Clive Caines Cultural Contributor
If you were asked to produce a list of emerging market countries no doubt you’d come up with India, China, Brazil and may even throw in Mexico or Indonesia but would any African country come into your reckoning?
Even for a seasoned businessperson Africa may well be discounted as a place of new opportunities given that the general perception is, “it’s too difficult to do business there.”
Yet, according to Gogetters there are differences between the business strategies generated by multi-nationals able to hire an accountancy firm to size up Africa by the numbers and companies that size up business opportunities; by getting people on the ground and keeping an open mind: those that do the latter are more likely to build better businesses.
Gogetters Africa has a number of attractions thanks to new technology. There
GoGetters Founder Alieu Fofanah
are now African countries who have started to put money into fibre optic networks; Africa has the fastest growing mobile network in the world along with the second largest mobile phone market after Asia.
Then there’s Ghana’s $10 billion Hope City technology village, which Kenya is now in the process of following having got IBM on board.
From that list alone it is not difficult to reach the conclusion that technology is going to be the driver of significant economic change for many African countries.
If you need more convincing that Gogetters are on the right track then the comments of Michael Milken, founder of the Milken Institute, former UK premier, Tony Blair and Microsoft founder Bill Gates should be a fair indicator:
“Change is happening, you can see it.” Tony Blair.
“Six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are in Africa” Michael Milken.
“You can see the progress… You can see on a year-by-year basis dramatic things are happening.” Bill Gates
These comments were delivered back in May at the Milken Institute Global Conference as part of a panel entitled Investing in African Prosperity.
Photo courtesy www.kayavolunteer.com
Go-getters, an organisation that took its founder Alieu Fofanah just four weeks to take from business idea to a fully-fledged organization, will follow their “look at things from the ground up” principles by taking a team of nine professionals to Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone; the trip will run from August 2013 to March 2014.
While in Africa the team will not only learn how innovative use of technology is revolutionizing the African business ecosystem but will also organize, create and execute tangible outputs in each country visited, which will be in the form of either an event, product, or initiative.
Alieu Fofanah
Trying to achieve so much in such a short time may sound like the business approach of an inexperienced idealist but Alieu is far from that.
The journey that led to the setting up of Gogetters involves working for Price Waterhouse Coopers, spending time in America visiting cities like New York and Boston while digging deep into the new technology business eco-system.
Alieu’s fact finding mission in America also saw him sitting down with some of the best names in new technology such as Google, Twitter and Facebook just to name a few.
However these meetings wouldn’t have been half as beneficial had they not involved meeting the people with the money, to this end Alieu can point to meetings with big venture capitalists such as Andreessen & Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.
Having venture capitalists for business contacts does mean that the sponsors for the African trip have all been lined up, Gogetters are still open to individuals or groups getting on board.
Alieu does however have a vision of what an ideal sponsor will look like: “I really want them to have a goal in terms of something to do with Africa, something to do with technology, something to do with entrepreneurs and something to do with changing the perception of the world from ill informed to the reality of what the situation currently is because I feel that’s how we are going to work together better.”
Once the work in Africa is done the question then becomes what happens when the team returns?
For Alieu the trip to Africa is seen as the pilot so there is a deal of flexibility in what will happen when the team returns from Africa, which essentially means that there are a range of hoped for possibilities.
Gogetters are certainly open to working with organisations who’d want them to set up a global programme in which they’d target other African nations and make use of the networks that they’ve set up.
Then there is a plan to act as advocate speakers showing the British and global public what Africa is really like for the outsider wanting to do business.
Part of Gogetters’ advocacy mission will involve explaining what they intend to do with the information gleaned from the African trip; the hope here is that business opportunities have been spotted and the knowledge gleaned would have made it easier to capitalise on the opportunity.
Finally there are a number of things that are still at the planning stage, which are to do another programme, hopefully made easier because of the success of the initial project.
Then there is a fair chance of media exposure as Gogetters are already in consultation with media organisations in order to gain some insight into how to capture television friendly imagery.
There are opportunities for the Caribbean here which CaribDirect will explore for possible collaborative implementation.
See here for news on CaribDirect’s upcoming West Indies Cricket Seminar
