We are in an increasingly dire state – overlooked and forgotten by the world at large, which allows our captors to inflict unspeakable violence upon us.
I write to you today from Kondengui Principal Prison, where I am unjustly detained with a sizeable part of my cabinet and with thousands of other Southern Cameroonian prisoners who have run afoul of the repressive regime of Paul Biya, the long-ruling despot of Cameroon.
We are in an increasingly dire state – overlooked and forgotten by the world at large, which allows our captors to inflict unspeakable violence upon us. This, in reality, is indicative of the broader struggle that my people have faced, often in silence and too often disregarded.
Over the past two years, I have the honor of serving as the president of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government. Several months ago, I was illegally abducted, together with part of my cabinet from the Nera Hotel in Abuja, Nigeria, and thereafter illegally transported to Cameroon, in violation of international law. To be sure, I am merely the latest victim of a catastrophe that has been long-simmering, evident today by a growing social fissure that has resulted in countless deaths and destruction.
Historically, The Republic of Cameroon achieved its independence on January 1, 1960, and became a member of United Nations with her own territory clearly defined, sharing a recognized boundary with Southern Cameroons. British Southern Cameroons was later granted its independence on October 1, 1961, with her own territory clearly mapped out as well, sharing common boundaries with the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Cameroon.
As such, the root cause of today’s ongoing crisis is the result of a severely botched decolonization process. And this must be addressed immediately before a lasting solution can be found, one that is built on a foundation of international law and a culture of justice and respect for basic human dignity.
Put simply, international law provides Southern Cameroons the right to self-determination. What is more, the violence and killings that are taking place in Southern Cameroons at this time, has left us with no alternative than to fight, to defend and to liberate ourselves from the shackles of black on black colonialization.
The unjust treatment of Southern Cameroonians is today, an unavoidable and tragic reality. Our people are being killed not for what they have done but for who they are. Our people have indeed been described as “rats” and “dogs” by members of Cameroon’s government. There are calls to exterminate us, and other Ambazonians, with the justification that President Biya has the right to kill everyone on the pretext of “national unity.”
Imagine being told that you are the enemies in the house; imagine your people being told to vacate their ancestral lands and villages or be considered terrorists; imagine the scorched earth policy and military operations in our villages that have spared no one, not even elderly women and young children; just imagine being made to feel like a second class citizen in the country of your birth. These are the stone-cold and brutal facts of today and living conditions in which we are forced to somehow survive.
On the basis of these reprehensible and humiliating conditions, Southern Cameroonian leaders have sought, on multiple occasions over the years, to engage in peaceful dialogue with Cameroonian authorities. We have been consistently refused this opportunity. Over the due course of time, our people – myself included – realized that we were simply victims of another broken promise and the signs of impending disaster were manifest.
Our hopes were dashed and many of our leaders, both political and civic, were thrown illegally into jail. Protests had failed. Attempts at good-faith dialogue also failed. We were stymied. We were beaten. And we were humiliated in the process. We thus came to the realization that collectively we had no other alternative except that of preparing for direct confrontation, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the international community.
Put simply, the people of Southern Cameroons have lost faith in the Cameroon experiment – it is indeed an incurable disease. Paul Biya and his regime have ruthlessly cracked down on our peaceful people – our mothers, fathers and children alike – with a ferocious barbarity. War has been declared on our people. This is all to remind onlookers and readers that we did not move irresponsibly into direct confrontation with authorities in Cameroon. We have always advocated for a peaceful resolution to the root causes of this crisis. However, Biya and his regime thought otherwise, determining that violence can be the solution.
Never again can we, the people of Southern Cameroons, afford to live with the narrow and institutionalized status of second-class citizens – certainly not in the land of our ancestors.
Today, the winds of freedom and liberty beckon to your divine conscience to tell your governments and your elected representatives worldwide: Let my people go! Support our democratic aspirations. This struggle has gone beyond that of individuals like me willing to pay the ultimate price for the freedom of our people. Join our struggle for human decency and the battle for respect of our bodies, hearts and minds, our traditions and values. The struggle for the complete independence of Southern Cameroons is your struggle. Please, stand with us.
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.
Roche announced today the Global Access Program is expanding beyond HIV, to include Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), Hepatitis B and C (HBV and HCV), and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) for low and middle-income country programs where the disease burden is the highest.
