Photo by Lauren Mulligan

On May 28, 2022, the Basketball Africa League (BAL) held the championship game of its second season, pitting the club team Petro de Luanda, from Angola, against US Monastir, from Tunisia.

Traffic snarls outside the stadium, congestion tightened by temporary road closures for the arrival of Rwanda’s first lady, Jeannette Kagame. Inside Kigali’s three-year-old, $104 million BK Arena (named for the Bank of Kigali), pregame entertainment features a troupe of thunderous, polyrhythmic drummers and dancers.The seats and court are adorned in bright green, yellow, and blue, and the concession stands offer popcorn as well as bowls of spicy beef over French fries. During timeouts, the nearly 10,000 fans—one of them painted head to toe in green, yellow, and red, and another wearing an impossibly detailed lion’s head— mug for stadium cameras, competing for jumbotron coverage. The low drone of vuvuzelas competes with the arena’s mix of American hip-hop and regional hits.

It is a distinctly regional take on an iconic American export.

The league is a core pillar of NBA Africa, a two-year-old venture whose value NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has estimated at nearly $1 billion. Its growth plan is matched in ambition by its goals, which include nothing less than creating an economic growth engine that can support the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continental population, says Mark Tatum (MBA 1998), the NBA’s deputy commissioner and COO.

Tatum attended all three legs of the 2022 BAL season, watching as Africa’s 12 best club teams competed in earlier tournament games in Dakar, Senegal, and Giza, Egypt, and observing the impact inside and outside the stadiums. “Just this season, we have engaged more than a hundred local vendors, entrepreneurs, and freelancers,” covering everything from uniform production to food service, notes Tatum. “These are opportunities that didn’t exist before.”

Growing basketball on the continent entails addressing the logistics and marketing challenges inherent in trying to scale any operation across 54 countries. It also poses a deep cultural challenge—the kind where the transformational impact would be evident not just in boardrooms but also in schoolyards, says NBA Africa CEO Victor Williams (MBA 1998). “We want the first instinct of African kids, when they see a ball, to be to bounce it rather than kick it.”

The NBA’s presence in Africa dates back to 1993, when the league commissioner at the time, David Stern, met with Nelson Mandela after the fall of apartheid. “David has acknowledged that it really changed his life,” says Tatum, who joined the NBA in 1999. “Mandela told him that sports had the power to change the world, and the commissioner came back with this idea that we have to use sports as a power for good.”

For decades thereafter, the NBA’s activity on the continent focused on grassroots development. Its international Basketball Without Borders program, which launched in Africa in 2003, featured athletic development and training as well as leadership and wellness education. In 2011, the league launched the first of 15 Jr. NBA programs focused on youth development; in 2017, it opened NBA Academy Africa, one of four NBA Academy programs around the world that features elite training for high school-age prospects, in Senegal.

Yet fulfilling the promise that Stern saw required thinking beyond athletics or awareness and figuring out how the NBA could drive real economic growth. The continent offers a unique opportunity for impact, notes Tatum, with 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30, according to the United Nations, which creates a rising need for employment. The vision for the BAL—“a league for Africans, by Africans,” Tatum says—developed in response to this opportunity, and a series of sold-out exhibition games confirmed a continental appetite for live basketball. The NBA’s larger mission, though, extended beyond ticket sales. “We started seeing that sports could be used there as a platform to not only improve the health and wellness of one of the world’s youngest and fastest growing populations but also to create a whole new industry around the business of sports,” says Tatum.

Creating an industry from scratch, though, required both capital investment and regional experience. After the league spun out NBA Africa as a standalone entity, it found interested investors in former NBA players who hail from the continent, including South Sudan’s Luol Deng and Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Dikembe Mutombo, as well as partners like actor Forest Whitaker, who runs the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative, and even former President Barack Obama. Strategic investors like Nigerian conglomerate owner Tunde Folawiyo and Tope Lawani (MBA 1995), co-CEO of Helios Fairfax Partners and cofounder and managing partner of Helios Investment Partners, Africa’s largest private equity firm, offered both funding and expertise on scaling businesses in Africa.

