Nurturing Talent Is Hard in Africa

Local business leaders are scarce amid lack of top schools, lower pay than in other regions

ENLARGE

A worker inspects a bottle of Meta beer on the bottling line at the Meta Abo brewery, operated by Diageo in Sebeta, Ethiopia. In the absence of traditional management training ground, companies like Diageo have developed their own programs to nurture Africa-based leaders. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS

Africa is hailed as a major growth market for global businesses, but as global companies expand there, they are having a tough time finding leaders to run their operations.

That is the conclusion of a new report on executive talent by Russell Reynolds Associates, which surveyed 230 senior leaders and recruiters in Africa. Recruiters say companies are eager to recruit good hires in the region, but find that candidates with traditional management skills—such as the ability to drive change or build teams—are in short supply.

The report focused on the talent markets of Kenya and Nigeria, whose economies are growing rapidly, and South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy, yet the issues are common to many nations in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors note.

The issues will become more acute as more businesses expand in Africa, where gross-domestic-product growth is projected to strengthen to 4.5% this year and 5% next year, according to the African Economic Outlook 2015 report.

Driving the talent shortage is the African continent’s dearth of high-quality business schools, according to Simon Kingston, who leads the global development practice at Russell Reynolds.

In countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, many with management aspirations tend to leave for school or work abroad, and persuading them to return home for their career is a challenge, recruiters said.

In the absence of traditional management training ground, companies such as Coca-ColaCo., Diageo PLC and Heineken NV have developed their own programs to nurture Africa-based leaders.

McKinsey & Co. trains promising young Kenyan professionals in critical thinking and quantitative analysis, as well as people skills like cooperation and consensus-building, with an eye on developing talent for the firm, said Mutsa Chironga, a McKinsey partner based in Johannesburg.

The management-consulting firm turns away many local hires in Kenya and Nigeria who attended top local schools, Mr. Chironga said, because those schools often fail to adequately prepare young people for work in global corporations.

Local candidates also lack the internship or work experience and global exposure of some of their counterparts hailing from other regions, he added.

So far, global firms have relied on imported talent to fill local roles but relocating people is costly and doesn’t strengthen the local talent pipeline, said James Newlands, who leads the Americas-Africa business center at Ernst & Young LLP.

“It’s not a sustainable solution to run your business on expat management,” Mr. Newlands said.

Retaining managers in the region is difficult because compensation tends to be lower than in other global areas, the study found.

In Kenya and South Africa, some professionals are forgoing global companies’ management-development programs in favor of local firms, which often provide a faster path to senior ranks, according to the survey.

To provide emerging leaders with international experience and training, more multinationals are trying rotation programs that send Africa-based talent abroad with the plan that they will return later, said Mr. Newlands.

Eulicia Govender, a South African national and second-year M.B.A. student at WITS Business School in Johannesburg, said she plans to work abroad for a few years in financial services before ultimately returning to South Africa to found a for-profit enterprise with a social mission.

“I want to bring back knowledge to South Africa with me, and see how I can make these ideas work in the South African context,” she said.

Businesses are hoping that young Africans like Ms. Govender stick with their plan.

Some 39% of Kenyan executives, 39% of Nigerian executives and 41% of South African executives surveyed see the diaspora as a key source of leadership talent over the next 5 to 10 years, yet only 32%, 29% and 13% of them felt local talent would be willing to return home.

Write to Lindsay Gellman at Lindsay.Gellman@wsj.com

Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/nurturing-talent-is-hard-in-africa-1449623548

Posted by Ike Onwubuya

Africa: Business Class - China and Africa - the Lessons From the East

ANALYSISBy Mutumwa Mawere

Forum on Africa-China Cooperation ... Mutumwa Mawere attended the summit in SA

The lions of Africa: Mugabe and Malema

I WAS privileged to attend the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC) summit hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg during 4 to 5 December 2015.

