New report shows the extent of China’s hidden power as the developing world’s creditor.
Over 50 developing countries’ Chinese debt accounts for on average 15 percent of their individual GDP.
New report shows that the majority of the world’s developing country’s debt to China is considered “hidden.”
China’s loans for poor countries are primarily for crucial infrastructure.
China’s overseas lending, which was virtually zero before the turn of the century — well, about $500 billion in 2000 — stands today, ostensibly, at around $5 trillion. Indeed, they are now the world’s largest creditor, being twice as large as both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, combined.
As much of what China does is under a veiled curtain of secrecy, it’s been difficult to track how all the money is flowing. A new comprehensive study though, by Sebastian Horn and Christoph Trebesch of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University, has provided some new insights about China’s official credit lending empire. What did the researchers discover?
More than half of China’s lending to developing countries is what they term “hidden” money — loans that haven’t been reported to any of the international funds, such as the World Bank.
Indeed, economist and author of the report, Tresbesch, recently told Germany’s Spiegel in an interview following the release of the study’s findings, that compiling all of the information was like “a kind of economic archeology.” Their information came from numerous financial world databases, along with some documents provided courtesy of the CIA.
It’s no secret that China would like to keep this type of information occluded from the international scene. Opponents of China’s secretive lending practices fear that Beijing is engaging in predatory debt diplomacy and using their worldwide Belt and Road Initiative to create a new kind of economic colonialism over Africa and other parts of the developing world.
China’s creditor strategy for economic growth
China is in a state of further economic evolution. Long gone are the days of being the world’s impoverished manufacturer. With a thriving consumer market boosted at home, China is now flexing their influence over vast swathes of the world. One of their strategies is by becoming the world’s most involved lender to poor countries.
This can be problematic for a number of reasons. Countries that take this deal, end up grossly indebting themselves to China’s policies in a number of ways, both monetarily and culturally. An example on the extreme end of the spectrum is Djibouti, whose Chinese debt is equivalent to 70 percent of the country’s GDP. On average, the top 50 of China’s borrowers owe somewhere near 15 percent of their GDPs, which, still, on a global scale is quite a lot.
The authors also found that China has never officially disclosed any loans to Iran, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, which on other records it’s been shown that China is a major creditor. The report speculates that one of the ways to avoid these international cross-border crediting claims is by the Chinese government disbursing loans straight to Chinese contractors rather than the developing governments themselves.
A great deal of these loans isn’t subject to credit rating agencies, because most of China’s foreign loans flow straight from their government. China’s lending practices take on another interesting dynamic, as the country is lending much more than just money: it is also helping build crucial infrastructure in these developing nations. In doing so, China exports a healthy dose of its culture and influence.
Growing influence in Africa
China’s investment in Africa takes the form of loans in exchange for infrastructure development. Oftentimes, Chinese companies and citizens reap the benefits and profits of these large projects. While many Africans welcome the much-needed investment into their countries, it’s not clear how much the continent is benefiting from this Chinese influence.
One major issue a lot of countries are facing is that almost the entirety of their country’s debt load comes from China. For example, of Kenya’s $50 billion in debt, more than 72 percent of it is from China. In Senegal, highways, industrial parks and other crucial developmental projects for a functioning country are all funded by large, risky Chinese loans. Again, much of this value goes back to China. They’re not doing this for humanitarian reasons. The Chinese expect capital and cultural return.
Tim Wegenast, who wrote a report about Chinese mining in Africa states:
“It’s more or less safe to say that Chinese companies employ less local labor than other companies because they bring over many Chinese workers, and when they develop local infrastructure, they provide countries with loans which are being used to pay for it, which is then constructed by Chinese companies and Chinese labor.”
A future of Chinese credit
According to The Economist, China’s lending prowess is more of a mixed bag. While many new loans from China were offloaded with debt relief by Western creditors after defaulting, China has in the past put forth some debt restructuring plans on 140 of their foreign loans. Although at other times, they’ve taken their collateral with ruthless abandon, for example when they seized the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka.
Many Chinese loans have higher extended interest rates and short maturities, with heavy collateral that includes commodities, or even important strategic foreign infrastructure.
The authors of the report noted that China has started talking about being more transparent and sustainable on their loans in the future. But no clear evidence of this taking place has yet to materialize.
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s epic novel, is 60 years. Centered on the cultural conflict that developed in the mill of the colonial project in Africa, the novel’s content and essence remain very relevant in the “hopes and impediments” and in the totalizing dissonance that is at the heart of postcolonial realities in the continent.
Ridden with violence, corruption, war, hunger religious intolerance, and largely travestied democracies, postcolonial Africa approximates a fantasy land where anything can happen. The situation continues to evoke that uncertain note on which Achebe ends the novel, that frozen moment when authentic Africa yields to the glory and triumph of Empire, giving birth to a fleeting, but totalizing and conflicting hybridity that has no end.
While the situation calls for concern as it relates to the harsh realities of the human condition in these parts, it has also provided a creative resource for artists at various times and from different standpoints. To this extent, as Things Fall Apart attains 60, it is pertinent to pay homage to its continued relevance and the sagacity of its legendary author through this exhibition whose thematic visions draw from the novel and some of the social realities that resonate with its centralizing theme in postcolonial Africa.
Things Fall Apart, was perhaps written for a distinctive purpose, which is to tell a version of history that often tends to be ignored. His inspiration for penning down the story is summarized in his proverb: Until the lion tells his story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi hunter.
And indeed, Achebe rightfully roared until the tale of the hunt was heard from the lion’s point of view. His ability to creatively portray the white men stripping the Africans of their agency is a metaphor of how the cultural agency of the modern African people is constricted by the ambitions of empire and colonialism.
This fact is captured in the decline of African culture in the face of colonialism, and the subtle prediction of the divided consciousness and dissonance that would ravage the continent in post-independence and beyond.
Okonkwo, the major character in the novel, personifies Africa because he possesses a combination of all traditional African values: he is strong, powerful, influential and hardworking, as vividly captured in the paintings of Okonkwo by TobennaOkwuosa and Olisa Nwadiogbu. His status, however, changes with the coming of the white man. And like Okonkwo’s influence, the autochthonous culture and tradition fade as the white man imposes more of his visions and worldview on the people.
Towards the end of the book, Okonkwo kills one of the white man’s court messengers, believing his people would unite and join him in fighting the outsiders. No one does, and in that instance, Okonkwo realizes just how much things have fallen apart. He hangs himself soon after and his death is the metaphorical death of the African spirit: political, religious, economic and otherwise.
Sadly, the politics of after the death of Africa’s authentic spirit is what plays out today as postcoloniality, with all its undying contradictions and conflicts.
Any wonder Achebe’s prophetic work continues to reverberate through generations, inspiring the creative instincts and talents of the gifted spirits. This year, Things Fall Apart attains 60, and to assert the continued relevance of the work, 15 artists from Africa have come together in this exhibition to pay homage to the novel and its illustrious author, with works inspired by moments from the novel and some social issues they allude to.
