Africa and the Gulf have long maintained commercial relationships, yet the potential for deeper industrial cooperation, investment and technology exchange remains substantial. Beyond the movement of goods between both regions lies an opportunity to develop businesses, strengthen manufacturing capacity and establish partnerships that create lasting economic value.
For Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan, Founder and Executive Director of Elsooltaan International, addressing this opportunity has become a defining part of his entrepreneurial journey. His work focuses on connecting African and Gulf businesses through commercial relationships, investment facilitation and ventures designed to address gaps in regional markets.
Working across Nigeria, Egypt and the Gulf, he has developed an approach to international business built around trust, local market knowledge and commercial execution. His ambition is to strengthen the structures through which African entrepreneurs can access investment and international markets while Gulf businesses identify productive opportunities across the continent.
His interests extend beyond conventional trade facilitation. Through ventures including FastLink AI and HerbMetics, he is pursuing solutions to challenges in digital commerce, logistics, manufacturing and market distribution. Although these businesses operate in different sectors, he sees them as interconnected components of a wider economic ecosystem.
For Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan, the future of Africa–Gulf trade depends on moving beyond transactions towards partnerships that expand productive capacity. He believes the relationship between both regions can generate greater economic value when investment supports African industries, creates opportunities for local businesses and strengthens access to international markets.
His broader vision also incorporates youth development. Through initiatives such as Africa Youth Voice and programmes focused on technology skills, he advocates preparing young Africans to participate in the digital economy and build businesses capable of serving international markets.
In this Crest Africa Spotlight Interview, Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan discusses the foundations of Elsooltaan International, the commercial principles guiding his ventures and the opportunities he sees for a new chapter in Africa–Gulf trade.
Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan on the Vision Behind Africa–Gulf Trade
CA: Your career has been driven by a vision to strengthen trade, investment, and business relationships between Africa and the Arab world. Looking back, what first inspired this mission, and what continues to drive it today?
Abdul Gaffar: What moved me was a contradiction I refused to accept. Two regions, Africa and the Gulf, sat side by side, historically bound, economically made for each other, and yet doing a fraction of the business they should have been doing together.
Africa held the raw materials, the youngest population on earth, and markets no one had opened. The Gulf held the capital, the manufacturing capacity, and the appetite to deploy both. Between them stood a wall of unfamiliarity, with investors who did not know where to look, businesses that did not know whom to trust, and deals that died on the table because no one stood in the middle to make them real.
I did not set out to describe that wall. I set out to bring it down, and I did. Elsooltaan International is the proof: a working corridor that ties Nigeria, the wider African market, and the Gulf into one connected marketplace, where capital, goods, and opportunity now move in both directions as a matter of routine.
That wall is down. What drives me today is no longer building the bridge. It is making the crossing seamless. Every year, I make the path faster, cleaner, and more reliable, so that trade between these regions stops feeling like a leap and starts feeling like the natural order of things.
That is the work now: not proving it can be done, but perfecting how it is done.
CA: As Executive Director of Elsooltaan International, you work across the UAE, Egypt, and several African countries, connecting businesses, investors, and opportunities. What have these cross-border experiences taught you about building lasting commercial partnerships?
Abdul Gaffar: Trust is the real currency of cross-border business, not capital, not contracts, not even opportunity. Capital can be raised, contracts drafted, and opportunities found anywhere. But without trust between parties who speak different languages, operate under different legal systems, and carry different business instincts, nothing moves.
I have watched technically flawless deals collapse for the lack of human confidence, and modest ones flourish because the relationship beneath them was solid. That is not a theory I am still testing; it is the principle Elsooltaan already runs on.
The second lesson is that lasting partnerships are built on presence, not correspondence. You cannot unify markets from behind a desk. That is precisely why Elsooltaan is built with real operational presence on the ground, in Nigeria, in Egypt and in the Gulf, instead of one headquarters issuing instructions from a distance.
When I say I have connected these markets, I mean there is someone physically accountable on both ends of every introduction. That is why the corridor holds: both sides know there is a person who will answer the phone and stand behind the deal.
I proved that model works, and now I deepen it.
Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan on Building Businesses That Solve Market Problems
CA: Alongside Elsooltaan International, you have founded ventures including FastLink AI and HerbMetics, each serving different industries. What guides your decision when identifying opportunities with the potential to become sustainable businesses?
Abdul Gaffar: I look for the same thing in every sector: a structural gap everyone lives with but no one has built the infrastructure to close.
FastLink AI came from watching African commerce and delivery run in fragments. Marketplaces could not fulfil, logistics firms could not see demand, and businesses could not reach past their own city. The missing piece was the intelligence layer connecting them, so I built it.