The expansion of the Global Access Program highlights Roche’s commitment to improve access to cost-effective resources, implement scale-up programs, and contribute to the elimination of diseases in the regions with the greatest need.
“With effective treatment options for these infectious agents and improved patients access to diagnostics, early detection can help save lives and ease suffering,” said Michael Heuer, CEO Roche Diagnostics. “As the leader in infectious disease diagnosis testing, Roche is dedicated to supporting goals on eradicating diseases globally.”
“Access to cutting-edge, best in class diagnostic test results means more patients being appropriately diagnosed and well treated, resulting in lives saved,” stated Clinton Health Access Initiative’s (CHAI’s) Chief Science Officer David Ripin.
“We welcome Roche’s decision to expand access to tests for hepatitis, tuberculosis, and HPV (the leading cause of cervical cancer) to their Global Access Program, providing health systems with transparent and consistent pricing to these important tests in addition to the HIV viral load and early infant diagnostics already established in the program.
CHAI values Roche’s continued partnership in the effort to make diagnostics seamlessly available in well-optimized diagnostic lab systems throughout the world.”
“Accessible pricing can be the difference between a patient getting a quality diagnosis or not,” said Catharina Boehme, CEO of the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) – a global non-profit devoted to the development and delivery of diagnostics for diseases that include TB and HCV. “FIND is proud to have worked with Roche to expand the Global Access Program for these deadly diseases, leveraging our support for its TB assay.”
Access to screening, early detection, and prevention of transmission reduces the spread of disease. Tuberculosis is a major health crisis and is the leading cause of infectious disease deaths worldwide. Access to hepatitis diagnostic tests for HBV and HCV will improve the outlook of eliminating these chronic infections.
And screening with HPV DNA testing can more accurately identify women at risk for cervical cancer than other screening methods. With vaccination and proper screening, cervical cancer is a preventable disease. Importantly, infection with HPV has been found to increase the risk of HIV transmission for both men and women. Similarly, women living with HIV are four to 10 times more likely to develop cervical cancer. Screening for co-infection (HIV+ HPV) can significantly improve disease management decisions and enable appropriate patient care.
In total, the Global Access Program now includes molecular diagnostics for HIV-1 viral load, HIV-1, and HIV-2 early infant diagnosis, the cobas® Plasma Separation Card – an innovative plasma collection device, MTB, and MTB – RIF/INH, Hepatitis B and C, and Human Papillomavirus. All these assays run on the cobas® 4800/6800/8800 platforms for various testing volume needs to be enabled by the cobas® Plasma Separation Card that transports samples from remote areas/sites to the central lab for further processing.
About World Health Organization disease elimination goals
Optimizing the use of diagnostics will be critical to achieving targets for elimination. The UNAIDS HIV 90:90:90 goal by 2020 states that by 2020, 90% of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy, and 90% of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have durable viral suppression.
For hepatitis, the World Health Organization defined goals aiming at a 90% reduction in new chronic infections and a 65% reduction in mortality in 2030 as compared with the 2015 baseline.
Cervical cancer is preventable with vaccination, screening, and treatment when necessary. The draft 2030 goals for cervical cancer elimination include 90% vaccination rate for HPV in girls by 15 years of age, 70% of women screened with a high-precision test at 35 and 45 years of age along with appropriate follow-up, and 90% of women identified with cervical disease receive treatment and care.
The WHO have established goals to end Mycobacterium tuberculosis by 2035 which includes a 95% reduction in death, 90% reduction in incidence, and 0% catastrophic costs.
About Roche’s Global Access Program
In 2014, Roche announced, the Global Access Program for increased access to HIV diagnostics. Roche partnered with national governments, local healthcare facilities, communities and international agencies, including UNAIDS, CHAI, Unitaid, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Global Fund, and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to establish programs that would go beyond providing diagnostic tests.
Since its inception, the program has expanded substantially in the menu and geographic footprint to provide increased access to diagnostics at affordable pricing for qualifying organizations in eligible countries with the highest disease burden. Most recently the Global Access Program included the innovative cobas® Plasma Separation Card to provide the only CE-marked plasma sample collection devise which meets the World Health Organization sensitivity standard of < 1000 cp/mL.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are over 36 million people living with HIV around the world. Just 21.7 million people are receiving antiretroviral therapy and of those, only 47% are virally suppressed.
