobile payments system.

So successful has he been in finding sustainable solutions to those problems that he was awarded an OBE in 2017 for services to innovation in Africa (although, in keeping with a man who lists humility as an important  value, you are unlikely to hear it from him).

Now, as Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at M-KOPA, Hughes is not just providing affordable, clean energy, but brightening the lives of millions of people in emerging markets by empowering them with access to financial credit as a means to fulfil their potential. He is also an Executive Fellow at London Business School’s Wheeler Institute for Business and Development, leading on its Digital for Development initiative.

He has always had an innovation-driven, entrepreneurial spirit. A PhD scientist, he was focusing on some of society’s biggest challenges at an early stage of his career: “At BP the problem was how to get engineers to see that something perceived as an environmental issue was actually an economic issue. Once they realised that they could save or make money for their business units by trading carbon, suddenly all these amazing carbon-related solutions began to emerge.”

He joined Vodafone as head of social innovation and created a multi-million pound social innovation fund focusing on mobile applications. Soon, he initiated a project to create digital micro-credit. This became M-Pesa, (M stands for mobile; “pesa” means “money” in Kiswahili, Kenya’s official language). With initial seed funding from a Department for International Development (DFID) Challenge Fund, his team at Vodafone worked with Kenya’s network operator Safaricom to design and build a mobile money platform that is used today by more than 30 million people.

M-Pesa allows anyone who has a phone to pay bills, buy and sell goods and transfer funds using a mobile wallet. They don’t need a bank account – they simply load cash into a digital ‘wallet’. “Again, it was all about finding a solution to a problem,” Hughes says. “How to move money safely and securely in an environment where banking has only reached a small proportion of the population and where the only infrastructure available was the mobile network.”