HerbMetics came from the same pattern in cosmetics and supplements. Brands wanting into African markets were forced to solve manufacturing, compliance, branding, and distribution as four separate battles, and most gave up before they began. So I built the system that handles them as one.
These are not scattered bets. They are the working parts of a single, integrated market I have assembled, each one closing a gap in how goods, services, and capital move across the corridor.
My filter is threefold. First, is the problem real and widely felt, or a solution chasing a problem? Second, can it be built as infrastructure, something that grows more valuable and more defensible as it scales, instead of a service trading hours for money? Third, does it connect local capability to global standards, the thread running through everything I build?
Meet all three and it becomes a durable pillar of the system. Fail one and I let it pass, no matter how attractive it looks on the surface.
Africa–Gulf Trade and the Shift Towards Industrial Partnerships
CA: A recurring theme throughout your work is creating stronger commercial links between African and Arab markets. In your view, where do you see the greatest untapped opportunities for collaboration between these regions?
Abdul Gaffar: The greatest prize is manufacturing and industrial partnership, with Gulf capital and technical capacity fused with African raw materials, labour, and market access.
For too long, the relationship sat at “transactional”: the Gulf buys African commodities raw, and Africa buys finished goods back. I have spent years moving my own corridor past that, into co-production, where the factory and the processing plant sit on African soil, financed by Gulf investment, and both sides own the outcome.
That is where jobs are created, where wealth stays on the continent, and where the relationship stops being buyer-and-seller and becomes genuine partnership.
Beyond manufacturing, three areas are ready now. Agriculture and food security, where the Gulf needs reliable supply and Africa has the land and climate to provide it. Technology and digital infrastructure, where young African talent can serve Gulf and global markets through the platforms I am already connecting them to. And pharmaceuticals and healthcare, where demand across Africa is vast and the manufacturing capacity in places like Egypt is ready to serve it.
I am not speculating about these; I am scaling into them because the corridor to carry them already exists. The shift from a buyer-seller relationship to co-investment and co-production is not a hope of mine. In my markets, it is already underway.
Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan on Building Institutions That Support Economic Growth
CA: Beyond your business ventures, you have established organisations focused on trade promotion, investment, youth empowerment, and community development. How do these initiatives contribute to your broader vision for economic growth and regional development?
Abdul Gaffar: I have never believed that business and development are separate pursuits. The businesses I have built create value; the institutions I have established create the environment in which that value is sustained and shared.
A thriving company in a stagnant society is fragile; a company embedded in a rising community is durable. So my trade-promotion and investment platforms exist to widen a door that is already open, to bring more African and Gulf businesses into a room that is already working, not just the ones I deal with directly.
I am growing the whole ecosystem because a larger, healthier one strengthens every venture inside it, my own included.
The youth empowerment and community development work is even more fundamental to me. Africa’s greatest asset is not its minerals or its markets. It is its people.
I have built businesses and a working trade corridor. If I fail to equip the next generation to run them, I will have built something that cannot outlast me.
These initiatives are how I make the work generational instead of personal. The connections I have established today should be inherited and expanded by young people who are better trained, better connected, and more ambitious than my generation was.
That is the real measure of whether any of this mattered.
Turning International Relationships Into Commercial Opportunities
CA: Your professional journey has brought you into collaboration with ambassadors, government officials, chambers of commerce, investors, and international business leaders. How have these relationships helped transform conversations into meaningful trade and investment opportunities?
Abdul Gaffar: Cross-border business is ultimately built through relationships, and over the years I have built a network across government, diplomacy, investment, and the private sector that now functions as one of Elsooltaan’s core assets.
When a business enters an unfamiliar market, its hardest problem is knowing whom to speak to, whom to trust, and how the local environment actually works. I have already done that mapping across these markets, so that access exists on day one instead of after years of trial and error.
But I am clear-eyed that relationships alone do not close deals. An introduction opens a door. What follows depends on the quality of the opportunity, the credibility of the parties, the economics of the transaction, and the ability to execute.
So I treat relationships as the bridge, not the destination. They create access and an initial level of confidence, but real commercial value has to carry the rest.
That is exactly how Elsooltaan operates: not simply introducing people, but understanding what each side genuinely needs and whether there is a real basis for something lasting.
The network is built; the discipline is in how I use it.
Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan on Africa’s Investment Potential
CA: As a speaker at international conferences and business forums, you regularly share your perspectives on entrepreneurship, investment, and emerging markets. What message do you believe the global business community still needs to hear about Africa’s economic potential?
