The Future of business. Future of business, future of business.
It's more global and more decentralised, making sure that enterprises are a lot more responsible.
Smart cities, more collaboration. Consumer driven productivity.
Environmental and social responsibility. Global human centred.
Purposeful Individualised Automation. Big Data.
Climate Change. Space Exploration. Renewable Energy.
Information Security. Exciting and digital. Hello and welcome to the Future of Business Podcast.
I'm your host, Alison McArthur. Today we bring you the second in our two part series on the future of business in Africa.
In our last episode, you heard from leaders in the private and public sectors about the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.
Today, we'll bring you more on the challenges and opportunities facing the continent as governments consider a more unified future.
First, we'll hear from serial entrepreneur Erik Hersman about how technology and innovation can play a role.
My name is Erik Hersman. I'm the CEO of BRIC. So I don't look or sound like it.
I did grow up in East Africa, in Sudan and Kenya, and then went to the U.S. for university and then came back to Kenya with my first business.
And so I've been deep in the technology sector and in Kenya for a while with, you know, the founding of Ushahidi, the Ihub, a brick savannah fund.
Gearbox, a number of different initiatives. And all of those initiatives are really about how do we get the foundations
set so that we can have more tech companies doing everything from hardware,
you know, design, engineering all the way through to just large scale software.
Start-ups. So I'm very tech oriented, but and today and today's work that I do with Break, it's really about connectivity.
I really think a lot about that. Mm hmm. So the Ihub is an innovation centre for the tech community.
How important do you think collaboration is in driving innovation in the West?
So, I mean, you teed that question up for me perfectly because I think that collaboration and connectivity is actually
the glue for any any not even tech ecosystem but business ecosystem to really accelerate and catalyse.
So when we were building the AI Hub back in 2010, one of the big ideas is saying, hey, listen, we you know, of course, technology is already starting.
It's already happening here. Right. There's engineers building things.
But how do we take what's going to happen already over the next five years and accelerate to three?
Right. So we just move faster. And the way you do that is you get people connected. You get ideas having babies with each other, right?
With people talking with each other.
You try and just make those spaces available to them so that they can they can talk and and you never know what's going to happen.
So the serendipity of never knowing who you're going to run into,
but finding valuable links all the time is where these tech hubs really become invaluable.
Think of them as a community commons. Right. That everybody's welcome to for that community.
And you have a much better understanding of what a tech hub should be. And it seems, you know, well,
certainly looking from the outside in that Africa is a continent of entrepreneurs in the sense that you just see people building businesses on,
you know, from a tiny scale to a larger scale. Have you experienced that from living there?
And how important is this mindset? Yeah. So I mean, I think it's a different level across different countries.
But, you know, there's a there's a great term that was coined for African entrepreneurs,
which is parallel entrepreneurs, where people are always running multiple businesses.
Everybody has a side hustle. Right. Even the you know, the permanent secretary has a side hustle.
Right. So everybody has something that they're doing. And I think that's kind of it's in the DNA of the entrepreneurism in the continent.
And and because of that, it's done because of de-risking. Right.
So if you have a couple of things going, if something goes south on one of them, you can at least have other revenue coming in from other streams.
So the reason why is interesting, but it also it also means that, yeah, we have a great entrepreneurial culture across many of the countries.
You know, sometimes they're, they're focussed on really small businesses like micro kind of businesses, but, you know, at least it's there.
And, you know, and this is you know, this is industriousness and ingenuity born of necessity.
This is, you know, I need to earn my bread. I need to be able pay school fees.
It's not just because I want to do something cool or I want to be an entrepreneur to be my own boss.
It's like now this is the only option. Right. And I think that can be valuable, too.
Yeah, absolutely. So what do you see as Africa's competitive advantage in terms of driving forward innovation?
It's obviously a very young country and people are more tech savvy.
So do you think that's that's an advantage, you know?
Yeah, I do think that when you have the youth bulge like we have, it's it's interesting.