Titled And the Centre Refuses to Hold: Homage to Things Fall Apart @60, the exhibition comprises works by Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi, TobennaOkwuosa, Ato Arinze, George Odoh, Tony Nsofor, Anthony Polo, Nathalie DjakouKassi, OlisaNwadiogbu, Akeem Muraina, Emma Mbanefoand ChinyereOdinukwe, Francis Ike, NnaemezieAsogwa, Benjamin Akachukwu, Obi Nwaegbe, IykeOkenyi, and Abigail Nnaji.
Reflecting the artists’ diverse background and experience, it is an eclectic collection including drawing, paintings in various media and technique, sculptures, installations, and mixed media.
The eclecticism is also vividly embodied in the thematic thrust of the works, as they address issues directly from iconic moments in the novel and from the African experience in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Thus social issues relating to religion, politics, intolerance, war, culture and (under)development are part of the creative resource in most of the works. The exhibition, therefore, is a celebration of postcoloniality in Africa, with Things Fall Apart as the centralizing spin-off.
For instance, works by Benjamin Akachukwu take a totalizing stand on conflict and dissonance as they harness the accidents of the tie-dye technique as a basis for paintings that literally reflect beautiful chaos in their forms. Holistically, they evoke the divided conscious that yawn at every interaction of our collective life and history.
The same metaphorical use of colour language is to be found in the works of some other artists like Chinyere Odinukwe, and Francis Ike where message depends more on colour than on the visuality of form. Beyond a general celebration of the contradictions of the postcolonial through their personal idiolects of colour, the artists explore diverse themes.
While Akachukwu visualizes conflicts, violence and divided consciousness in his Forms from My Skies series, Odinukwe’sOsondu and I Shall Wait Here present the dilemma of contemporary Africa where citizens are caught between the call for patriotism and the often overwhelming desire to run across the ocean in line with the counter-penetration of the West which now approximates and redefines slavery.
We find a corollary to this in Nwadiogbu’s Owners of the Land or Heavers of Wood, a work which refers to neo-colonization and the perpetuation of apartheid in other means and beyond its birthplace. That Africa and the black man are now subject of a twin-colonization is not in doubt.
While black Africa is still colonized by the West through the soft powers of culture and economics, on one hand, it is also a subject of colonization from inside through the exertions, caprices, and greed of corrupt leaders and politicians. Tobenna Okwuosa’s Black Man, in its content and iconography, captures this situation in its political, social and religious ramifications.
In another work, Okwuosa pays tribute to Achebe as a master storyteller through the imposition of the author’s portrait in the painting. Igbo uli traditional script is also explored and deployed at various locations in the work. It shares the same vision with the clay portrait by Ato Arinze which cleverly celebrates the person of Achebe and his great work.
Arinze also extends the essence of Achebe work in the overt and covert imageries in his other terracotta piece where the politics of (under)development is part of the centralizing interest. It is perhaps, this menace of underdevelopment that worries Nathalie Djakou in her work as it does Obi Nwaegbe in his concern with mundane realities in his impressionist and poetic paintings.
The Last Supper by Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi and Tony Nsofor’s both reminds us of the hopes and impediments of the 20 century with all its tormenting and tormented characteristics. While Nsofor’s painting laments the failed aspirations and possibilities in the virtuosic orchestration of colour and form, Ikwuemesi captures the apocalyptic tendencies of the last years of that century and the beginning of this century through the symbolisms of The Last Supper. Comprising curious otherworldly faces, it is not the traditional last supper, but one in which the whole of humanity is at the table, a supper where the past and the future interrogate each other.
Besides these works, there are others which celebrate moments in the novel, not necessarily from the angle of illustration, but in a bid to inscribe the novel as a datum that enables us to come to terms with the past, present and future of Africa, as it relates to her religious, cultural and political aspirations and realities.
Nwadiogbu’sEzinne, Ikwuemesi’sMkpuluMma, George Odoh’sEzimma are all good examples. At the level of content, they provide interesting opposites to the visions of Iyke Okenyi, Francis Ike and Abigail Nnaji who seem to grapple with existential and historical issues in their works.
While Okenyi’s sculpture aspires to monumentality as a way of amplifying the meaning and evocative power, Ike and Nnaji’s paintings rely on subject matter and form as the roadmap to experience, as they straddle memory, desire and the conflicting grounds in-between.
In all, the epochal, historical traveling exhibition and the Art Talk planned to take place at SOAS, the University of London in 2019 all makeup one composite celebratory statement in honour of a novel whose relevance and influence continues to cut across generations.
Like the blind men and the elephant, the artists engage the novel as a creative resource from individual perspectives, employing media and techniques as the spirit moves them. What unites them in their finding and resulting works is, perhaps, the novel’s capacity as a source of metacreativity for artists and scholars and as a historical and anthropological reference to which we must all return now and again.
–Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi is an Artist, Art Historian and Associate Professor of Fine Art, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
CEO of Giraffe, a South African mobile job matching platform that helps medium-skilled workers get access to opportunities and helps businesses to recruit staff faster, and easier, and more affordably than any other way, Anish Shivdasani recently shared his view about how Software As A Service (Saas) championed by his startup has scaled in Africa.
Below is the transcript of his presentation
‘‘The reality is that Africa is booming’’
How many of you are from Africa or have been to Africa? Okay, so quite a few. I guess selection bias, probably why you’re here. What do you think about when you think of Africa? I mean, those of you who’ve been probably understanding it and know it, but those of you who haven’t. Often people have very negative perceptions or stereotypes of what Africa is about. When they think of Africa, they think of really negative stuff like disease, Ebola, and HIV and malaria.
They think of corruption, fat cat dictators hoarding billions of dollars whilst they’re compatriots have to sleep rough on the streets, kind of like San Francisco if you think about it. Poverty, famine, babies with bloated bellies and flies all over the face, and finally war. People hacking each other’s limbs off with machetes for no reason. To be fair, you would be right. I mean, all this shit does happen there, right?
But it’s not the full story. It’s not the full truth because the reality is that Africa is booming. Between now and 2050, half of the world’s population growth will occur in Africa. Think about that. Between now and 2050, another 2.4 billion humans will enter the Earth, and 1.2 billion of them will be in Africa. Last year, of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world, half of them were African countries.
Also last year, of the 10 fastest growing Internet penetration markets in the world, 8 of them were in Africa. So on the one hand, Africa’s kind of a mess. On the other hand, it’s booming population-wise, economically, and technologically. This is giving rise to this phenomenon called leapfrogging, whereby African countries are circumventing the normal pathway of economic development and jumping straight to the latest thing.
An example of this is in telecoms, for instance. Most African countries never had fixed-line telephony. When mobile came along, they just leapfrogged straight to mobile. This is having very important implications across other sectors. For example, banking.
Most African markets never had a banking infrastructure the like of which we used to here. It was largely a cash economy, but with the advent of mobile, all kinds of interesting things are happening. For example, in Kenya. More than half of Kenya’s GDP is now transacted through a mobile, through arguably the most successful mobile banking and payment system called M-Pesa. With electricity, a lot of African nations never had legacy electrical grids. So with off-grid solar becoming a thing now, a lot of African countries, in fact, 9 of the top 10 adopters of off-grid solar, are in Africa.
