Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais (born 28 October 1967 in Fribourg) is a Swiss-Angolan entrepreneur who has founded and led several businesses over the course of his career. Among these are Quantum Global Group, an international investment group with a particular focus on Africa and Banco Kwanza Invest, Angola's first investment bank.
Bastos was cited as one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2013 and 2017.
Family
Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais was born on 28 October 1967 in Fribourg, Switzerland. He is of bi-national heritage. His father is from Angola and his mother is Swiss, coming from an entrepreneurial family. His maternal grand-father was an industrialist in the watch industry and invented the light inside the watch. According to Bastos, his late Angolan grandmother inspired him to establish the African Innovation Foundation in 2009.
Education and career
Bastos studied economics at the University of Fribourg and received a Master of Arts in Management. He financed his studies by starting a regional mergers and acquisitions business that sold small companies. In 1989, Bastos joined Deloitte as a consultant and later Abegglen Management Partners. In 1995, he founded a venture capital company focused on Swiss SMEs.
In 2004 Bastos founded Quantum Capital S.A. in Luanda, Angola, the first company of the Quantum Global Group, which he is Chairman. In 2007, Quantum Global Investment Management was founded in Switzerland. As an asset management company for global liquid investments Quantum Global also expanded into the real estate business after establishing Quantum Global Real Estate in June 2009. From 2012, Quantum Global together with Plaza, a joint venture with JLL subsidiary LaSalle, purchased office properties on Savile Row, Fifth Avenue and in Munich. The Tour Blanche in Paris followed in 2014. Other fields of activity of Quantum Global are private equity, portfolio management, and a laboratory for economic research.
In 2008, Bastos de Morais founded Banco Kwanza Invest, Angola's first investment bank.
In September 2015, Quantum Global became a member of the Forest Stewardship Council. In 2016, a fund managed by the group acquired the InterContinental Hotel in Lusaka. In 2020, Quantum Global Investment Management merged with Quantum Global Corporate Services.
Fábrica de Sabão
In 2015 he launched the hybrid innovation hub, Fábrica de Sabão (The Soap Factory) to support innovation projects in Angola. Fábrica de Sabão, a former soap factory, was converted into a hybrid incubator, co-working space, maker-space, and accelerator hub. The hub is a collaboration with the government, which leases its premises. Fábrica de Sabão was built as an inclusive model to enable marginalized communities to participate in sustainable enterprise such as urban manufacturing.
NGOs
In 2017, Bastos de Morais was elected an international council member, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
African Innovation Foundation
In 2009, he founded the African Innovation Foundation (AIF) which aims to support sustainable projects in Africa. The Foundation's project "Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA)" was launched in 2011 in cooperation with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). The IPA is an annual competition that honors African entrepreneurs and innovators through investment in their ecosystems and business development. In 2016 the Innovation Prize for Africa celebrated its 5th anniversary, and the AIF signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for cooperation to support African innovators. In February 2017 the AIF signed a MoU with the Botswana Innovation Hub to support innovations in Botswana. In addition to the IPA, the AIF founded the ZuaHub, a platform that connects innovators with resources. By 2017 the IPA had a database of over 6,000 innovators from 51 African countries.
In 2012, the IPA was endorsed by a joint resolution of the African Union (AU) conference of ministers of finance, development and planning, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) conference of ministers of finance, planning and economic development. The AU/UN-ECA resolution invited "African governments and the private sector to contribute to financing the African Science, Technology and Innovation Endowment Fund and the Innovation Prize for Africa" to ensure the sustainability of the IPA.