As a teenager, Acumen Fellow Kelvin Hughes took his grandmother to the grocery store in London. A simple task that for many mixed-race families can provoke questions and even insults from strangers.
At the check-out counter, an employee made a racist remark to Kelvin. He laughs, “[My grandma] basically threatened to throttle him with her walking stick.”
Kelvin’s personal heroes like his grandmother (who he describes as a “sassy, little old white lady”), taught him how to walk the fine line between comfort and justice. Now, the 32-year-old CEO regularly leans into dissonance — not just in conversation with others, but also within himself.
A Social Entrepreneur in the Making
His path to becoming a CEO was no exception. As a teenager, Kelvin chased a dream of investment banking. His family’s work ethic was infectious.
They left Ghana for London without much, and throughout his childhood studied at nights while working multiple jobs (including at McDonald’s where they first met).
“When my Dad came home I would sit on his lap and [watch] him reading or studying, always trying to push forward,” Kelvin says. Now, his mother and father run their own successful businesses.
Like the children of many immigrant families, Kelvin and his brother watched their parents chart their own success. They worked “so hard to give us a set of opportunities that means that we don’t have to struggle. We can coast,” Kelvin says.
He attended a top school in England, interned at Morgan Stanley, graduated from the University of Bath with a degree in Business Administration, and pursued a post-grad program at Unilever. “Things were going to plan,” Kelvin says.
He spent nearly three years savoring the delicacies of technology, finance, and marketing, “using aromatherapy to sell shower gel, employing BMX riders to sell butter. These are things that come out of your head and you can make it real, and then you can go and see it in the car park and you see the kids interacting…I really loved the creativity of that,” Kelvin says.
Kelvin later chased an opportunity to join a new team at Unilever: he interviewed families and designed products to address issues of sanitation, climate change, and gender equity. “I was basically given license to sit down with people from all walks of life and ask about their hopes and dreams,” Kelvin says. What’s your biggest fear for your kids? What would success be in your life ten years from now? In turn, Kelvin was asking himself the same questions.
Flitting between prototypes and financial models, he was proud of his work. But for Kelvin, an earnest, self-described “literature nerd,” something was missing. “I think that until I was quite old, definitely in my late twenties, I wasn’t really questioning [certain things],” Kelvin says. “When there starts to be a real divergence, then you’re sort of starting to think, ‘Well, hold on…Money isn’t my definition of success.’”
Clean Team Toilets Bring Dignity and Safety
After nearly five years interviewing customers and testing prototypes before jetting back to London, Kelvin started to question the value of his work from a faraway, Western seat. “Can you get a real feel…a real sense…can you smell it?” If not, Kelvin asked himself, “Should you have a license to make decisions?”
With much deliberation — dotted with some family and friends suggesting that it would be “a little bit ridiculous” to leave London — Kelvin decided to leave behind the hamster wheel of sleepless flights and settle down closer to the questions he sought to answer. In 2018 Kelvin accepted a role as CEO of Clean Team Ghana, a social enterprise founded in 2012 that supplies low-cost, in-home toilets for customers without indoor plumbing. Coincidentally — at least according to Kelvin — this brought him to the town his grandparents once lived in almost 60 years before.
Clean Team is responding to a critical need in Ghana: about 20 million people (almost 70 percent of the country’s population) don’t have a toilet in their homes. Instead, these families are forced to use public toilets for a fee or find a place to defecate outside.
Clean Team visits almost 3,000 homes per week to service customers’ toilets, which don’t require water, electricity nor digging. Not to mention families spend half as much as they would on public toilets.
Clean Team’s product also allows women and girls to avoid harassment or violence while walking to public toilets at night.
Most customers talk more about the pride of having a toilet in their home than about the cost savings. Customers say they’re comfortable hosting relatives with their new toilet, and are happy to avoid leaving their homes in the middle of the night. It’s about “the dignity of being able to go to the toilet in your own house,” Kelvin says. “So many people around the world take that for granted.”
Clean Team wants to make this dignity accessible for Ghanaian. “We’re not delineating by income or job…I find that really powerful,” Kelvin says. “This goes beyond just delivering a world class service, but also ensuring that the company is imbuing a group of leaders with the skills and tenacity to contribute to the development of their communities — and ultimately the country.”
For Kelvin, moving to Kumasi has answered some of the questions that troubled him in London. “I understand what it’s like for the electricity to go out on a regular basis…and when you get up in the morning and you can’t have a shower because the water’s off,” Kelvin says. “I think it allows you to be less invested when you are far away and you have all the confidence.” Now, Kelvin hears “about the problems people have over a beer, rather than every now and again” between trips.
In the next five years he aims to make Clean Team profitable, and continue building the company’s coaching and development program for staff — himself included. Kelvin laughs, “As my team would say, I’ve got many, many flaws!”
In the meantime, Kelvin is thoughtful about providing his team with opportunities to grow, whether on an international stage or in a local training. “Sometimes it’s really simple stuff,” he says. “Some of our team had never flown before, and so rather than me going to speak at a conference in Sweden, we send a different member of the team.” Other times, he leads sessions on Navigating Polarities, curricula from the Acumen West Africa Fellowship.
Finding Community through the Acumen Fellowship
Kelvin joined the West Africa Acumen Fellowship last year, befriending 19 lifelong confidants. “Not just people that if I’m in a city I’ll call and have dinner with, but people that I’m sure will call me in tears and want to chat about something, and I could do the same,” he says. Kelvin laughs, “It’s insane that we actually physically have spent less than five weeks in person with each other. It’s just nuts.”
A handful of late night chats and a pinch of forced vulnerability were just the right ingredients for the group to bake disagreement into growth. In one seminar with his cohort, Kelvin remembers a discussion about marginalization that left many in tears. “It was such a powerful, powerful expression,” he says. “Almost everyone left that room having their own thinking challenged, their own biases…I was angry at people. I was sad for others. And we had this incredibly rich conversation.”
Kelvin ordinarily defaults to listening, but says an important takeaway from the Acumen Fellowship has been, “By keeping quiet, you are sometimes holding things back that others might find useful or even transformative.”
He describes a frequent tension: when to step up versus step back. “It’s a tension that as a male, as someone that’s privileged,” he thinks, “Am I talking over people? When do I shut up?”
According to Kelvin, the Fellowship “can really kind of open your eyes about ‘Not only have I got a role to play, but I’ve got a duty and responsibility to use what I have.’”
The 2019 West Africa Acumen Fellows cohort stays in contact through WhatsApp. Kelvin says that the group celebrates each others’ successes — especially when hidden beneath humility. “Someone will find something that someone else has done and then we’ll call them out for not sharing it,” Kelvin laughs. “That may sound silly, but it’s incredibly powerful because you have this group of cheerleaders” — cheerleaders who, like Kelvin, question conventional definitions of success.
“They understand the stresses and challenges of doing this work,” Kelvin says. “But the massive takeaway and the thing that I’ll have forever is the fact that…if I have a challenge, whatever it is, I’ve now got a group of friends that is invested in my professional success and my personal success, and wants me to do well.”
He’s not working at the Fortune 500 company that his 17-year-old self imagined, but Kelvin is living his values — in pursuit of success defined by dignity.
Applications for the Acumen Fellowships in Bangladesh, Malaysia and West Africa are now open. Learn more and apply here.