So you can see how technology’s starting to play a very important role in the development of Africa. What does this mean for startups and tech companies? Can they be done there? Now, unfortunately, there are a lot of constraints in Africa, major constraints when you’re talking about setting up and scaling a startup. First of all, the capital. There isn’t any. Unlike here, where you have billions, and billions, and billions, maybe trillions of dollars of capital, over there you have very little.
There are hardly any VCs. In fact, the concept of a VC is barely understood in Africa. It’s only starting to happen now. There is no startup ecosystem to speak of. Here in Silicon Valley, you have Google, and Facebook, and a ton of other massive organizations that are just churning out people who then go on to found other startups. There’s a solid ecosystem of mentorship, and talent, and stuff like that that you have here, which we just don’t have that.
Also in Africa, users are not particularly tech-savvy. You guys are at the bleeding edge of tech, but in Africa, it’s not the case. Tech is a novelty there. Talent, major problem. Here developers are dime a dozen. Over there, there are no developers, hardly any. Finally, and importantly, the market size is tiny.
South Africa’s GDP is 50 times smaller than the US’s GDP, and South Africa is the biggest economy in the continent, right? When it comes to setting up a startup, you’re probably thinking, “Why the hell would you do it there? Why the hell would you do it in Africa?” Well, I’m going to tell you why we did it, and how we did it. I’m going to talk about some of the lessons that we learned along the way.
‘‘In Africa, you’ve got to focus on a massive uniquely local pain point’’
First of all, in Africa, you’ve got to focus on a massive uniquely local pain point. We cannot possibly compete with Silicon Valley when it comes to building the next big thing or solving big global needs. I will guarantee that the next Facebook or Google will not come from Africa. We simply do not have the resources to compete, or the market size to compete. Where we can play, however, is when it comes to solving local problems, uniquely local problems, that no one cares about.
No one else will be interested in it, and an example of this is unemployment. In South Africa, the unemployment rate is about 40%. It’s one of the highest in the world. It’s crazy when you think about it, right? One of the reasons why unemployment is so high is because people just don’t have access to opportunities because of apartheid, because of the difficult history of South Africa.
You have large sections of the population that live geographically very far from business areas, and so they simply just don’t have access easily. They never had access to the Internet, and public transport is very expensive. Just in terms of seeing what opportunities are out there, it was very difficult.
However, back in 2013, in my previous career as a strategy consultant, I was doing a lot of work with telecoms companies in South Africa. We noticed that mobile penetration was starting to increase. By 2013, mobile penetration probably exceeded the 50% mark, and people who were up until then offline were now coming online with mobile as a primary means of accessing the Internet. So you had millions and millions of job seekers, who never had any means to access opportunities, suddenly having a mobile device and an Internet connection.
We saw an opportunity to use mobile, and the ubiquity of mobile, as a tool to solve the fact that people struggled to get access to opportunities. That’s how Giraffe was born. I think if we had focused on solving a niche problem, the market’s simply not big enough to scale. You’ve got to focus on a massive problem that is unique to that particular location. You’re probably wondering what that picture is about. Maybe some of you are wondering what that picture is about, and why it’s there related to this point.
Well, every year about two million Wildebeest migrate from the Maasai Mara in Kenya to the Serengeti in Tanzania. They all come to this river, and they stand on this riverbank, and the river is infested with the crocodiles. They spend days there figuring out how to cross it without getting eaten. It’s an example of a uniquely local massive problem in Africa. You see the metaphor, perhaps.
‘‘You need to remove all the barriers to adoption’’
The next thing I would say we learned is really about removing all barriers to user acquisition. Here in the US, you have disposable income. Businesses have disposable income, consumers have disposable income, and so you can spend money on trying out new stuff. In South Africa, the average salary is about $500 a month. What that means is people are confronted with the reality of should I buy data or should I buy groceries? You need to have a really compelling reason why someone should try your product, and you need to remove all the barriers to adoption.
Let me perhaps give you some concrete examples about what this was about. Our first MVP was actually an SMS based app where job seekers would send six SMSes in order to register on our platform. It probably cost about $1 for someone to register. We thought, “What’s $1? It’s not a big deal.”
We went into the townships to see how job seekers would interact with this app, and we noticed that none of them were signing up. Why? Because they didn’t have any airtime. They didn’t have any cell phone credit. They use their cell phones primarily to receive calls, and they would buy small data bundles for WhatsApp and Facebook, which were becoming common at the time. So we basically said, “This SMS thing ain’t going to work.
We have to go back to the drawing board.” So we built a .mobi site, which basically used a mobile website for them to register. Because they had some data, we figured that that would be less of a barrier to adoption. Sure enough, we built that version, went back to the townships, and people started signing up. It started working, but people still had to spend a couple of cents to sign up. We were like, “How do we make this thing completely free to sign up?”
So we went to speak to some of the cell phone operators, and we said, “Look, this is what we’re doing. Why don’t you zero-rate our .mobi site so that you can go above the line and say, “Hey, we’re trying to help solve unemployment in South Africa,” and we can simultaneously get more and more people jobs? So they did this, and we made it completely free for job seekers to sign up, and that’s when we started to see the thing explode. As soon as people would hear about it, then they would sign up. So you’ve got to build barriers to acquisition in any African market within which you operate.
The third thing is you’ve got to build for non-tech savvy users. You guys here in the States have been using smartphones for more than 10 years now, and before that, you were using PCs. Smartphones are only becoming a thing now in the last couple of years in Africa, and up until now, people have never used PCs. The smartphone is the first means by which people accessing the Internet, and it’s a novelty. People are still used to doing business offline, and so people are not particularly tech-savvy. What does that mean when you’re trying to build a tech product? Well, you have to build it in a very simple way. You have to leverage existing behaviors that the market already understands so that you don’t need to educate users.
An example of this is in South Africa all banks use this thing called one-time PIN, whereby to authenticate a user or to authenticate a transaction, they SMS you a four-digit code and use that four-digit code to be authenticated. Every South African understands that. We use exactly the same mechanism to authenticate our users. The cool thing was when people started using Giraffe, and they saw that we had this OTP thing because they associated OTPs with banks, it meant that they trusted us because they recognized, “Okay, cool. Banks use this, and Giraffe uses this.” It helped us gain credibility without necessarily needing to educate the market because it was an existing thing. This, I think, was quite important to stimulate usage and to get people to come onto the platform.
‘‘In Africa, business is done on trust. They need to speak to a person.’’
The fourth thing that we learned is… and this is interesting, right? Here in the US and other developed markets, people are so used to buying stuff online that they’ll go online, they’ll just do self serve, right? In Africa, business is done on trust. They need to speak to a person. They need to see a person, have a conversation with them. It’s really important to have that face to face interaction in order to sell.
The challenge, however, is that because of the limited disposable income that both consumers and businesses have, you can’t charge a lot of money for services there. You’ve got to be very sensitive to price, and so you’re caught in this conundrum. On the one hand, you can’t really afford to hire salespeople because your CLTVs don’t justify it. On the other hand, you can’t sell anything if you don’t have your salespeople. So what do you have to do?
