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Quickfire Questions with Lungile Maile, Founder of Nubian Smarts

December 20, 2024

Quickfire Questions with Lungile Maile, Founder of Nubian Smarts

Lungile Maile, founder of Nubian Smarts, an innovative ed-tech company committed to democratizing access to high-quality STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) education. They believe that every child, no matter their background or location, should have the chance to explore and thrive in our rapidly advancing world.

Before you read, click here to read part one of this interview with Lungile Maile.

What’s the African country that you would love to visit and why?

I want to go to Nairobi. People in Kenya, please invite me. I took a flight and I was going to Ghana, and it passed through Abuja. And I saw it from the air. And I was like, I think I need to walk the streets of Abuja. Please, my Nigerian friends invite your friends, please (laughs).

Africa has got so many different places that I want to visit. I think I’m more one to visit more African countries than any other continent. I think every time I’m somewhere, it feels at home. It feels like I relate to the people and I relate to their stories.

The entrepreneurial things that are happening in Africa are just amazing. It’s almost as if entrepreneurship is in our blood. Hustling is in our blood. Fighting and trying to get to the top is something we’re born with and that just fills my energy.

How do you look after yourself in your free time?

In my free time, I do a lot of hiking. I hike to anywhere there’s a river or some sort of body of water, water calms me down. Even when I’m facing difficult times, I’ll go where there’s water. And it just sort of calms my crazy brain.

I spend a lot of time with my family. My baby is seven months. The other one is 4. He’s a big man. And the other one is 11. So I spend a lot of time with them, and my nieces and nephews. I’ll call myself a mother of many, a lot of people that say mama.

So I spend a lot of time with them. They always say the weirdest things. And watching a child develop is just the most amazing thing. It’s a blessing to be able to watch your kids grow.

What’s the most underrated South African food?

Nobody makes meat like South Africans. Our braai is the best. We do the things with the meat. Whether it’s cooked like in a stew, whether it’s open fire.

South African meat is literally the best. When I was in Toronto, I bought meat there. It just felt like it was fake meat. Sorry, my fellow Canadians. It just doesn’t have that thing, that extra thing. And we do the things with the spices as well. So South African spices are just delicious. I love meat. I can’t start naming all the different types of meat, but I love meat with all my heart.

What has been the most humbling moment in your journey as an entrepreneur?

I’m humbled daily by where the company is. When we arrived in Toronto at the beginning of this year, a bit of context, I went to Toronto and my daughter was six weeks old when I left. Hardest decision to make is to take the opportunity and go for three months, living with a six-week-old baby.

And immediately when we landed, one of the fellow cohort members, we were talking and he said, do you realize that you are here because of your word? Every business starts with a word. You think of something, you take that, you put it down, whether you put it down via WhatsApp and you send somebody, but it’s a word.

And after that, you consciously start building this word into something that others can see, others can interact with, others’ lives are changed. People have been hired through a word that I heard in 2016. And that in itself, it’s humbling to think that there’s nothing extra about me.

I’m not extra educated, I’m not rich. All I had was a word that I then put in energy into making it into something. And now it has affected lots of people. At one point, this year, it made people who had never met me say, we wanna meet you, come spend time with us for three months here.

We will use our resources in order to build you and build your world, that world to become better. And I think that was just a haunting experience to realize it was just a word.

What’s one thing that you would love people to know about you?

Let me put it this way. How I would like people to always know me is I would like you to know that I have a heart that is passionate about Africa, passionate about Africa’s youth, passionate about the black African child, and how we can build them.

I’m a mother first and foremost. My decisions come from being a mother, and that is a badge that I hold highest above every other name that people call me. The one of being a mother is the one that is closest to my heart, and it’s the one that drives every other decision that I make. And I’m a mother not only to my children, but all other children that come into contact with me.

To find out more, contact Lungile Maile via:

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