Tuberculosis is a major global health problem and is the leading cause of infectious disease deaths worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that about 1.7 billion people are infected with MTB, with an estimated 10.0 million new TB infections, and over 1.6 million deaths in 2017.
Viral hepatitis remains a major public health burden killing more than 1.34 million people annually and mortality is on the rise. 71 million are estimated to be infected with chronic hepatitis C; whereas, 257 million are estimated to be infected with hepatitis B. The majority of disease burden is in low- and middle-income countries
According to the WHO, there are approximately 570,000 new cases of cervical cancer and 311,000 deaths globally each year, with close to 90% of these occurring in low- and middle-income countries. , Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the cause of nearly all cases so screening for HPV DNA can identify women at risk; with proper vaccination, screening and treatment, nearly 100% of cervical cancers can be eliminated.
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.
During the past decade, much of the discussion about start-up ecosystems has been centered on the question of which city or region will become “the next Silicon Valley”. Although there are several places with promising growth trajectories, we frankly think this view is short-sided. It implies there needs to be a new champion overshadowing the old one.
In fact, there will be no “next Silicon Valley”. Instead, new research from Start-up Genome’s 2019 Global Start-up Ecosystem Report (GSER) points to there being 30 “next” hubs that will reach critical mass and reshape the state of the global economy. While none of them will be as big as Silicon Valley in the foreseeable future, each will thrive due to either regional dominance or start-up sub-sector leadership.
Now, it’s not obvious which ecosystems will end up as the global change agents we predict, but we have some big clues. The first place we should look to determine the next hotspots is at present start-up ecosystem rankings. We rank 150 leading start-up ecosystems each year, incorporating data on more than a million companies globally. The newest list shows Silicon Valley is at the top, but following it are New York City, London, Beijing, Boston, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Paris, and Berlin.
These 10 globally leading hubs have built a strong reputation for having plentiful start-ups and small businesses.
New York City, for example, owns the number two slot for start-up ecosystems in part because it has more than 9,000 start-ups, numerous unicorns and high global connectedness (a measure of how much founders are connected with other top global ecosystems). Alternately, Beijing has been steadily moving up the ecosystem ranks in part to being home to more than 1,000 AI companies, which is one of the four fastest-growing startup sub-sectors globally.
While the 10 ecosystems outlined above are some of the more obvious leaders in the global start-up revolution, it’s worth looking at the fastest growing hubs beyond them. Start-up Genome dubs these “Challenger Ecosystems” and 12 such ecosystems are identified, in alphabetical order:
Among this list, we can easily point to Lagos as a top contestant for regional leadership in the African continent. Given the wider economic context and the current momentum, several indicators point to the fact that even a spot in the global top 10 is not out of reach. Indicators include that it is the largest city in Africa and one of the fastest growing cities in the world, it has the largest tech hub in Africa, global titans like Google and Facebook have invested there, and young entrepreneurs there are on the cutting edge when it comes to running mobile-first businesses.
When it comes to specific start-up sub-sector leadership, we see Montreal emerge as one of the global hotspots for artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups. Since 2016, more than $1 billion has been invested in AI companies located there (including notable startup Element AI), and it has the largest concentration of AI academic researchers in the world. Montreal also hosts the NeurIPS conference, the largest AI event held annually in the world.
Other “Challenger” ecosystems on our list have not created such a strong brand, or ecosystem identity, for themselves yet. But that is changing rapidly, partly due to aggressive government investment. In Asia-Pacific, for example, the Seoul Metropolitan Government stands out with a recent pledge of $1.6 billion in funding for start-ups by 2022. South Korea is also notable for its R&D spending-to-GDP ratio, which is the highest in the world at 4.55%.
The global start-up community is now the top engine of job creation and economic growth in the world, not only in Silicon Valley. The next hubs, partly predicted above, will be where the bulk of that growth is occurring and they are where the global economy will be remade, especially in the areas of advanced manufacturing, agricultural tech, AI and blockchain.
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.
Nothing lasts forever, goes the saying. For the Baby Boomers and Generation X who existed without the internet, it was a shock that the traditional, physical retail business model could fade away, to be replaced by the business at the click of a button.