Well, you have to build a direct sales force. It’s something which you have to do in the beginning because until you gain trust, and your brand becomes trusted, you need to have a direct sales force to bring in those initial customers. This was actually a blessing in disguise because by getting direct sales, and I mean, I sold myself in the beginning for quite a long time. I mean, the negative economics of having this direct sales force actually funds your education of the market because you spend time with customers, you understand what their real problems are, and you’re able to tweak your product to address it. It’s interesting.
As entrepreneurs, we normally come up with an idea, and we build a product, and we don’t really understand what the customer actually wants. Having this direct sales force is invaluable in educating and informing where your product is going.
‘‘You’ve got to know when your customers are lying to you’’
I’d say the next thing that we learned is you’ve got to know when your customers are lying to you. Here in the US people are very direct. They’ll tell you what they think, and they’ll mean what they say. Whereas in Africa, I think in many African cultures people are very nice, right? They’re not going to say anything that will piss you off. Even if they have a problem with their product, they’re not necessarily going to be very candid about it.
I remember a situation where we had closed quite a big customer in the very early days. They were a supermarket, and they were using our product. They were hiring tons of people, and we were like, “Okay, cool. This customer seems to be getting a lot of value out of what we’re doing.” We started talking to them, and we asked them a couple of questions. We said, “How important is Giraffe to you in your recruitment process?”
They were like, “It’s just extremely important.” I asked them, “How disappointed would you be if we took Giraffe away from you, and you couldn’t use it?” They said, “Look, it would be a disaster. I’d be very disappointed.” We were like, “Cool.” At this point, we were offering the service for free. After having these kinds of conversations, I was like I think we’ve reached a point where we’re ready to charge these customers now because they seem to be deriving immense value. We went to them a couple of months later and said, “Okay, your free trial is over.
We need to start charging you,” and they refused. They said, “No, we’re not going to use the product anymore,” completely diametrically opposed to the conversations I’ve had with them before. This is the kind of thing that you see there, and so it’s so important to really not listen to what your customers are saying, but listen to what they’re doing, how they’re behaving.
From that moment on we’ve spent more time looking at data on customer usage to give us insight into whether customers would like to continue using our product or not. I’d say the next thing is it’s super important if you want to scale in Africa to become a thing. What do I mean by this? Here in the US and again other developed markets, people are interested in novelty and innovation.
They are interested in trying new brands, experimenting with new things. This phenomenon of a startup is well understood, and people have embraced it. In South Africa, it’s quite the opposite. Incumbent brands rule, and newcomers are treated with suspicion. New brands are treated with a lot of cynicism and suspicion. That’s very difficult for startups because startups by definition are new brands, right?
There’s a couple of things that we did here to manage this situation. We couldn’t use paid marketing because incumbent brands had all the share of voice, and simply by using paid marketing we would have blown all our funding, and that would have been that. We had to find alternative ways of marketing and really getting the word out there. There were a few things that we did. There was no silver bullet, I would say. There’s no silver bullet, but there are a couple of lead bullets that I want to share with you.
The first thing we did really pulled the unemployment angle quite aggressively. Unemployment was a massive social problem in South Africa, still is actually, massive topical problem. Every day on the news you hear something or the other about unemployment. So when we launched this app that was intending to help reduce the employment situation, we got massive amounts of press, mainstream press, mainstream TV, prime time radio, news, newspapers.
That did two things for us. It brought a massive amount of trust and credibility to our brand, and what we were doing, and it brought a ton of leads, a massive number of inbound leads. The PR thing is extremely powerful when the problem you’re solving is an important social problem. That was the first thing we did. I’d say the second thing we did was really about building alliances with brands that were already trusted, and this was a cool logo acquisition tactic that we did. We basically looked for the biggest call center in South Africa.
We went to them, and we said, “We’ll give you unlimited hires for the next six months, in exchange for which you need to write a bunch of press releases about our partnership, and the fact that you’re going to hire 600 people from us in the next three months,” to which they agreed. As soon as we started launching these press releases, we had tons of their competitors phoning us up saying, “Hey, can you come and talk to us? We’d really like to find out what you’re doing.”
Literally, in the space of a few weeks, we managed to close a number of quite big subscriptions just off the back of FOMO, effectively. The competitors of the customer that we offered the free service now wanted to pay us for it. That was another tactic that really, really worked well for us.
I’d say the third lead bullet that we did, and I think this is quite common now, especially in marketplaces, is we built viral loops on opposite sides of the marketplace. What that means is as soon as a job seeker would sign up and make their CV on the Giraffe app, we would enable them to send their CV, there’d be a send button, and we’d email their CV to any employer they wanted. The email would contain Giraffe and Giraffe branding.
We basically got our job seekers to market to our employers. Vice versa, whenever an employer wanted to use our service, we gave them a dedicated link that they could put anywhere, and it would enable job seekers to find out about Giraffe through the employer.
So we built viral loops on opposite sides of the marketplace. I’d say those three things, combined together, helped us to grow really, really fast. It was all guerrilla stuff, very little paid marketing. I think it’s super important that if you’re going to build a brand that’s going to see explosive growth, you cannot rely on the traditional forms of marketing, in my view anyway.
‘‘If you’re going to do a startup in Africa, you’ve got to be ultra-lean’’
Okay, so I’ve talked about product, and market, and customers, and brand, and sales. I want to take a step back now and talk about some more existential or abstract elements that I think are really important. Product/market fit. This is one of our favorite topics, and I’m sure we’ve all read The Lean Startup and stuff.
Often we have to manage this lean situation where we have limited resources, and we need to make sure that we iterate until we get to the answer. That sounds all very well in principle, however, if you’re going to do a startup in Africa, you’ve got to be ultra-lean, right? You’re not going to be able to raise millions and millions of dollars of funding. You’re going to be ultra-lean, and we were very, very lean. In fact, for the first 18 months, we had one developer who built the entire first version of our product.
Even today we have just three developers, and with such limited developer resource, you have to be super careful of how you build and prioritize products. Now the funny thing is, when it comes to product/market fit, I had initially assumed that it was a binary event. That it would just happen. It wouldn’t be there, and then the next day it would be there. This is definitely not the case, or it wasn’t the case for us.
I think product/market fit is a gradual process, and you can think that you’ve reached it even when you haven’t reached it. I’d say the first 18 months of monetization we were seeing double-digit revenue growth for the first 18 months, and ostensibly you could take that as an indication that, fine, you’ve read product/market fit right. Revenue’s growing, customers are happy, etc., etc. After about 18 months, we started noticing some weird stuff. It started to become more difficult to sell.
In terms of operations, things started to get a bit creaky, and then we felt actually the product that we are trying to scale up on is not the right product. We felt that we’d… It wasn’t the right product, and so what do we have to do? We basically had to change the product. Now by that time, if you can imagine, we’ve done all this with one developer. We had built an immense amount of technical debt.
You build stuff super quickly, so it becomes a bit dirty the way you build it. We had a massive amount of technical debt, but it wasn’t just technical debt. We had to change our pricing. We had to change our sales processes. We had to change our operations. We had to educate customers about the fact that we were changing our product, and that was quite painful because you got customers saying, “But I liked your old product. Why are you changing it?”
