Kola is the Managing Director of Babban Gona, an innovative Agricultural Franchise model founded to leverage the private sector to address Nigeria’s spiraling youth unemployment challenge. Babban Gona, a sustainable private sector solution, that provides the members of hundreds of franchise farmer cooperatives, a holistic set of services to enable them increase their yields to 2.3 times the national average and increase their profitability to over 3.5X the average farmer. Babban Gona expects to sustainably enable 1 million small holder farmers lift themselves out of poverty by 2025.


Kola brings significant leadership experience across four continents and multiple leading companies, including
General Electric (GE), Abiomed and Notore. In addition, Kola brings extensive public sector experience as the
former Senior Advisor to the Nigerian Minister of Agriculture. Kola is globally recognized as a thought leader in
African Agribusiness. In recognition for his leadership in driving positive change on the African Continent he
has received several global awards including the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship and Rainer Fellowship.
Kola holds an MBA (Honors) from Harvard and Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, MIT.