As I watched the opening of the summit by its co-Chairmen, President Xi Xinping and President Zuma, I could not help but observe that the irony of a single Chinese individual, making the promises of independence to an attentive crowd of 54 representatives of presumed sovereign African nation-states all seeking to outdo each other in a beauty pageant style to look good as beneficiaries and resource mortgagors.

Any rational observer would have taken note of the fact that, China, the world's most populous nation-state, with a population of about 1.3 billion compared with Africa's 1.11 billion, has a single individual as its head of state as opposed to Africa's 54 incoherent voices. It is the case that scale matters in the economic order of things yet the unity of Africa is being driven by outsiders who have the financial power to make it happen than the people in whom true sovereignty is vested.

A lot has been said about the colonial and post-colonial relationship between China and Africa and implications thereof as if to suggest that China is some kind of a salvation army to fill the perceived gap created by the Western Nations who know better that money without values is recipe for disaster.

During the African decolonization period, China was pursuing the idea of socialism and, therefore, the value and principles that informed its worldview were founded on the premise that the state and its actors ought to drive the agenda of delivering a just, inclusive and prosperous dispensation. The fact that the socialist idea was fatally flawed from conception and implementation was proved right by the passage of time.

The idea failed, as could be predicted, to capture the imagination and creativity of the Chinese people yet the big idea that the state and its actors know better and act in the national interest seems to be taking root with the assistance of the Chinese whose history and emergence as a super power suggest otherwise.

With the death of Chairman Mao and the short-lived transition, it was as predictable as it was inevitable that China would have no choice but to conform to the dictates of the human spirit in order to unlock the true potential that resided in the frustrated minds of the ordinary Chinese citizens.

The evolution of China from a socialist/communist system has been quick and transformational yet the African post-colonial journey has and remains painful, uninspiring and dangerous. A careful observation of the Chinese work ethic in countries and territories dominated by the Chinese like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, and to a lesser extent Malaysia and Indonesia would confirm that the Anglo-Saxon protestant ethic is not unique to Caucasians.

The history of human civilization has taught us that human beings have the inherent capacity to step up to the plate when opportunities exist and when freedom reigns for them to dream and convert dreams into products and services.

Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201512110400.html

Posted by Ike Onwubuya

Naira weakens, sells at N250 to dollar

The exchange rate used by Nigeria’s money-changers weakened below N250 per dollar for the first time on Friday as pressure builds on the Central Bank to devalue the local currency and allow businesses more access to foreign-exchange.

The black market, or parallel rate fell to 253 per dollar from 246 on Thursday and 222 last month, according to Aminu Gwadabe, president of the Lagos-based Association of Bureau de Change Operators of Nigeria.

That’s 22 percent weaker than the official rate used in the interbank market, which was 198.50  in Lagos. “The Central Bank will say they don’t care about the parallel market, but investors are looking,” Gwadabe said by phone. “Why will they bring in their money at 197 or 198 when the parallel rate is 250?”

The official rate in Africa’s largest economy has been all but fixed at 198-199 per dollar since March after Central bank Governor Godwin Emefiele restricted banks’ ability to buy dollars. In June, he stopped importers of about 40 items, including wheelbarrows and glass, from obtaining foreign-exchange.

Foreign investors have criticised Nigeria’s stance and sold bonds and stocks this year on expectation of a devaluation, which would cause losses on their holdings in foreign-currency terms.



The naira’s fall in the black market comes as the Central Bank restricts dollar supplies further to save its foreign reserves, which fell below $30 billion for the first time in four months on November 30. About 1,200 money changers, or 60 percent of the total in Nigeria, were denied their weekly allocation of $30,000 from the Central Bank on Wednesday, according to Gwadabe.

His association has requested a “crucial” meeting with the Abuja-based regulator on December 8 to address the issue, he said. The phone of Ibrahim Mu’azu, a spokesman for the Central Bank, was turned off and he didn’t immediately respond to a text message requesting comment.