You have the team who’s basically now having to change the way they work together, and that wasn’t the first time that we did it. We had to do this again maybe about six months later. What we realized is that every successive attempt a product/market fit gets harder. It’s not like you can just keep experimenting until you find the answer.
Every time you change something, it gets much more complex. The energy that you have to muster in your organization is very significant. This is something which we hadn’t realized, and it’s funny because, if you think about it, almost all startups are at the verge of extinction.
The thing that is often the difference between life and death is reaching product/market fit, and the number of bullets we have in our gun to get it to diminish over time. Each successive attempt is more difficult than the previous one.
‘‘One of the biggest mistakes I think we made, ironically enough, is being a recruitment company…so you’ve got to hire for mission.’’
I guess this brings me to the next point, which is around recruitment. One of the biggest mistakes I think we made, ironically enough, being a recruitment company this was very ironic, are we really screwed up our recruitment. You see, the thing is in Silicon Valley you have tons of really, really talented people who want to work at startups. Everyone knows what a startup is. In fact, it’s cool and sexy to work at a startup, right? If you’re a startup, and you’re looking for people, I don’t think it’s particularly difficult. Sure, there’s a war for talent, but there’s an abundance of talent as well.
In South Africa, there are three problems regarding talent. The first one is that 70% of the workforce is employed by corporates. Corporates dominate the economy in South Africa, and so people don’t really understand what a startup is, right? People just don’t get it. They just say, “Well, I want to work for a bank or a telecoms company.”
They don’t understand what a startup is, but I think more pertinently, there just isn’t the talent there. We don’t have lots of developers. We don’t have anyone who’s a growth hacker. It doesn’t exist. There are no digital marketing people, right? It’s such a new space. There’s no ecosystem, right? So the talent is scarce as it is, but you’re competing with well-funded or well-capitalized corporates.
When we closed our first seed round, we were funded by Omidyar Network, which is a Silicon Valley investor. We’re one of the only Silicon Valley companies that are funded in South Africa by… Sorry, one of the only Silicon Valley funded companies in South Africa. We expected that thousands of people were going to come to our door saying, “Hey, I want to work for you guys.” That didn’t happen at all, and it was a slog. We had to find these people who are needles in haystacks, and this was something which was very difficult for us.
I think the key learning is you’ve always got to be recruiting. Even if you don’t have any open roles, keep recruiting because the time it takes you to find the right person, you will have an open role. I think when it comes to choosing someone when you’re working in a place like Africa is you can’t compete on money, or financial benefits, or bean bags, or free lunch, or whatever it is.
You’ve got to compete on the mission. You’ve got to hire for the mission. When I interview people, I ask them, “Why do you want to join Giraffe?” Some people say they want to work in a small company where they can have a big impact. Some people say they want to work in tech. The ones who I only really take seriously are the ones who say, “I want to work for you guys because you’re trying to help solve unemployment.
I want to be a part of that.” That is supercritical to hire for people who are mission-aligned, and it’s not just the founders have to be mission-aligned. It’s the whole company because it’s the people who are mission-aligned are the ones that are going to be most resilient when you inevitably go through tough times, so you’ve got to hire for mission.
‘‘You’ve got to hustle’’
I think the next learning is you’ve got to hustle. In Africa, you’ve got to hustle. Everyone in Africa hustles. What do I mean by this? Well, here in the US, and developed markets, you have established ways of doing business. You have business norms. In Africa, it’s much more informal, much more chaotic. Because you’re operating in a very lean environment, you have to be able to hustle to leverage to the maximum the resources that you do have.
I’ll give you some examples of this, right? We acquired job seekers when we had no jobs to offer them, and that was hustling. We pitched to customers when we didn’t even have a product, and we only started building our product after we closed a sale, because we couldn’t do it any other way. We had to do this because we didn’t have the resources to build our own product. We had to sell it first. When you’re operating in this kind of environment, hustling is key.
‘‘I’d say the final learning that I’d like to leave with you is this.’’
I’d say the final learning that I’d like to leave with you is this. When we set up Giraffe in 2014 and quit our fairly high paying consulting jobs, most of our colleagues and friends thought we were completely mental. They thought we were crazy. They were like, “Guys, what are you doing? You can’t do this in South Africa. No one is doing this. It’s never going to happen. It’s never going to be successful. People don’t even have smartphones yet. How do you expect to build a company like this?” But we’ve kind of done it.
Not that we’ve finished, we’ve still got a long way to go, but the point is that we’ve shown that the infrastructure, the mobile infrastructure, the Internet penetration, the digital infrastructure is there, right? It is possible to build and scale a company in South Africa, and I believe the rest of the continent, as mobile penetration and smartphones become more abundant.
Also, I guess when I look around the room, you guys are some of the smartest, and most intelligent, and wealthiest, and privileged people in the world. Right? It’s funny, I’ve been here a lot of talks. Everyone’s talking about unicorns and decacorns, and making tons of money, and you guys really have a choice.
You can use your talent to solve high-class problems, First World Problems, and help big corporates earn more money, and help big VCs, fat cat VCs, make more money, or you can use your talent to help the people who need it the most. Right? This world is full of suffering and pain, right, yet most people use their talent just to make more and more money. The inequality that we’re facing in the world is very significant.
I guess my appeal to you is, instead of trying to build the next Slack, or Dropbox, or whatever high-class problem these guys are solving, use your energy and your talent to help solve humanity’s problems, because I believe a lot of problems in Africa can be solved using tech and software. So my closing remark would be this. I would love it if you could join me, either in South Africa or any African country, and help us to build the future because of the last 30 years as Asia’s time. We’ve seen how Asia has emerged. The next 30 years will be Africa’s time, but Africa just needs the talent, the capital, the ecosystem. With those things, we can build an amazing continent.
Thank you very much.
Anish Shivdasani’s talk was transcribed for use in English by Jason M. Lemkin Co-Founder and CEO of EchoSign.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
Goree Island which was a huge slave holding facility at the centre of the European slave trade from the sixteenth century until 1848.
The importance of this historical site has made it a Mecca of sorts for those who want to connect with Africa’s past, to understand some of the historical dynamics that brought this continent where it is today.
The recent group to visit the site are businessmen from across the continent of Africa under the auspices of the African Energy Chamber and several oil executives who took time off their conference in Dakar for a symbolic visit to Senegal’s Goree Island today, southeast of the capital Dakar.
Goree Island was a huge slave holding facility and at the centre of the European slave trade from the sixteenth century until 1848, when France abolished slavery. Countless African slaves passed through the island for centuries on their way to the US, Haiti, and Cuba. The oldest building on the island, the House of Slaves, is a reminder of the inhuman conditions in which African slaves were treated for over three centuries. The whole island was inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage list in 1978.
“Slavery was a sin and a crime against humanity. The Chamber is looking forward to working with various African civil society groups to fight issues of modern-day slavery. It starts with us creating an environment where all are treated with fairness, love, and equity,” said NJ Ayuk CEO of Centurion Law Group and Executive Chair of the African Energy Chamber during the visit.
Oil executives were told how slaves were chained at the neck and arms with a heavy iron ball attached. Many of the slaves were released just once a day from their cells which measured just 2.6m by 2.6m, each containing between 15 to 20 men. The ill and the dead were thrown into the sea for the sharks to feed on.
