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InterContinental Hotels Group Partners Msafiri to Open Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza Hotels Across African Markets

November 5, 2022

The IHG® Hotels & Resorts has signed franchise agreements to rebrand three properties in Tanzania and Kenya to join the IHG portfolio of brands. The move sees IHG Hotels & Resorts swiftly expand its presence across Africa, as the continent’s profile continues to grow.

Holiday Inn Nairobi Two Rivers Mall (http://bit.ly/3T3ADf4) and The Fairview Nairobi (http://bit.ly/3NucZHI) in Kenya and Crowne Plaza Dar es Salaam (http://bit.ly/3NwlbXO) in Tanzania are now open and are welcoming guests. Across each property, IHG Hotels & Resorts and the new owners will elevate the guest experience by completing renovations and enhancements, incorporating brand hallmarks and standards that IHG guests recognize and love worldwide.

“Africa’s hospitality and tourism industry has weathered the disruption of the past two years, with a rising number of inbound travellers, highlighting how much potential the region has,” commented Haitham Mattar, Managing Director, India, Middle East & Africa at IHG. “Our expansion across Kenya and Tanzania is testament to how IHG Hotels & Resorts is encouraging this potential and meeting the returning demand quickly. We are delighted to have these properties join the IHG family and are excited to offer our guests the exceptional hospitality that we are known for.”

Haitham Mattar, Managing Director, India, Middle East & Africa at IHG

He further added: “Ownership that includes Actis and Westmont Hospitality is an important partnership to IHG. We are pleased to grow together in the region and to bring exceptional properties and hospitality to guests visiting these two important gateway cities.”

A representative on behalf of the ownership said: “We are delighted to strengthen our partnership with IHG and expand our portfolio together into new markets and different brands. Africa has tremendous MICE, business and leisure growth potential. Franchising with IHG at a time when travelers are increasingly purchasing branded offers on the continent also makes sense. These three hotels that are joining the IHG platform are very well located and will offer guests a great place to stay. We expect all three properties to benefit from the strength and scale of IHG’s global systems, technology and strong loyalty programme”

Funke Okubadejo, Director Real Estate, Actis, commented: “We are excited to establish a relationship with IHG, through our joint venture with Westmont Hospitality and this continues our track record of investing in exciting Real Estate opportunities across key locations in Africa.”

The hotel is located in the vibrant Gigiri/Runda district, in northern Nairobi. Holiday Inn Nairobi Two Rivers is within the 100-acre Two Rivers Mall & Entertainment complex; offering guests unrivalled access to over 200 shops, the City’s theme park and an array of family fun activities, such as go-karting and the skate park.

This new Holiday Inn Nairobi with 171 rooms, will be a popular choice amongst families, groups and those visiting the United Nations, NGOs, embassies and the many companies moving to this growing part of the city. Along with excellent rooms, the hotel offers modern facilities, meeting rooms, a gym, a swimming pool and an all-day dining terrace.

The Fairview Hotel, located in Upper Hill Nairobi, is one of the City’s landmark addresses. The Fairview was converted from a 1920s manor house in 1932 and has been an established destination amongst discerning travelers, domestic and international, for decades. The property will be undergoing a sensitive refurbishment before operating under one of IHG’s boutique brands. In addition to offering an upscale hospitality experience, the Fairview’s reputation for its restaurant and bars will be further enhanced during the refurbishment.

The new ownership’s investment at Fairview is anticipated to have a positive social, environmental and economic impact. The Fairview team is already engaging in new skills training; and a greater social awareness has been incorporated into how the hotel operates within its local environment. Following the refurbishment, the team also hopes to achieve a material reduction in the property’s energy consumption.

Located within the central business district of Dar es Salaam, Crowne Plaza Dar es Salaam is anticipated to receive high demand from business travelers visiting Tanzania’s commercial center and leisure guests who decide to stop-off in Dar es Salaam in the hope of enjoying some Taarab music before travelling to Tanzania’s world-renowned Serengeti and Mount Kilimanjaro.

Crowne Plaza Dar es Salaam offers 148 bedrooms, an all-day dining restaurant, a bar, meeting rooms, a modern gym and a swimming pool. Additionally, the property is conveniently located just one km from the city center and 11km from Julius Nyerere International Airport, making it an attractive option for international and regional travelers.

IHG currently operates 28 hotels across 5 brands in Africa, including: InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and voco, with a further 22 hotels in the development pipeline due to open within the next three to five years.

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

How This 37-year-old Former School Teacher Became India ’s Newest Billionaire

July 30, 2019

When Byju Raveendran left classroom about seven years ago, he had no idea that he would soon be included in the list of India ’s billionaires. Now, that has happened and he has got a lot of credit for his persistence. Today, he has joined India’s billionaire list after his Think & Learn Pvt secured $150 million in funding earlier this month.

Here Is The Deal

The deal conferred a value of $5.7 billion on the company in which the founder owns more than 21%.
This brought the total valuation of the company developed by the former classroom teacher to almost $6 billion in about seven years.
This closing coincided with the announcement that the company’s Byju’s app — named after the founder — will team up with Walt Disney Co and take its service to American shores by early 2020.
In Byju’s latest funding round, the entrepreneur bought shares to maintain his equity level. Along with his wife and brother, the Raveendran clan now holds a total stake of about 35%.
Byju’s own fortunes have climbed alongside the market. Its revenues are expected to more than double to Rs 3,000 crore ($435 million) in the year ending March 2020, Raveendran said. That pace of growth has already caught the eye of some of the industry’s biggest investors from Naspers Ventures and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to Sequoia Capital and Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan.