Today, Amazon Effect means that traditional, physical retail shops continue to wind down and call it a quit, giving in to the stiff competition from Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Jumia and online shops. For emerging markets and developing countries, what remains for these physical shops to be completely rendered to ruins is trust.
Chinese billionaire, Jack Ma, understood this early enough. In 2016, Jack Ma started a revolution he called the ‘New Retail’ that would itself redefine what commerce really means for all of us. Jack Ma is the 21st richest man in the world and the number one richest man in the most populous nation on Earth— China.
He is piercing the heart of commerce and extracting what has fueled commerce over the course of thousands of years ago — human beings. Through new retail trade, he is relaunching the whole idea of technology in commerce and trade itself to the people that originally own them — human beings, consumers.
“Commerce as we know it is changing in front of our eyes. E-commerce” is rapidly evolving into “New Retail.” ,” Ma wrote to Alibaba shareholders in a letter sent ahead of the New York-listed company’s annual shareholders in 2016. ”The boundary between offline and online commerce disappears as we focus on fulfilling the personalized needs of each customer. We anticipate the birth of a re-imagined retail industry driven by the integration of online, offline, logistics and data across a single value chain. This is why we are adapting, and it’s why we strive to play a major role in the advancement of this new economic environment.”
This may sound more Utopian than realistic, but in China where the concept was formed, Hema Supermarket, an arm of Alibaba that specializes in new retail, has opened 64 Hema stores in 14 cities, with over 10 million customers shopping at these supermarkets since the beginning of 2016.
On average, for a Hema Supermarket that has been open for at least 1.5 years, daily average sales are upwards of 800,000 yuan (US$116,500) — about 60 percent of which comes from online orders. Based on Alibaba’s data, offering a combination of online and offline shopping options results in an increase in average monthly spending by customers. Consumers who shopped both online and offline at Hema spent an average of 575 yuan monthly, compared to under 300 yuan for purely online, or purely offline shoppers.
Pinduoduo, the $1.5B Chinese startup is also another Chinese e-commerce company, engaged in new retail. The startup is challenging the giant Alibaba in China’s towns and villages. In January, Pinduoduo had 114 million active users, surpassing that of New York-listed Chinese discount retailer Vipshop. Currently, the startup has captured a projected 7.0% of all retail e-commerce sales in China this year, not a bad showing for a firm that launched in 2015. In three short years, Pinduoduo has emerged as one of China’s fastest growing shopping startups, with as many as 55 million users accessing the site per day.
Pinduoduo’s idea of new retail comes by way of offering group discounts.
Here Is How The Idea of New Retail Works
The idea of new retail lies in thinking beyond the boundaries of the two-party system of retail operations, that is, e-commerce and legacy brick-and-mortar retailing. New retail, instead, focuses on employing an entirely new operating system for reaching and inspiring consumers to shop.
‘‘New Retail trade is trying to solve two particular core challenges in the industry,’’ Emmanuel Elem, an advocate of Sairui, Africa’s new retail startup said. ‘‘The first challenge is the challenge of cold war between offline and online malls. Shoprite is an offline multi-billion dollar shopping mall, for example. On the other hand, Jumia is an online mall. These two different malls are doing things differently and the truth is that they are struggling for the same customers.’’
Now, there are people who have sworn [or who are so internet phobic] that they cannot buy or make payment on the internet because they cannot see the person they are buying from. There are also people that say they don’t have the time to go to Shoprite and begin to buy things [be in the queue and waste their time?] when they have Jumia that can get them what they want in their houses while they wait patiently for delivery to be made. So what new retail is trying to do is to bring a marriage between online malls and offline malls.
By new retail, it will no longer be about online shopping malls. They will also have offline shopping malls or offline distribution centers where people can go, select what they want, pay online and if they don’t want to pay online, they can go to the mall offline and make payment and collect the goods, with the coupon they present to the owner of the shop.’’
He says new retail trade represents a system that blends the best of what both offline and online worlds have to offer. Apart from that, it also offers the best of an entirely new mix of human, digital and physical experience design, giving consumers a new means of inspiration, selection, immediate gratification, physical sensation and convenience, and that ultimately renders the distinction of digital vs. physical irrelevant.