Families were split up with women and children each being kept in a separate part of the slave house. For young women, there was one means of escape. Any that became pregnant by the slave masters were released either on the island or in the town of Saint Louis.
“Visiting Goree Island should remind us that slavery continues when we shrink civic freedoms, encourage legislation that stifles dissent, stand idly by on rising populism that has stirred xenophobia, limit opportunities for Africans and women in oil and gas and put a blind eye on African families that continue to earn unworthy wages,” added Ayuk.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 List features 120 of Africa’s brightest achievers under the age of 30 in four categories: business, technology, creatives, and sport. The list celebrates pioneers who are building brands, creating jobs, innovating, leading, transforming and contributing to new industries and ultimately impacting positively on the continent.
This year is the fifth issue of the annual Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 List.
The publication features 120 young and dynamic individuals across four sectors, namely business, technology, creatives, and sport.
“Meet the class of 2019, a stellar collection of entrepreneurs and innovators rewriting rules and taking bold new risks to take Africa to the future,” the publication explains.
Jason Pau, chief of staff for billionaire Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba Group, told Forbes that the journey for young entrepreneurs, especially in Africa, is not always easy.
Many start-ups fall by the wayside due to a lack of resources. In South Africa, it is estimated that the small enterprise failure rate is at almost 80% within the first three years.
The select few celebrated in this list represent those individuals who continue to persevere against the odds. It also serves as a reminder that it is possible. However, not only does the list look at the financial impact of each candidate but also their reputation, resilience, and ability to be role models to other young Africans.
Sport is the newest category, opening up the list to the game changers and Africa’s next generation of leaders. Individuals in this category have “won awards, broken records, made social investments and pushed the boundaries by challenging the status quo on policies in sports,” the Forbes team stated, adding that “some of the challenges they still face include lack of resources, a gender pay gap and an immense pool of untapped talent not yet given a chance to be in the limelight.”
Below are the lists of Africa’s30Under30 individuals in each category:
Business Category 2019
Bruce Diale, 29, South Africa – Founder and Managing Director: Brucol Global Development
Tyrone Adams, 28, and Siyabonga Thomas Tiwana, 29, South Africa – Founders: Skywalk Innovations
Chika Madubuko, 27, Nigeria – Co-founder and CEO: Greymate Care
Dorcas Owinoh, 28, Kenya – Co-founder and Director: LakeHub
Ndabenhle Ngulube, 28, Matthew Smith, 26, and Marnus van Heerden, 29, South Africa – Founders: Pineapple App
Sports Category 2019
Clarence Munyai, 21, South Africa – Track and Field Athlete
Jean Sseninde, 26, Uganda – Footballer and CEO
Mohamed Salah, 27, Egypt – Footballer
Wayde van Niekerk, 26, South Africa – Track and Field Athlete
Chad le Clos, 27, South Africa – Swimmer
Genzebe Dibaba, 28, Ethiopia – Track and Field Athlete
Jacob Kiplimo, 18, Uganda – Track and field athlete
Sara Ahmed, 21, Egypt – Weightlifter
Luvo Manyonga, 28, South Africa – Track and Field Athlete
Giana Lofty, 24, Egypt – Martial Arts practitioner
Beatrice Chepkoech, 24, Kenya – Track and Field Athlete
Patricia Apolot, 28, Uganda – Kickboxer
Caster Semenya, 28, South Africa – Track and field athlete
Emmanuel Korir, 24, Kenya – Track and Field Athlete
Faith Kipyegon, 25, Kenya – Track and field athlete
Francine Niyonsaba, 26, Burundi – Track and Field athlete
Kagiso Rabada, 24, South Africa – Cricketer
Ruhan van Rooyen, 24, South Africa – Paralympic Track and Field Athlete
Sadio Mane, 27, Senegal – Footballer
Sabrina Simader, 21, Kenya – Alpine skier
Gerson Domingos,23, Angola – Basketballer
Siya Kolisi, 28, South Africa – Rugby player
Thembi Kgatlana, 23, South Africa – Footballer
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, 29, Gabon – Footballer
Aphiwe Dyantyi, 24, South Africa – Rugby player
Percy Tau, 25, South Africa – Footballer
Quinton de Kock, 26, South Africa – Cricketer
Alex Iwobi, 23, Nigeria – Footballer
Akani Simbine, 25, South Africa – Track and Field Athlete
Margaret Nyairera Wambui, 23, Kenya – Track and Field Athlete
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
The Kofi Annan International Peace Keeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) will collaborate with the African Union Commission (AUC) by participating in the validation workshop for the Advanced Mediation Training Curriculum organized on 18th and 19th June 2019 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
This engagement is part of the Centre’s vision to support the African Union in its mandate to promote peace, human security, and development in Africa; it is also in line with KAIPTC’s overall goal “to become the trusted partners of ECOWAS, AU, UN, RECs and member states in the development of their capacity to ensure peace and security in Africa”, and also with its vision “to become the leading and preferred international Centre for training, education and research that are focused on ensuring a peaceful and secure Africa”.
The main objective of the workshop was to validate the curriculum and manual to be used to develop/strengthen participants’ advanced understanding and skills required for the design, conduct, and evaluation of mediation interventions. This intervention is within the framework of the AU Standard Operating Procedures for Mediation Support and the AU Mediation Support Handbook.
Speaking on KAIPTC’s support to the AUC, the Commandant noted that; “KAIPTC & AUC have signed an MoU to strengthen their mutual commitment to the promotion of peace, human security, democracy, good governance and development, conflict prevention, management and peacebuilding in Africa.
In light of this agreement, KAIPTC partners the AUC in the provision of technical support, capacity building, joint initiatives, research, and other activities to solidify conflict prevention, peacebuilding including support to multi-dimensional peace operations”, he stated.
KAIPTC supports the AUC’s mandate through a variety of initiatives that relate to areas of mutual interests. The Centre’s participation in the validation of the curriculum/manual of the AUC’s Advanced Mediation Training was one of the areas of support. Some of the topics discussed during the validation workshop include preparing for mediation, negotiating in a mediation session, coordinating the mediation intervention and closing the mediation, etc.
The African Union Commission (AUC) has established and begun to operationalize a Mediation Support Unit (MSU) in order to institutionalise its conflict management approaches in a more systematic manner, in particular preventive diplomacy, mediation and dialogue interventions which are approaches widely used by the AUC to prevent the escalation of violence, foster dialogue and negotiation, as well as the management and resolution of conflicts and disputes across the African continent.
The MSU is located within the Crisis Management and Post Conflict Reconstruction and Development (CM-PCRD) Division of the Peace and Security Department (PSD).
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
Nigeria is expected to feature significantly in the 2019 Africa Investment Forum scheduled to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa this November, business leaders and government heard at a roadshow event held in Abuja over the week.
Following the hugely successful inaugural edition held last year, the African Development Bank’s innovative investment marketplace set up to accelerate investment into the continent will convene for its second meeting from 11-13 November.