“If they continue what they’re doing this week, next week will be worse,” Gwadabe said

Source: http://thenationonlineng.net/naira-weakens-sells-at-n250-to-dollar/

'It's possible for regular people to build pan- Africa business'

    Ken Njoroge and Bolaji Akinboro, the
co-founders of Cellulant, have taken the company from a payments technology
start-up to a pan-African corporation connecting more than 40 million customers to mobile payment solutions. They were recently in Cape
Town where they jointly gave the keynote address at the third annual MasterCard
Foundation symposium on Financial Inclusion. Our
correspondent in Cape Town Mwangi Githahu caught up
with the two to discuss digital
commerce among other subjects.

Bolaji Akinboro

Ken Njoroge

Many people hear the words ‘digital
commerce’ and think M-Pesa. There must be more to it than that. Simply explain
what digital commerce is?



Bolaji: The
simplest definition really goes beyond M-Pesa. Because
M-Pesa originally was kind of into money transfer, [in fact] more peer-to-peer,
then later it migrated to peer-to-business (small businesses) and I believe now
it is moving into its third evolution, which is peer-to-really big businesses.

So really the idea
of digital commerce is to create an environment in which consumers can benefit
from getting what they want, when they want it and how they to pay for it. On
the other hand, businesses are empowered to connect to their consumers with
ease. Within that space they can do both virtual
transactions and transactions that translate into physical goods.

In today’s world there are things that
are purely virtual, like if you are buying airtime now, it’s a purely virtual
transaction, there is nothing physical involved with
it. But at the same time, if I wanted a taxi cab and I wanted it to come now, I
could pay for it digitally like with Uber but still get the physical taxi that
comes to fetch me.



Ken: I
think that basically gives the definition. I mean M-Pesa was just the beginning of this digital revolution so it is
not an end in itself but the starting point, a piece of service out of maybe
another seven or so that make up the broad world of digital commerce.



So do you think that this technology is what will finally give Africa an advantage over the wealthier
nations of the world?



Ken: I think so because if you look at digital payments and
that sort of thing and you look at the sort of speed that this is happening –
think about it. Fifteen or so years ago most of us
didn’t have mobile phones. But within that period of time, if you look across
Africa 500 million people have come onto the mobile phone network so they are
visible. As a result of that [sort of progress] all these narratives around Africa rising just popped up because these
numbers just leapt out of the woodwork.

What digital
does is to create efficiency in payments — because transactions are cheaper. It creates efficiency in
reaching markets and enables easy delivery of services. And not just markets, even the basic stuff that we struggle with on this
continent — getting food to everybody across the pyramid, getting water
to everyone, getting power to everyone, getting health and education to
everyone. Digital payments are completely going to revolutionise the speed, the scale and the cost of getting services to the
people and that will be transformational for the continent.

So because of
that process we get to leapfrog a lot of other stuff. We [now] don’t need to go
through the learning curve with technology. Just like
it was literally within the blink [of an eye] before 500 million
people had phones. We didn’t
need to dig up [the pavements] and lay cables all over the place. [Snaps
fingers] it just happened like that.



Can you speak of any future strategies
for the company or have one-stop payments and digital commercial services
reached their peak?



Ken: This is just the beginning.

Bolaji: We haven’t even started scratching the surface. Our own
strategic view of the future is very different from other
people. We feel that fundamentally there is what we call the bread and butter, which is
really bringing merchants and banks together within the eco-system [we are
building] — that’s really the bread and butter part. But beyond that
it’s really the market place because what we call the ‘Cellulant Mall’ which is so much more sophisticated than paper. If you
come into that mall you will find that we’ll connect everyone to everything
every day.



Give me a practical example of that. How does it work in an African context?



Bolaji: Let’s take what we call the e-wallet now. We are
connecting everyone in agriculture in
Nigeria to everyone — we are
connecting more than 14.5 million farmers to about 2,500 agro-dealers to about 115
seed companies to about 75 fertiliser suppliers, to
about three insurance companies.

So if you are
looking for someone in your neighbourhood to sell you seeds you can just get on
your phone and get in touch with whomever you need to deal with to get whatever
it is you need to get done.

So while there is the sophisticated part of our business, we
are fundamentally a people’s company.