You know, I was looking at some numbers recently and, you know, there's there's no there's, you know,
causation and correlation are not aligned here, but they're funny because the numbers are about the same.
So we have, you know, 1.2, 1.3 billion people on the continent.
Right. 450 of which are connected to the Internet, which means about 800,000 or not.
If you look at those who are under the age of 25, it's about the same number, 800, 800 that I'm sorry, 800 million.
Right. And you sort of say, wow, that's a really interesting number. So the youth bulge is real.
The technology access is still a little lopsided, but it's changing rapidly.
So, you know, I think that the competitive advantage is going to come from how.
We've learned to apply technology across multiple businesses.
So it's a cross-cutting kind of thing, right across multiple businesses to be accessible by these youth.
Right. Because so in our network in Kenya, in Rwanda, we have 500,000 monthly active users, 5 million sessions a month.
It's growing is growing rapidly. The first thing people want to do when they get access to the Internet is, you know, WhatsApp.
So comes with family and friends. The second thing they want to do is entertainment.
You know, YouTube is the primary source. And the third thing is look for jobs and in ways they can do commerce on their own.
Right. And so I think the youth of the continent getting access to that,
having a low friction way to get into the Internet and be able to do things like that will have a massive effect across the across the board.
And obviously,
there's been a lot of talk around sort of obviously how microfinance will impact investing as a way to facilitate economic development in Africa.
I think on a global scale, people are very aware of the economic potential of the continent.
And how important do you think it is to develop new innovative financing models to reach different businesses?
Well, I think it's always valuable to do that. It's always I mean, I think Africa is probably one of the better places to to try some new stuff.
I think it's a great because it's so hard to do some things. It's actually a really great testing grounds for new things.
One of the things that we didn't talk about earlier,
but I think is really important as you talk about competitive advantage is actually lack of regulation.
Mm hmm. Like this overregulation you get in the West prohibits some innovation to happen.
Right. And I think the the lack of of of overregulation can be a competitive advantage in African countries.
So you can try new businesses and new business models, you know,
and hopefully try something that will work at a large scale across multiple countries.
Next, we spoke with Kola Adesina, group managing director at Sahara Group,
a multinational energy and infrastructure conglomerate operating in over 38 countries on the global stage.
What do you see as Africa's position in the world in the future?
I if there is anything that I'm but sentimentally attached to each time I see it and I see it almost every day of my life is the map of Africa.
If you look at the map of Africa tilted the other way, it looks like a gun.
And if you are the Don, you know what that means?
It means that everything in terms of greatness and opportunity are here for the world to enjoy.
China is rapidly investing in Africa and forging new relationships not because of anything, but because of the market.
China is shrinking because of their population. Control methods underestimate them, which is not making them grow as much as they should.
But Africa is too green. We're still exploding by way of population, so the market will remain readily there.
And because we are still at the infancy stage of development,
it invariably means that the opportunity is available for companies with products and services that can help the coast of Africa.
For us to truly grow and identify with the world in terms of the enablers of success that the rest of the world has.
The products have been manufactured in Japan, so they end up in Africa.
Products been actually in Germany, it's in Africa.
So if Africa is a major market, is a place for you to sell your commodity, that's the place to be.
Africa has value to the rest of the world in terms of the market size, equally in terms of education.
A lot of Africans travel abroad to Oxford, Cambridge, understand them to acquire knowledge.
So invariably, we are equally spreading our tentacles around to acquire the knowledge to this economy require.
Africa is the place to be. Absolutely. So I think.
So you've been involved in acting as a mentor to young entrepreneurs.
Why do you think it's so important to involve young people in business? Well, if you look at the demographics of Africa today,
you'll see that the population of the youth population is growing almost twice as much in the last 20 years.
Good quality health care is helping, so people are seeing a life.
So if we are going to die, we're going to we're not going to live forever.