The Nigerian roadshow, held 9th July, was organized by the Nigeria Country Department of the Bank in collaboration with the Africa Finance Corporation. It was attended by key industry players, including, policy makers and representatives of state governments.
Speaking at the event, Ekiti State Governor Dr. Kayode Fayemi emphasized the role of private capital to deliver the infrastructure required to grow Nigeria’s economy and provide jobs for millions of young Nigerians.
“With the support of the African Development Bank and the African Finance Corporation, and the quality of investors that attended the inaugural edition in South Africa last year, I am confident that if we put our best foot forward, we will receive significant funding commitment for investments across Nigeria and the continent,’’ Fayemi said.
Senior Bank Director for the Nigeria Country Office Ebrima Faal, highlighted Nigeria’s prominence during the 2018 Forum. Nigeria was very visible. Out of the 63 boardroom deals presented at the Forum, Nigeria had 5 deals worth $7 Billion. This represents 14.9% of the total deals accounted for on the continent, and 43% of the deals accounted for the region.
“The African Development Bank and its partners are excited to present you with … the only platform that allows you to instantly pitch and close monumental deals on the spot. We encourage you to engage early and wholesomely to be a part of re-writing Africa’s economic history,’’ he urged.
According to Africa Finance Corporation Senior Director Taiwo Adeniji, “building on the success recorded in 2018, it is expected that Nigeria will be a major participant at the 2019 Forum. The Africa Finance Corporation is keen to support Nigerian businesses across sectors to ensure effective project implementation to boost economic development.’’
The Nigeria roadshow included highlights and key lessons from the 2018 forum, project preparation guidelines as well as presentations on selected pipelines.
“We are now seeing positive momentum in building transparent and durable institutions to anchor the political economy, promote and support the development of the private sector, in order to increase the pace, depth, and spread of economic growth,’’ Faal said.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
9.6 million players globally, including a 28 percent rise in registered female players; More than one million registered players in Africa – up 26 percent since 2017; Over 2.2 million girls and boys participated in Get Into Rugby around the world in 2018; South Africa tops global table for Get Into Rugby participation; Burkina Faso newest addition to World Rugby’s global family.
A record number of people are playing rugby worldwide as the sport continues to grow and prosper in Africa and across the globe, according to the World Rugby Year in Review 2018.
The sport’s unprecedented growth continued in 2018 with 9.6 million men, women and children playing the game around the world. This includes 2.7 million women, up 10 percent on the previous year and accounting for more than a quarter of the total global playing population.
In Africa alone, the number of registered players topped one million (1,004,674), an increase of 26 percent since 2017 as the sport continues to thrive on the continent.
This growth was underpinned by World Rugby’s development programme Get Into Rugby, which acts as a gateway for young people to try, play and stay in rugby. For the second consecutive year, more than two million girls and boys (2,280,200 with 40 percent female participation) enjoyed the sport and everything it has to offer. More than 4,000 Get Into Rugby activities took place from Kathmandu in Nepal to Kitwe in Zambia, hosted by 159 registered unions and expanding the sport’s global reach.
In Africa, 460,000 children took part in Get Into Rugby activities, 42 percent of them female, while South Africa topped the global table with the highest number of participants per country. South Africa also had success with its referee development programme as 261 young referees between the ages of 13-14 – 45 percent of whom were girls – took part in the ‘I also play referee’ initiative, a significant increase on the 2017 total.
In Asia, the popularity of Get Into Rugby helped World Rugby’s Impact Beyond legacy programme reach its goal of one million new participants nine months before Japan is due to host Rugby World Cup 2019, setting the stage for a game-changing tournament. Project Asia 1 Million is a central pillar of World Rugby’s mission to grow the game locally and ensure Japan 2019 – the first Rugby World Cup to be hosted in Asia – is the most impactful Rugby World Cup to date. Namibia will join South Africa in representing the African continent in Japan after winning the Rugby Africa Gold Cup in 2018.
Excitingly the total number of registered female players grew by an impressive 28 percent to 581,000 across all of World Rugby’s member unions. This comes during the first full year of implementation of World Rugby’s ambitious plan, Accelerating the global development of women in rugby 2017-25, which aims to support the growth and development of the women’s game and promote parity.
That success was matched off the field by increased engagement levels from female fans – 38 percent increase in video views by women and the growth of the World Rugby and Rugby World Cup female audience on Twitter to more than 30 percent. It was also reflected in increased diversity at the highest levels of the game in a year when World Rugby added 17 new female members to its Council and New Zealand was named as first-time hosts of Women’s Rugby World Cup 2021.
World Rugby was also pleased to welcome Burkina Faso, where rugby is now included on the school curriculum, as one of its newest associate member unions in 2018. Other highlights in 2018 included the second Youth Olympic Games rugby sevens tournament in Buenos Aires, won by Argentina (men’s) and New Zealand (women’s). Meanwhile, Rugby World Cup Sevens in San Francisco saw 100,000 fans across three days create an incredible atmosphere inside the iconic AT&T Park, with a US broadcast audience of nine million tunings in, many watching rugby for the first time.
This helped drive even greater interest in the sport, which now boasts a global fan base of 800 million worldwide, driven by young people consuming sevens digital content in emerging markets like the USA, China, India, and Brazil.
Thanks to a new partnership with the African Press Association (APO) coverage of African rugby also increased significantly in 2018. The Rugby Africa Gold Cup achieved just under two million YouTube views, while 196 press releases were distributed by member unions, helping to promote rugby across the continent.
Off the field, player welfare remains World Rugby’s number one priority with the international federation focusing on evidence-based injury prevention at all levels of the sport. Alongside its ongoing focus on research, World Rugby’s training and education programmes remain core to its strategy, with more than 2,700 training courses delivered worldwide in 2018.
World Rugby Chairman Sir Bill Beaumont said: “2018 was another special year for rugby as we watched the sport continue to prosper and grow both on and off the field. Within a total playing population of 9.6 million it was fantastic to see our Get Into Rugby programme – run in partnership with unions and regions – continue to break participation records with over two million girls and boys worldwide getting involved for the second year in a row amid a growing global fan base of 800 million.
The 26 percent increase in the number of registered rugby players in Africa shows the sport is thriving in the region and I would like to thank Rugby Africa and its unions for the tremendous effort they put into growing the game in 2018.
“As Rugby World Cup 2019 fast approaches, it was particularly pleasing to see our Impact Beyond programme surpassing all expectations in Asia in 2018, reaching its target of one million new participants in the region a full nine months ahead of schedule. With the tournament expected to be game-changing in every respect, the stage is now set for the most impactful Rugby World Cup ever.
“From a women’s rugby perspective, 2018 was a breakthrough year as we began implementation of our groundbreaking strategy to accelerate the development of women in rugby at all levels. Progress was evident with increased participation and engagement levels as well as in the governance of the sport, where we welcomed the first women onto World Rugby Council. We will continue to strive for even greater parity in 2019.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
The drone industry is sitting and waiting for regulations and guidance that make sense across the globe. Take Kenya for example. Currently, drone operations are illegal within Kenya for the average person and extremely limited otherwise, leaving both businesses and individuals in great need of practical and adequate drone regulations.
While drone use is allowed in many countries, even in these places where they are legal and regulations are in place, current drone laws are often woefully inadequate.