Sairui, The First African New Retail Option Is Gaining Momentum
Although launched this year, March, Sairui is on course to change the idea of internet retail trade. Modeled after Chinese Pindoudou, the startup, which has its Africa headquarters in Accra, Ghana sells everything from clothing to hardware and other commodities and offers large discounts to purchasers. The startup has a strong presence in Nigeria and is also extending to other Africa countries like Cameroon, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, and other places.
‘‘We are doing this simultaneously,’’ said Elem. ‘‘Sairui is all about supporting grassroots entrepreneurship. Sairui shows people the possibility of starting to build a business no matter how small they have because with as small as less than 10,000 naira, they can become a business build through Sairui. This is exactly what it’s called pure grassroots entrepreneurship. Sairui also has bigger packages for those that don’t want to start with such small amounts of money.’’
The startup says it has multiple certified safeguard mechanisms, genuine licensed goods at lower prices and more reliable quality.
The Major Changes The Startup Is Bringing To The Table Are In The Logistics And The Customer Experience Areas
The startup offers large discounts to its online shoppers, bringing on-board an entirely new way of buying and selling.
‘‘What Sairui has brought in is the possibility of online and offline shoppers becoming business owners while also shopping. This has nothing to do with network marketing,’’ Elem said. ‘‘Network marketing is a different ball game altogether. Sairui has variety of products.’’
Elem said to handle logistics, the startup has physical shops where the online shoppers can go, present their coupons and redeem their goods or simply make new purchases.
‘‘Sairui is not opening up physical shops on its own. Sairui is opening up these physical shop through partnership or mini-franchising. These shops are called service centers. The centers are there to service our customers who can come and pick up these products. It is either you pay the company online or through these service centers. You can select your products online or you go to the service centers, give them your cash and carry your products. But the simple truth is that the products are going to be very affordable.Right now, we have about three physical malls in Nigeria through what we call Service centers. We service our customers through our customers centers there. We have centers in Cameroun. We have in South Africa. Right now, we have in about seven African countries.’’
For a startup that is just three months old, this appears a great streak of success, but the startup believes its incorporation of Jack Ma’s concept of new retail trade into its business strategy doesn’t just stop at setting up physical locations to enhance internet commerce experience but also that the strategy means consumers on the platform would get a chance to develop business interests from their purchasing or consumption needs.
‘‘Sairui is not a B2B company. Sairui deals directly with end users. We are dealing directly with the end users; people that are consuming these products. We are not dealing with business owners . We are making the end users business owners and also consumers linking them up directly with the manufacturers of these products, removing the middle person involved,’’ Mr. Elem said.
But it does appear that even the B2B middlemen would still have a say after all since the aim is to turn your consumption cost into instant profitability.
‘‘If you do some shopping on a $100 product on Sairui, for instance, we are giving you a discount of 60% on each product, meaning you’re getting a chance to buy two more products. Now, Sairui will help you sell those two discounted products you bought through its wholesale store,online or offline, free of charge. Sairui will sell each of them on your behalf at $100 each, the initial retail price at which you bought them.’’
The startup boasts it would sell off the products on behalf of its customers within a 7 to 10 days period, leaving customers with some unexpected side profit, long hours after they have made their first purchases.
‘‘We are the pioneer of this kind of system,” Elem said. ‘‘It may be strange to African markets, but the simple truth is that over 20,000 e-commerce companies are already using new retail to run their businesses in China. You can trade as many times as you want with one-time principal.’’
Elem said offering discount does not represent any loss for the startup because of a direct partnership with manufacturers of the goods sold by the startup. He said Sairui mall is an open market place just like Amazon, and as such, anything is bound to happen.
‘‘It is just like asking people why they drink water from a clean cup,’’ he said. ‘‘Nobody would see what is good and wouldn’t want to go for it. The general ideology of new retail is encouraging grassroots entrepreneurship. Sairui is a unique opportunity that anyone shouldn’t miss, even though not for the sake of profit, but for the sake of buying things affordable prices and getting free products from its online or offline shops.’’
Getting Started With Sairuimall Africa
To learn more about how to be part of the Sairui value chain, contact the startup’s country director on +2348039421770
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.
Although this is simply a report and does not bring this future into existence, current trends suggest more millionaire population would soon sprout across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This is according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG)’s 19th annual analysis of the global wealth-management industry released this week.
Here Is How
BCG found that Global wealth grew by 1.6 percent in 2018. The fastest growth was in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, Latin America.