Byju’s Strategy

The Byju’s founder grew up in a village on India ’s southern coast where his parents were school-teachers. He was a reluctant pupil, playing hooky to frequent the football field, then learning on his own at home.

He became an engineer and then began helping friends crack entry exams to top Indian engineering and management schools.

The classes swelled until he finally began teaching thousands in sports stadiums, becoming a celebrity tutor who commuted between multiple cities during weekends.

Byju’s approach is simple — captivate kids by transforming the content to fit short attention spans. Raveendran has always harbored ambitions to crack English-speaking countries and has flown in YouTube stars to feature in his videos.

The 37-year-old entrepreneur — who has said he wants to do for Indian education what the Mouse House did for entertainment — is taking his biggest step yet geographically and creatively.

Online learning is booming, perhaps nowhere more so than on Byju’s home turf, where internet usage is exploding because of the ubiquity of cheap smartphones and cut-price wireless plans. India’s online learning market is expected to more than double to $5.7 billion by 2020, according to the government-backed India Brand Equity Foundation.

He set up Think & Learn in 2011, offering online lessons before launching his main app in 2015. The business has signed up more than 35 million of whom about 2.4 million pay an annual fee of Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000, helping it became profitable in the year ending March 2019. That’s when Raveendran began courting long-term investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds — his latest backer is the Qatar Investment Authority.

In his new app, Disney staples from The Lion King’s Simba to Frozen’s Anna teach math and English to students from grades one through three. The same characters star in animated videos, games, stories and interactive quizzes.

“Kids everywhere relate to Disney’s Simba or Moana, who grip kids’ attention before we take them through the loop of learning,” said Raveendran, also chief executive officer.

India is going through a dramatic period of wealth creation — and destruction. A new breed of self-made entrepreneurs is joining the ranks of the well-heeled, helping the country’s ultra-rich population grow at the world’s fastest pace. Raveendran, at least on paper, assumes his place among those parvenus thanks to his effort in internet education.

Education technology for kindergarten through 12th grade is one of the fastest-growing segments of the country’s internet market (India), said Anil Kumar, chief executive officer of Redseer Management Consulting Pvt.

“Indian education startups are well set to seize the global opportunity given that they already cater to a large English-speaking base and have created unique education content,” he said.

Those big-name backers buy Raveendran’s vision.

In Disney, he may have found a ready-made audience. All the lessons on the new service with Disney are set in the context of the entertainment giant’s classics and stay true to the narrative.

To explain temperature, the app sets up a scene where Frozen’s Elsa falls ill because she constantly plays with snow.

Anna gets out the thermometer to gauge her fever and a little story is then built around heat and cold. Or, to learn shapes, young learners dive into the story of Cars where they have to sort items like tires, traffic cones, and billboards into buckets to learn about round, triangular and rectangular shapes.

“We are customizing Disney Byju’s to the American and British school curriculum,” Raveendran said. “The characters have universal appeal.”

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.

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India Offers to Help Nigeria on Rural Internet Connections

July 17, 2019

Nigeria’s aspiration for universal internet coverage has received a boost with the materialization of a $100 million loan from the Government of India.

The facility arranged by the EXIM Bank of India is the result of a close collaboration between the India High Commission in Nigeria and the Federal Ministry of Communications. The deal was facilitated by the immediate-past Minister, Alhaji Adebayo Shittu, who had promised a 70 percent broadband penetration by 2021.

The loan from India is expected to accelerate the deployment of solar-based mobile telephone sites in the country’s vast rural areas. Officials of the communication ministry privy to the details of the plan said no fewer than 1,000 sites can be built within 12 months once the two countries seal the agreement.

The credit facility from India is expected to be devoted to financing Nigeria’s Rural Broadband Network and the deployment of robust masts that will rely on alternative power sources, especially solar power. The plan is hinged on the government’s determination to extend telephone services to all rural communities at a relatively affordable cost while ensuring that identified bottlenecks experienced in urban areas are minimized.

Early this year, Shittu had disclosed that the government was desirous of fast-tracking the implementation of the National Broadband Roadmap by rapidly deploying less-expensive telecoms masts in the rural and remote areas. The plan, he explained, would provide access to telephone services and rapidly increase broadband penetration in hitherto hard-to-reach regions of the country.

The latest statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has indicated that broadband subscription stood at 63.2 million while actual broadband penetration increased to 33.13 percent in May this year.

“I am optimistic that if we put all the current efforts together, in another two years, we should be able to attain 70 percent. My ambition is two years rather than the five years being postulated,” the former minister said at a conference organized by the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria in February this year.

The minister premised his hope on the $100million loan from India, saying: “The current mast that the telecom operators use is very expensive to maintain. They rely on electricity, and we do not have electricity all around the country. So we have a situation where somebody who wants to build a mast of N40million would also have to acquire a 200KVA generator and fuel it.

“For this reason, we have redirected our effort at getting solar-based masts which will also have 50km radius so that if you have a land area of 100km, you will have two masts. It is cheap to maintain and all operators can depend on it, rather than having the rural operators to construct their own masts or lay their own cables.

“We are doing all of these, and I believe that within the next two months, we should have an approval from the Indian Government for work to commence on deploying this to all rural areas in Nigeria”

Figures from the NCC indicate that there are about 120 million internet users in Nigeria, most of them in the urban areas. Internet penetration is a little above 33 percent, although the commission is working with the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to introduce Television White Space to further deepen broadband penetration.

Although the Nigerian communications industry has attracted huge investments of recent, experts believe that a robust telecommunications network is important for economic growth in the country. Indeed, the Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof. Umar Dandatta, has noted that while the present portfolio of $68 billion investment in Nigeria is huge, it is by no means adequate for one of the fastest-growing telecommunications markets in the world.

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.