In 2017, 4G Capital Founder and then-Chief Executive Officer Wayne Hennessy-Barrett enrolled in an executive leadership course at Harvard Business School—and it’s fitting that he has ties to the school. Like one of its most famous undergraduates, John F. Kennedy, Hennessy-Barrett does not do things because they are easy; he does them because they are hard.
He founded 4G Capital in 2013 to provide short-term working capital loans in Africa after being headhunted to a consulting firm in Kenya from his business on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of France. A 16-year veteran of the British army, Hennessy-Barrett’s worldly travels, along with his willingness to take on challenges, set him up perfectly for a move to Nairobi to become, in 2011, the Head of Loans for microlender AFB in Nairobi.
In a 2016 interview, he described—passionately—why the founding of 4G was a labor of love:
Our customers are self employed traders and micro entrepreneurs in rural and urban markets. They are highly resilient, enterprising and fantastic people. They work incredibly hard to support their families and build a better life. But they generally lack access to lines of business credit on the terms their businesses need, which is where we come in.
Hennessy-Barrett led this charge for a decade, sharing what he’d learned in a mid-2024 interview:
The challenge is learning from the mistakes of the past to find a business model that is not ‘dependent on shoving the maximum amount of credit on the maximum amount of people.’ Rather than moving directly to scale, 4G Capital has focused on making the economics work for itself and its clients first.
And then, having honed the message and put in the work, he decided to step aside as CEO. In September 2024, Hennessy-Barrett handed the reins to Julian Mitchell, the former CEO of agribusiness company InspiraFarms. But Hennessy-Barrett isn’t going away. He has transitioned to the role of Executive Chairman, where he will retain responsibility for overall strategy, partnerships, capitalization, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement. The rest of the world beckons, and Hennessy-Barrett is heeding its call.
