Emmanuel Weyi


Emmanuel Ntima Weyi is a Congolese entrepreneur and presidential candidate for the Democratic Republic of Congo. He served as the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Groupe Weyi International – a sustainable mining and renewable energy enterprise focused on the Congo from 2009-2014. He also founded the Colorado Sickle Cell Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on bringing awareness to sufferers of sickle-cell anemia.

Education

Weyi was born in Kisangani on May 29, 1959, and grew up in a family with 2 brothers and 7 sisters. In 1960, Weyi's family moved to the capital of Kinshasa, where his father would become the head of the Union Zaroise de Banques in 1971. That same year, Weyi completed his completed his elementary schooling at a Catholic school.
In 1972, at the behest of his father, Weyi went back to the Bas-Congo to attend a Catholic boarding school for secondary education. After graduating high school in 1979, he attended the Ecole Internationale Des Hautes Etudes in Paris to study International Relations.

Career

After moving to the US in 1984, Weyi attended an English language school, where he learned how to speak and write English, adding to his fluency in French, Lingala, Swahili and Kikongo. In 1995, Weyi moved with his family to Denver, Colorado.
In 2003, focusing on business in Congo, he started Groupe Weyi, a social enterprise focused on sustainable mining in the DRC. Additionally, his interaction with non-profit agencies in the US and Congo led him to found the Colorado Sickle Cell Foundation in 2005. The organization’s vision was to provide sickle cell anemia awareness and assistance in the state of Colorado and abroad.
In 2011, Weyi co-founded Groupe Weyi International—an expansion of his original company. He and his co-founder began work to bring awareness and transparency to business in the Congo. And In 2012, Groupe Weyi International expanded operations into renewable energy implementation. The company expanded its headquarters into a second branch in Kinshasa, DRC.

Presidential campaign

In 2011, Weyi participated in a congress to decide on one candidate to represent the diaspora in the upcoming election of that year. And in 2015, he announced that he would plan to run for president in the 2016 elections when current incumbent Joseph Kabila completed his second and last term in office as mandated by the DRC's constitution. He ran under the slogan “Stand by Me.”