Tatum also knew that the organization required a very specific kind of leader, and he had one in mind: former classmate Williams, who led corporate and investment banking for African markets at South Africa’s Standard Bank. “He’s always been a real strategic, big-picture thinker, with an ability to execute,” says Tatum. “I watched from afar what he did with Standard Bank, how he helped grow that business. As I started thinking about a leader for the continent, I couldn’t think of a better person than Victor to do that.”

Named the CEO in August 2020, Williams recalls that the offer came at a time early in the pandemic, when locked-down viewers turned to sports for respite. His two decades in banking had been focused on development—funding bridges, dams, electrical power stations, agricultural installations, and manufacturing operations—and he wondered if he would miss that sense of direct impact by moving to sports. “But what struck me was how much people hungered for something to lift their spirits in the middle of sitting at home in various stages of lockdown and how impactful sports was to driving that sense of psychological and mental well-being,” he says.

Williams also realized the benefit of his impact in a way he hadn’t in his last job. He likes to tell the story of being at a social event not long ago when a young child, maybe 10 years old, approached him. “He reached out to me and said, ‘Mr. Williams, I just want to thank you for everything you and your colleagues are doing to help provide more sports for kids like me and the youth in Africa,’” says Williams. His face breaks out into a smile. “No one ever came to me when I was a banker, shook my hand, and said, ‘Thank you for building that dam.’”

Two days before the 2022 BAL Finals, Williams took his seat in front of the cameras and reporters in the media room inside BK Arena. Wearing a black dashiki and black-framed glasses, he sat next to the president of the Rwanda Basketball Federation and the country’s Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Sports, who had gathered to sign a memorandum of understanding to declare that NBA Africa would commit to building development programs in Rwanda, and the officials would work to support the establishment of those programs. “Today is a historic day,” Williams told the assembled press.

For NBA Africa, scaling requires building these local, on-the-ground relationships, region by region. After all, while it might have a Silicon Valley–like valuation and aggressive expansion plan, the organization can’t simply hire more software engineers in order to grow. And unlike the NBA’s efforts to operate in China, where it had to deal with only one government and one broadcaster for its 2008 launch, further development on the continent requires building and maintaining relationships across 54 markets and governments, each with its own media companies, cultural characteristics, and politics.

The NBA Africa business card always helps, says Williams, who was born in Sierra Leone, but building relationships can still require time. “We’re trying to build something big for the long run here,” he says. Sure, he’d always love to move faster. But if it requires an extra six months to make sure the partner is comfortable and committed, then so be it: “That’s time well spent, as long as it delivers down the road.”

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Victor Williams on the personal meaning of his work with NBA Africa

Forging local business partnerships also can offer the league singular insight into new markets that a global corporation might not have. Of course, global brands have a great interest in breaking into the African market, Williams says, and NBA Africa has existing partnerships and sponsorships with the likes of Hennessy and Nike. “But for us to serve some markets best—as well as to be an entity that contributes to Africa’s growth and development—we have to engage with local brands.”

Strategic investors like Lawani help make those connections. Lawani’s Helios Investment Partners has been building and scaling businesses for nearly two decades on the continent, offering vital navigation. “There won’t be a shortage of interest in people and entities seeking to align themselves with the NBA,” says Lawani. “But how do you know, from New York City, who behaves in a manner that’s consistent with your values or consistent with your brand? Who’s riding on whose coattails? Are you benefiting them? Are they benefiting you?” Lawani can’t teach the NBA anything about basketball or how to negotiate contracts with ESPN. “But where we think we can be helpful is in saying, ‘Look, you’re trying to build a corporate enterprise that is winning business in a number of these African countries. You need to build teams, you need to hire people, you need to know how to vet them, you need to identify partners, and you need to know the right corporate partners and sponsors for this market.’”

Building the media product requires similar regional expertise, as Williams discovered. “When I got into this role, I realized that Africa is essentially four linguistic blocks: Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone-Portuguese, and Arabic.” Different media companies specialize in each block, so there’s no single TV contract to sign. The free-to-air TV space is even more fragmented, with literally hundreds of broadcasters operating across the continent, says Williams. “Each country might have three or four, so you then have to go engage, ideally, with the top one or two in each of those markets in order to distribute your product.”