What are the challenges and opportunities for Cellulant in
the next couple of years?



Ken: Our business is growing of course so I’ll start by looking
at that question in terms of opportunities, as that’s what drives us.

So there are
problems in the market that benefit from what we do and the experience and
expertise we’ve built. People don’t have water. The sort of problems that we
solved in Nigeria and that we are solving in other
countries still exist —
those problems affect not just agriculture, they affect power, and they affect
everything.

What’s nice
about digital payments and the services we offer in Africa is that it is not one of those things that is [referred to as] “good to do”, they are just a basic part of
the necessity of living.

Basically if
we didn’t do what we did in Nigeria, people would have starved to death. If we
don’t continue doing these things people don’t get water etc. So these services that our consumers take up are not novelties but basics
that consumers can’t do without. They are essential services not “good to do”
but necessary.

Digital
payments allow essential stuff to get to the consumers. So as long as that
continues to be true and it will continue to be true
for a while, it is basically a tremendous opportunity for us to build a great
business.

So we are not
an NGO, we are a profit business and we believe there are profits to be made in
that business of solving problems.

As for challenges, I look at them as internal and external. So
external challenges are fundamentally competition, there is also the regulatory
framework — because we are operating on the cutting edge of payments
and services, we have to continue to educate stakeholders,
regulators, mobile operators etc about some of the things we do.

That takes
time, effort and sometimes slows things down but it is a very necessary part of
things.

The other
challenge is obviously the competitive environment. As it becomes clear that there are opportunities to build billions of dollars in
terms of businesses, it attracts competitors. So we find ourselves competing
with companies like us that operate only in specific countries, others like
us who operate across multiple countries and sooner
or later some of the larger global businesses will get into the fray. So
competition is a big challenge that we need to keep dealing with and we deal
with it by being very agile and very nimble. Also, most
importantly, we really have experienced and
understand these problems.

On the
internal side, I think the biggest challenge we have is the question of
how we build talent and find talent to match the growth of the business. I
think today that is our single most important challenge and we are spending a lot of time figuring it out.

Think about
it. Over the last 13 years or so that we’ve been in business, we’ve grown
from a staff of three to a staff of 250 people. Into the next year I think we
are going to hire somewhere between 70 and 100 people.

It’s very possible to imagine that we are going to sustain
hiring almost 100 people over the next three to four years.

These [new]
people are going to come prepared to work the way we do, which is to
work with a high level of ambition, working tirelessly to make things work etc. That is certainly a big challenge.



Both of you were in a different field of knowledge before
you got into business. You were pharmacists I believe…



Ken:
[Laughing] I’m a dropout pharmacist and he’s a
graduate.

Bolaji: [Also laughing] He’s a dropout pharmacist and I’m a complete one.



When did you make the switch? What led to the ‘light-bulb moment’ occur for you on the subject of digital
commercial services?



Bolaji: Well,
how the practice works in Nigeria where education is free is that when you leave university you must do two year’s
national service to repay the government for your free education. I went to
public schools all my life and so I had to do a year’s internship where they
made sure that all I learned in university was still
in my head.

So for me in
particular, I worked in a the Swiss pharmaceuticals company Roche, did a tour
of government where I worked in a government hospitals and did a tour of
community pharmacies where I was the guy at the local community pharmacy.

I was still fresh from university but I knew a bit about life
by now and my conclusion was that being a pharmacist in Nigeria was the same as
being a teacher. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a teacher but when
you are a teacher your reward is in heaven and since
I was more of a commercial character…

Ken:
[Laughingly interjects] You wanted your reward on earth.

Bolaji:
[Laughing] Yes. I wanted to enjoy the rewards when I was still here. So I
decided to find something else to do with my life. It just so happened that Proctor and Gamble came to orientation
camp for the National Youth Service and on reading one of their flyers, I decided to
go and see what these guys were all about.

At Proctor
and Gamble, I met an Egyptian guy who told me that at the firm I would learn nothing in particular but instead a bit of
everything. But most importantly, he said, I would learn how to develop a
strong character and how to just find your way through life. I found those
statements intriguing and decided to try working
there and that’s when my life took a detour.