“Strong inflows” into life insurance and pension funds in South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil buoyed growth in Africa and Latin America, BCG found.
Although BCG’s report found that gains in personal financial wealth slowed by about 5 percentage points in 2018 compared to the previous five years — due to factors like the fourth-quarter drop in major stock indexes, this new analysis predicts it will pick up again slightly over the next five years — with Asia poised to add new millionaires faster than anywhere else.
BCG expects Asia and Africa will see the highest growth rates between 2018 and 2023. By then, private banking revenue pools in Asia could even exceed those in Western Europe.
Presently, the greatest concentration of millionaires (measured in U.S. dollars) is currently in North America. But BCG projects that Asia will see the fastest growth in its millionaire population between 2018 and 2023.
After Asia, Africa, And Latin America
The report notes that the total number of millionaires around the world is expected to rise from 22.1 million to 27.6 million by 2023. Trailing Asia, the report predicts that Africa and Latin America will see the most growth in their respective millionaire populations.
Currently, half of all global wealth is held by millionaires according to the report. Analysts projected that wealthy individuals with assets between $20 million and $100 million will see the greatest increase of wealth through 2023, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 8.6 percent.
Targeting that group could be “a golden opportunity for wealth managers willing to tailor their service and coverage models to clients’ needs,” according to the report.
The Fluctuating Wealth In North America
The BCG found that in North America, wealth dropped by 0.4 percent in 2018. This was because high-net-worth individuals in North America and Western Europe were most affected by drops in major market indexes which affected equities and investment funds. However, unlike in North America, wealth did grow in Western Europe, but only by 0.6 percent as growth in some countries offset a decline in others.
BCG predicts the U.S. will see positive growth through 2023, with wealth in North America overall projected to grow by 5.4 percent to $118 trillion. They expect growth in North America will eventually outpace Western Europe and Japan.
Globally, the analysis projects wealth will grow at a compound rate of 5.7 percent between 2018 and 2023, which would still be slightly slower compared to recent years.
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.
Businesses, entrepreneurs or contractors in Uganda selling goods and services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the U.K. can now receive payments faster and more conveniently following the launch of WorldRemit for Business in the country.
What This Means
With this launch from the world leading digital remittances firm WorldRemit, U.K.-based SMEs can quickly pay their employees and contractors in 140 countries worldwide, including fast-growing emerging markets such as Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa. The new service will first be available to U.K.-registered businesses.
For Ugandan entrepreneurs and contractors doing business with clients in the U.K., this service will lead to significant time and cost savings.
Traditional bank payments, which are still the dominant international transfer method for businesses sending money abroad to Uganda, can take up to a week, and often incur high fees and exchange rates. In contrast, WorldRemit’s low fees and exchange rates are shown up-front and customers can send money easily via the app or website.
Transfers To Uganda To Be Processed With 24 Hours
With this new service, users sending funds to Uganda can easily track their transfers in real-time on the WorldRemit app and opt-in to receive daily exchange notifications to send money at the optimal time.
Transfers to Uganda are processed within 24 hours or less and local entrepreneurs can receive payments via bank account, mobile money or cash pick-up — whichever method is most convenient for them.
“When I first started WorldRemit, I was frustrated with the high charges and long delays in sending money abroad both as a business owner and consumer. Over the past 9 years, we’ve made it easier for 4 million people around the globe to send and receive money,’’ Ismail Ahmed, Founder and Executive Chairman at WorldRemit said.
Today, we’re pleased to extend that service offering to businesses, and put an end to the steep fees that many pay, especially when sending to Uganda. We’re committed to making it quick, safe and easy for you to pay individuals across borders, leaving you to focus on growing your own business.”
WorldRemit customers complete over 1.4 million transfers every month from over 50 countries to over 140 destinations using its app or website and remains committed to providing innovative solutions to meet money transfer needs across the world. Earlier this year, the company announced a new partnership with FINCA and Diamond Trust Bank to further solidify its vast partnership network.
The U.K. is one of Uganda’s most important trading partners, with Uganda mainly exporting tea, coffee, and horticultural products. However, with the advent of digital technologies such as e-commerce, smaller entrepreneurs have been able to capture a growing share of U.K.-Uganda trade, especially in the services sector. WorldRemit for Business will enable this new class of digital savvy Ugandan entrepreneurs to get paid quickly and securely.
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.
