About Heard In Africa

About the Company

Africa has always produced world-class thinkers, leaders, innovators, and storytellers. The gap was never the talent. The gap was the infrastructure to connect that talent with the audiences that needed to hear it.

Heard In Africa was founded to close that gap.

Growing up witnessing the remarkable achievements of Africans across the globe — founding companies, pioneering ideas, setting records — our founder Chimfumnanya Nwandu saw something missing: a dedicated, professional home for African speakers on the world stage. After five years managing corporate events and watching organisations struggle to find, vet, and prepare the right voices, she built the platform she wished had existed.

Heard In Africa is now Africa's speaker management and conference programming partner of choice — working with pan-African summits, global institutions, and forward-looking organisations who understand that the right voice at the right moment can change what a room believes is possible.

We manage speakers end-to-end. We design conference programmes from the ground up. We position African experts to be heard at the level their expertise deserves. And we do all of it with the rigour, relationships, and care that Africa's excellence warrants.

Chimfumnanya "Nana" Nwandu

Founder, Heard In Africa

Vision

A world where African expertise shapes every global conversation that matters — and every stage that carries an African voice is worthy of it.

Passionate Experts

About Team

The strategic curators and event operators behind Africa's premier speaker management partner.

Mission

To connect Africa's finest voices with the stages they deserve.

Why Heard In Africa Exists

African expertise is consistently underrepresented on global stages — not because of a shortage of knowledge, but because of a shortage of professional infrastructure.

There has been no dedicated agency doing for African speakers what the world's best speaker management firms do for their rosters.

Heard In Africa exists to change that. We are not a marketplace. We are a management company, and there is a meaningful difference.

Founder

Chimfumnanya "Nana" Nwandu — Founder, Heard In Africa

Nana Nwandu is a lawyer, TEDx licensee, and development sector programme manager who has spent over seven years at the intersection of events, speakers, and the African stage. Her path into speaker management was not accidental — it was shaped by years of watching exceptional African voices go under-resourced, under-briefed, and under-placed, across corporate events, development programming, and the live stage. As the licensee of TEDxNzaStreet since 2018, she has not only managed speakers from the outside but curated and produced the kind of platform where ideas earn their moment. She founded Heard In Africa out of a conviction that African expertise deserves the same infrastructure, rigour, and strategic investment that the global speaking industry has long extended elsewhere — and she built it with the precision of someone who knows what that gap costs

Passionate Experts

About Team

The strategic curators and event operators behind Africa's premier speaker management partner.

Chimfumnanya "Nana" Nwandu

Founder

Precious Octavia Esiri

(PMP), Project Manager

Rachael Adeyemi

Operations Admin

Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Find quick answers to common questions about speaker management and agenda programming.

Heard In Africa is building the infrastructure layer of the African Speaker Economy. We manage speakers end-to-end for conferences and events, match global event producers with credible African speakers, and are building verified speaker directory.

Share your brief with us at info@heardinafrica.com — your event theme, audience profile, the sessions you need speakers for, and your budget range. We will return a curated shortlist within 48 hours.

Start with our speaker readiness self-assessment to see if you meet our vetting criteria. If you do, the assessment will walk you through the application process. https://speaker-readiness-assessment.lovable.app/

The speakers and facilitators we work with are professionals who charge for their expertise. If your event has a budget, we would love to help you find the right person. If you are looking for a pro bono speaker, that decision rests entirely with the individual speaker.

Our focus is African speakers and African voices. HIA was built specifically to solve the infrastructure gap that keeps African speakers invisible to global conference producers.

Heard In Africa manages the full speaker lifecycle for conferences and events — from sourcing and vetting through contracting, personalised briefing, moderator preparation, on-site handling, and post-event close-out. We have managed 100+ speakers across multi-day, multi-stage conferences, achieving 95% on-time session delivery and zero major stage disruptions. For events of scale and complexity, we become the single point of contact for every speaker on your programme — so your team has one source of truth rather than four separate communication chains.

Yes — and this is one of the most common ways we work with event teams. You do not need to hand over speaker sourcing for HIA to add value. We can come in at any stage of your speaker programme: managing briefings and preparation for speakers already confirmed, handling on-site coordination on the day, or taking over the full pipeline if your team needs the bandwidth. Reach out at info@heardinafrica.com with where you are in the process and we will tell you exactly where we can step in.