What about you Ken? What made you drop out of pharmacy?



Ken: I think the light bulb moment to get into technology
happened before I went to pharmacy school when I went to Strathmore University
where we were some of the pioneers of their computing
college.

So before I
went to pharmacy school I did some time at Strathmore and I fell in love with
computers. It’s just that simple.

Then when I
went to pharmacy school it became very clear that this typically was not my thing. I didn’t feel as much passion for it and so I
quit.



If you could go back to 2004, when you started your
business, knowing everything you know now about the business, what, if
anything, would you do differently?



Ken and
Bolaji: We’d never start it! [Laughter]

Ken: I know people like to give these nice political statements
to questions like this, saying things such as we’d do nothing differently because
the hard lessons were great lessons etc but looking back with hindsight, we’d
not start it.



Surely it
can’t be that bad, you’ve made a success out of this venture…



Ken and
Bolaji: It is that bad.

Ken: Don’t sugar-coat it. I know this is not the answer you
expected but man, we’d just not start it, but having said that the journey has
been unlike any other. Today I think as characters
and as individuals, we have been through just so much. There is nothing under
the sun that we haven’t seen.

Nevertheless,
generally when you look at it that way and see how far we’ve come, there’s no
other path — at least for me — that would
have yielded the same outcome. It has made me the person I am, the executive I
am.



Was
financial success your main goal or was it the innovation
that drove you?



Bolaji: The formation of this company had really nothing to do
with money. Because most people now might think we are in this to make a lot of
money.

We were just
intrigued by a problem in our society. By simply asking look, where are the companies in Africa started by regular people who
came from normal backgrounds? People who did not have rich fathers or uncles or
know political godfathers?

We wanted to
be a company started by regular people and today you can find regular people who will say, yes, I was there when these people started and
theirs is just a story of building it piece by piece.

Such stories
are few and far between but we said it is possible in Africa for regular people
to get a company going and grow it into a pan-Africa
business. I guess if we knew what we know now perhaps we might have found other
dreams, but that was our real motivation from the beginning.

We always
wanted to start businesses in many countries, even when those businesses were
not viable, but we felt it was and we have shown it
is possible to build a pan-African business.



What drives you? Cellulant is out there
and people are looking at it and wanting to emulate it. What advice would you
give them?



Ken: I think there needs to be a motivator other than money. Money is always as a result of the pursuit of
that motivation.

Bolaji: This question that you ask is very interesting because
there are guys
whose business model is to find their way to meetings like these, do you
understand what I mean? That is their business model,
they believe too much in networking.

But we’ve not
had that story. Like Ken said, it can’t only be money that drives people. I
think if I were to advise anyone I would tell them: You know what? You need to
find a human problem or a human need that only you
can solve. And then you need to see yourself as the person that can solve that
problem and not give up until that problem is solved. I think that’s how we
would summarise it. Because right from the word go, we wanted to build a company like this, but we’ve gone through different routes in
different markets to reach the ultimate end point that we sketched out many,
many years ago.



From the sound of it, you
guys are very focused and very driven, but in your down time what do you get up to? Do you even have down time?



Bolaji [laughing]: For me I don’t understand that concept at all.

Ken: We really enjoy what we do and so for me the concept of
relaxing or going on holiday or take time off work…I mean…Look at me now in
Cape Town at a conference. I feel like I’m on holiday
just enjoying what we do.

Bolaji: Like this trip to Cape Town now, is like a holiday for me.
I mean it is work, but it’s just like a holiday.

Ken: We like to work but of course we are also family men. So
in my case, my life is just a
dichotomy — I’m either at work or
with my family and that’s it. I don’t drink, I don’t go out, I don’t play golf
but I’ve taken to walking recently.



- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/its-possible-regular-people-build-pan-africa-business#sthash.RzEKwaHd.dpuf

Source: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/its-possible-regular-people-build-pan-africa-business

Posted by Ike Onwubuya