Executive Vice President, Rendeavour

Preston Mendenhall is Executive Vice President of Rendeavour, Africa’s largest new city builder with 30,000 acres of satellite city developments in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Rendeavour is the owner and developer of Tatu City, the only operational Special Economic Zone in Kenya, and Alaro City, a partnership with the Lagos State Government in the Lekki Free Zone.

Rendeavour is creating infrastructure, industrial zones, housing, offices, schools and hospitals that will help sustain and accelerate Africa’s economic growth and meet the aspirations of the continent’s burgeoning middle class.

Prior to Rendeavour, Preston worked for six years as Vice President for Strategy and Director of Communications at Russian Standard Corporation, one of the world’s largest vodka producers and a leading private consumer bank in Russia.

From 1993-2006, Preston was a producer and correspondent for NBC News, covering global events in the Soviet successor states, Europe, Central and South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Founder / CEO of RISE NETWORKS

Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, named by Forbes as one of the 20 most Powerful Young Women in Africa is a Data

Science & Artificial Intelligence Leader, Social Entrepreneur & Policy Advisor in EdTech & Human Capital

Development. She is the Founder / CEO of RISE NETWORKS, Nigeria’s leading Social Enterprise whose

mandate focuses on using Tech Innovation to create advocacy, skills empowerment and learning

opportunities for the inclusive growth of Youth with the core objective of preparing them for effective Value

Based Leadership at all levels in the Public, Private and Social Sectors. Rise Networks owns The Rise Labs,

Nigeria’s first and only Data Science powered Learning, Research and Work Readiness Lab and their

trainings, projects & products are centered around Emerging Technologies and Disruptive Innovation in the

realms of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things & Advanced Analytics. We’re knowledge

focused, research and development driven and we teach and create courses in technical skills relevant for the

Future of Work and we create and deliver data driven project/product models for private and public sector

organizations and institutions for the good and growth of society. They designed and built the first career Job

Chat bot in West Africa which was listed as part of the AI Mentoring in the Workplace Working Group of the

UN AI for Good Project in 2019. Another of their flagship projects is Passnownow.com, which is Sub-Saharan

Africa’s most used mobile learning portal with access to curriculum-based education content with

standardized assessments and exam review questions in digital format distributed via web and mobile to

underserved high School Students and Teachers.