The disparate nature of the market is why the league is run as a series of games in different locations, as opposed to having every team travel to a new location every week. “We don’t have a traditional sort of home-and-away structure,” says Williams, noting the potential issues posed by border crossings and requisite visa requirements. And even if travel wasn’t a logistical hurdle, most African countries lack the kind of world-class arenas the BAL games require.

While the challenges are complex, Williams has already begun to see the organization’s deep ripple effect. During the finals, the energy around the games and the NBA Africa–sponsored events was the product of thoughtful internal planning and coordination. But it was the events that they didn’t plan that most excited Williams. Speaking on the outdoor patio of the Kigali Marriott a few days before the BAL championship, he noted that, earlier in the week, he had attended a curated meal of African cuisine that featured a fashion show. “We didn’t put that together. There was somebody saying, ‘Hey, the BAL is in town, and I’m going to do this cultural event and promote it and make it its own thing.’”

Williams also had just returned from speaking on the economy of sports at an event across town that was similarly organized by an unaffiliated local group. “Somebody came up to me at the end of this conference and said, ‘We want to do a film festival around the BAL,’” recalls Williams. Okay, he told him, let’s have a conversation.

In May, three days before the BAL championship game, Egyptian guard Mohab Yasser took questions in a media area at the arena after his Egyptian club, Zamalek, lost in the semifinals to eventual champs US Monastir. Yasser, a few weeks short of his 20th birthday, had played in the United States at East Tennessee State, and before that, spent two years honing his skills at NBA Academy Africa in Senegal. With his season over, Yasser is refocusing on the ultimate goal. “My dream, of course—and not just for me, but for everyone here—is to play in the NBA one day,” he says.

Should Yasser achieve his dream, he would join a rising tide. This past season, the NBA featured 14 African players on opening-night rosters, a record the league set the season prior, which was up from 11 in 2019. Even if these players don’t make it to the United States, the BAL assures them local opportunities to compete at a high level. “Our goal is to make sure that the BAL is one of the top professional basketball leagues in the world within the next 5 to 10 years,” says Tatum. “And I think we can get there, given the amount of talent that is on the continent.”

The BAL also has created a logical progression to a professional career for young African players: It could start with a local Jr. NBA program, then an invitation to a Basketball Without Borders camp, an NBA Academy spot, and, ultimately, a chance on a BAL team. “Prior to the BAL, if you were a kid growing up in Africa, playing professional sports—and certainly playing in the NBA—felt so far away,” says Tatum. “There’s a very clear pathway now.”

And while soccer is still the dominant sport on the continent, Lawani says the sport is resting too comfortably on its laurels: “Football has taken the continent for granted forever. There’s no active investment either by UEFA or frankly by FIFA. So I think the ability of the NBA to really differentiate itself, especially by leveraging the tool of the Basketball Africa League as a franchise, is actually quite strong.”

And as pressing as overcoming the challenges of infrastructure, logistics, and relationship-building might be, brand-building is an immediate priority, Lawani says. “As we’ve seen in the research, there’s already a fairly large base of core and peripheral NBA fans in Africa. But trying to create a distinctive character for the NBA, and a voice to engage and stimulate the fan base, I think, is really the near-term job.”

One of the most important ways to do this, says Williams, is to create heroes. “Ultimately, if we think about all the things we’re trying to do, inspiration is really key. Whether it’s getting more kids to play the game, getting fans to be excited about the game, getting people to help us monetize the game, or getting other people to invest their money to grow infrastructure around the game, inspiration is critical.”

And not just from national icons like Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, or current Philadelphia 76er Joel Embiid, all of whom have galvanized generations of Africans with their All-Star careers in the NBA. But also from BAL stars like Yasser, who inspires children in his native Cairo. “There’s something powerful about having a local hero,” says Williams. “Someone who kids can look to and say, ‘Hey, that’s somebody like me who’s now performing at the highest level.’”

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