We need to hand over the baton to somebody. And we are deliberately crafting policies to help that next generation acquire
the skill sets and competencies needed to run the system better than we met it.
The Charter of Competition will continuously remain making things better, making it cheaper and draining faster.
This generation has learnt the microwave concept of knowledge and I'm sure that they will act on that to make our future better than it is today.
So it makes sense for me to share what I know with the younger generation and learn from
them as well whilst I'm still alive so that I can be better than what I was 10 minutes ago.
So it's possible to be at the learning phase both ways. I think that's a really nice point to end on.
The same is that Mr. Adesina was a pleasure to talk with you. My pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Before we go, we'd like to bring you the second part of our interview with Dr. Viera Sunway,
Executive Secretary for the UN Economic Commission for Africa.
In her remarks at this year's Oxford Business Forum Africa,
Dr. Sunway spoke about the important role that women must play in building a better Africa and a better world.
Some way was the first woman to hold her position at the United Nations and was previously
listed by the Africa Business Review as one of the top ten female business leaders in Africa.
We asked Dr. Sunway why it's important for women to seek senior positions on the world stage.
There have been a lot of studies that show that when you have women in leadership,
the policies that are put in place are more favourable for equitable and sustainable development.
So I think that is the first thing is that you can help ensure that, you know, there's more gender parity.
And secondly, it's just the visibility. I think the world, and particularly our continent, still needs women to be visible so that, you know,
you can give the younger girls that coming up, the encouragement and the ability to think that they, too, can do it.
And finally, I think we have seen across the world that when women are in organisations,
the organisations are more profitable, they are more innovative.
And so my sense is that hopefully that we can bring all this to bear on our institutions.
I must say that the Secretary-General of the United Nations has already reached
parity at the sort of senior level that we have 5050 now with the women,
and we are trying to ensure that. So we are proud as the UN to be one of the institutions that has parity.
But it's once you have parity at the top levels because what we see with with with sort of gender empowerment is the fact that, you know,
you need to build a bench, you must build a bench because otherwise then with two if two people leave, then you go from 50% to 30% very quickly.
So you really need to build a bench and you can sort of continue to to to ensure that people come.
And that starts with mentoring and creating and ensuring that there is more women at every level of the system that can,
you know, ensure and that are very performing. And, you know, as women, we work twice as hard and we continue to work twice as hard.
By the time we get to work, we've done, you know, three jobs already now, you know?
So I think that it's the visibility, it's the privilege to be able to then mentor a few more so that we have a lot more that come up as we of.
Yeah, for me it was it was really inspiring to see you on stage.
I know for a lot of women, the audience, they would have felt exactly the same thing.
What advice would you give to women who want to make a change and want to make their voices heard on a on a higher level,
be persistent and work really hard, be extremely prepared.
Because, you know, we we always have to sort of own the stage.
We are never given the stage. And you can't earn it if you're not prepared.
You can't earn it. If you're not resilient, you may not get it the first time, but you have to keep trying.
If you believe in the idea, then you know you must continue with it because the minute you decide that you're going to stop believing in the idea,
you can not only fail yourself, but you fail all the other women that are behind you and feel it.
You know, believing and not succeeding the first time just requires you to become even stronger,
even more sturdy, and to go back and work a little bit harder.
I think there is proof. There is enough proof now that working sufficiently hard, you know, harder than maybe the rest,
but that should not be a cause for completely should be a cause for saying, you know, I can do this and I can get further.
So really ensuring that you can work but look around you bring other people along with you as you do that and then, you know,
be grateful for the support that you have from friends and family and and, you know,
mentors and managers and, you know, good leaders that you have ahead of you.
Doctor, some way. Thank you very much for joining us. That's very inspirational.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for joining us this week.
We hope you've enjoyed our series on the future of Africa and that you'll join us in two weeks.
Time for another exciting episode of the Future of Business podcast.
If you haven't already, please subscribe and rate us. And as always, if you have any thoughts in the podcast, you can email us at SBS Podcast.
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