It started, as so many things now do, with a post on LinkedIn. Before traveling to Guinea, Jaye Connolly — Chairman and CEO of a firm focused on revenue traceability and transparency across Africa’s tax, climate, agriculture, and mining sectors — came across a message from Ibrahim BAH floating an idea: an Africa Diaspora Bank. The concept caught her attention enough to reach out directly.

What came back was not a warm welcome. It was a question.

Fair enough, Connolly later reflected. She explained who she was, outlined her work across the continent, and said plainly that she simply wanted to exchange ideas. That exchange, once only a LinkedIn thread, became real this week: the two finally sat down together in Conakry, and a short introduction stretched into a two-hour conversation covering Guinea, investment, leadership, and the role of the diaspora in the country’s future.

According to Connolly, BAH spoke with genuine optimism about Guinea’s new administration, describing a government he believes is steering the country in a more disciplined direction and showing less tolerance for the dysfunction that has historically slowed its progress. Connolly was careful to temper that optimism with a journalist’s caution: every government, she noted, is ultimately judged by results rather than rhetoric. Still, she argued, the enthusiasm of people who are deeply invested in their own country’s trajectory is worth listening to.

Those figures explain much of the interest circling Guinea right now. A country sitting on the world’s richest bauxite reserves and a Simandou iron ore deposit of global significance has no shortage of investors at the table. What Connolly and BAH spent their two hours discussing was less about the resources themselves and more about who gets to shape how that wealth is financed, governed, and shared — and whether the African diaspora, rather than only foreign capital, could take a far larger role in bankrolling the continent’s next chapter.

For Connolly, the meeting was also a small parable about how connections across the diaspora actually get made: not through formal introductions or institutional channels, but through a public post, a direct message, and someone on the other end willing to ask a blunt question before agreeing to talk. “Sometimes,” she wrote afterward, “the best meetings begin with a post, a message, and someone asking, ‘Who exactly are you?’”