Businesses are waiting for adequate drone regulations in Kenya and around the world.
What many entrepreneurs are seeing is that when it comes to successful drone operations, it’s not the technology itself that matters most, it’s everything else.
But with current regulations, we’re stuck relying on regulations that for far too long have focused exclusively on the size of the drone!
Whether you’re investing your time and energy in developing a robust drone delivery operation to deliver blood and save lives, or you’re just looking to fly your off the shelf drone to capture data, the difference between success and failure is in how you approach the operation, not what type of drone you’re flying. Unfortunately, drone regulations in many countries fail to recognize this, costing entrepreneurs and the public greatly.
With the need for enhanced drone regulations so apparent, what is holding us back from implementing them?
The biggest limiting factor for drones all over the world is a lack of trust. Government safety authorities don’t trust you to fly safely nor in a way that doesn’t compromise security. Business leaders don’t trust the role you’ll play in their work. All this mistrust expresses itself in regulation, where “unknowns” become “proposal declined.”
Take another look at Kenya, though the Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) proposed drone regulations last year these efforts were shut down by parliament. This left entrepreneurs eager to integrate drones into their businesses still waiting.
What is it that an entrepreneur can do to overcome these barriers? Well, that question is precisely what the drone industry is trying to answer to drive adoption and change minds. Building trust is an outcome of spreading knowledge and successful community engagement, and building it is a core challenge in the fourth industrial revolution.
Despite the disappointment that previous regulations weren’t accepted, there has been recent progress on drones in the East African country. Kenya’s latest drone regulations are now out for comment, and they look promising. New regulation proposals from the KCAA consider more than just drone size but focus on operations and technology to get more drones in the sky; to save lives and create businesses without preventing any type of operation outright.
These are Performance-Based Regulations (PBR) and are much more robust than many other drone regulations currently in use today. First put into practice in Rwanda, Switzerland and then the EU more broadly, robust PBR implementation has found that your approach to the operation, not simply the technology, can open the sky to you.
Building Trust Through Performance-Based Regulations
Drone entrepreneurs and authorities all over the world are beginning to realize that technology maturation is not the silver bullet to regulatory blockage. Rather than focus on specific technology requirements certified through strict processes, governments are beginning to adopt and advance performance-based regulations (PBR).
This new approach to regulation turns the traditional aviation equation on its head; no longer is the certified technology the crucial element for approval, but rather it is one important component of the overall proposal to fly. How you approach a flight, the procedures you put in place, the training a pilot has, the environment for flight, and how you protect the privacy of the community involved are far greater variables that define overall success.
In other words, if all your thinking about is the drone, then you’re very likely to fail. Though PBR, as an operation centric framework, does recognize that if you create the right processes to protect safety and security you can find great success, it’s not a silver bullet. What’s often missing is the education, training, and business model that focuses on the operations, not the drone.
Drones provide a bird’s eye view with a low barrier of financial and technical entry. Business and government stakeholders must speak a similar language of access and ethics, where operational considerations balance technological ones.
Today, Kenya is set to reform its own regulatory approach to drone regulations in a way that is practical, yet visionary. The rules being considered will continue a harmonization effort across Africa that aligns with the performance-based approach that Rwanda pioneered, and now Europe and the US are beginning to implement.
At the World Economic Forum, we believe that countries with vision and agility can pursue and adopt new approaches to governance which will both protect its citizens from the darker outcomes of drone technology while enabling domestic market growth and the expertise necessary to lead.
Performance-based regulations, piloted in Rwanda and now scaling globally, supported by leaders from both established and emerging economies, promises to enable industries held back by overly restrictive procedures while mitigating risks to society more effectively.
POST WRITTEN BY
Harrison Wolf Lead, Drones and Tomorrow’s Airspace, World Economic Forum
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.
The second edition of the EurAfrican Forum 2019 that attracted over 450 participants from Europe and Africa with the theme “Partnership of Equals: Sharing Values, Sharing Prosperity” ended in Lisbon, Portugal over the week. The event which focused on creating a new approach and paradigm for the relationship between Europe and Africa, changing the narrative for both continents to create an accountable, prosperous and sustainable future together was a resounding success, say the organizers.
During the two day event, many relevant topics were brought to discussion: i) African entrepreneurs driving inclusive innovation and growth; ii) From donor-recipient towards equal participation; iii) Changing the narrative: valuing talent and diversity from migrant flows; iv) Africa: the new frontier for impact investment and innovation and v) Legacy to growth: rehabilitating the heritage, culture and tourism.
Also, four parallel breakout sessions deepened related topics, namely: rebuilding Mozambique; security, migration and talent; tools and strategies for women and youth empowerment; and EU-AF economic integration and digital infrastructure for Africa.
With contributions from over 40 international speakers, the Forum had the participation of 450 participants, from 17 European countries and 24 African countries, including the participation of His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Mozambique, Filipe Nyusi, and His Excellency, the President the Portuguese Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
The EurAfrican Forum is a networking and discussion platform underpinned on the power of Diasporas for connecting people, cities, regions and continents, gathering prominent and influential people that are forging enduring ties between the two continents – government officials, high profile business personalities, investors, young entrepreneurs, activists, social influencers, NGOs and media.
Hosted by the Portuguese Diaspora Council and the Municipality of Cascais, with the High Patronage of the Presidency of the President of the Portuguese Republic and the Government of Portugal, the EurAfrican Forum is led by José Manuel Durão Barroso (Chairman of the EurAfrican Forum and former President of the European Commission / former Prime Minister of Portugal) and Filipe de Botton (Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Portuguese Diaspora Council)
“The mission of the Portuguese Diaspora Council was until today to help Portugal. We think today we should go to the next step: to motivate the African countries to create their own Diaspora Councils.” so says Filipe de Botton, President of the Board of the Portuguese Diaspora Council
In his own words, the Deputy Mayor of Cascais, Miguel Pinto Luz said that sharing is actually the keyword (…) I believe in healthy competition between companies, and even between countries, but above all, I believe in people cooperating and sharing.
Koen Doens, Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development, European Commission noted that there’s a lot of activity happening in Africa. 80% of young people want to be entrepreneurs. If we look at the dynamism of what is happening – in agritech, in fintech, in lots of issues, even in social entrepreneurship – I mean, this is incredibly important, and that is where Europe and Africa need to link up.
Explaining the importance of connecting, the Botswana Satirist Siyanda Mohutsiwa said that “we are more alike than we are different. (…) A shared imagination is one in which a collection of people from different backgrounds, who have different lived experiences, have different perspectives and ways of thinking, come together to create delusions collaboratively.
The modern world is filled unfortunately with the singular genius narrative. (…) A shared imagination is behind some of society’s greatest achievements: technology, space travel, and political ideas continue to be driven by groups of people who have the courage and faith in each other to come together and answer the question: what if…?”
On the need to address the issue of migration, Antonio Vitorino of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) said that there are two pre-requisites when it comes to the migration dialogue between Europe and Africa. The first one is building mutual trust and the second one is to have a sense of shared responsibilities between Europeans and Africans when it comes to managing migratory flows.
The next event comes up in 2020.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.