Abdul Gaffar: Stop treating Africa as a risk to be managed and start seeing it as an opportunity already being captured.
The global business community was conditioned to approach Africa through caution, to see the instability, the infrastructure gaps, and to price all of it as risk. Those challenges are real, and I do not dismiss them. But that lens misses entirely the scale of what is already being built, the pace at which it is happening, and the returns going to those who committed early instead of watching from a safe distance.
Africa is the youngest continent on earth, with the fastest-growing middle class and the largest free-trade area in the world by number of countries.
The serious players are not asking whether to engage Africa. They are asking how fast they can build a durable position before the window narrows.
My message is simple: the risk is no longer in entering Africa. The real risk is being absent from it while your competitors take the relationships, the infrastructure, and the market positions that will define global commerce for decades.
Africa is not the frontier of the future. It is the opportunity of the present, and some of us are already inside it.
Developing Africa’s Next Generation of Technology Talent
CA: Through initiatives such as Africa Youth Voice and your programme to train thousands of young programmers, you have invested in developing future generations alongside building businesses. Why do you believe youth empowerment is essential to Africa’s long-term economic transformation?
Abdul Gaffar: By 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African, and the majority will be under thirty.
That reality is either the continent’s greatest engine of transformation or its greatest source of instability, and which one it becomes depends entirely on whether we equip this generation with skills, opportunity, and belief in their own capacity.
You cannot run a modern, competitive economy on unemployed and disengaged young people, no matter how much capital or infrastructure you pour in. The human layer has to come first.
That is why initiatives like Africa Youth Voice and training thousands of young programmers matter to me as much as any company I have founded.
When I train a young African to write code, I am not handing one person a job. I am creating someone who can serve global markets from their own city, build their own venture, and train ten more behind them.
Technology is the great equaliser here, because a skilled young programmer in Lagos or Cairo competes for the same work as one in London or Dubai.
Youth empowerment is not charity and it is not a side project. It is the most strategic long-term investment anyone serious about Africa’s economic transformation can make, because it compounds across generations in a way that no single business ever will.
Abdul Gaffar Elsooltaan on Sustainable Africa–Gulf Trade Investment
CA: Your work spans trade facilitation, technology, investment promotion, and entrepreneurship across multiple countries. How do you identify opportunities that have the greatest potential to create lasting economic value for both Africa and the Arab world?
Abdul Gaffar: I look for opportunities that create value on both sides of the corridor at once, never a deal where one region simply extracts from the other.
The ones with the greatest lasting value are where Gulf capital finds a genuine home in African productive capacity, and African businesses gain not just money but knowledge, standards, and access to global markets in return.
When both sides are building instead of one merely buying, the relationship becomes durable because both hold a stake in its success. That mutual stake is what I have used to turn one-off transactions into lasting economic bonds across my markets.
Practically, I apply three questions to any opportunity. Does it build productive capacity, such as factories, platforms, skills and infrastructure, instead of just moving goods or money around? Does it connect local African capability to global standards, so that what is built can compete beyond its home market? And can it scale into something that outlives the original deal, creating jobs and secondary businesses around it?
Pass all three and it is worth years of my life.
A quick trade earns a margin once; a well-built industrial or technological partnership generates value for decades and spins off dozens more opportunities in its wake.
I have always chosen the second kind and built the corridor to carry it.
The Future of Elsooltaan International and Africa–Gulf Trade
CA: As you continue expanding Elsooltaan International and strengthening connections between African and Arab markets, what lasting impact do you hope your work will have on entrepreneurs, investors, and the future of cross-border trade?
Abdul Gaffar: My hope is that the work outlives the name.
I have built the institutions and the infrastructure so that an African entrepreneur reaching for Gulf capital, or a Gulf investor looking toward African markets, simply has a reliable path to do so, without ever needing to know who built it or how.
That is what real infrastructure does: it becomes invisible precisely because it works. The connections I have established are already becoming the ordinary, taken-for-granted plumbing of Africa–Gulf commerce. My job now is to make that plumbing flawless.
For entrepreneurs, I want the work to prove that where you are born is not a ceiling on what you can build.
For investors, I want to demonstrate that patient, serious capital committed to Africa and the Gulf together produces both strong returns and genuine transformation, that doing well and doing good are not in tension.
And for the future of cross-border trade, I have set the model: a relationship between these regions defined by partnership and co-creation, not extraction.
The wall of unfamiliarity I set out to remove is down. More wealth is staying on the continent, more young people are building futures they believe in, and the crossing between these markets keeps getting smoother.
That is not the legacy I am hoping for. It is the one already taking shape, and I intend to perfect it.
