To do business in Africa is not easy. I am not being pessimistic with this statement. I am based in Africa because I believe in our opportunities here. But lets face some truths:
- We are far from input suppliers (a problem for many and an opportunity for others)
- We are far from our customers (I mean those international customers or the pockets we have on the continent)
- Things take longer to arrive here (inputs and my Amazon book parcels), and
- We stretch our infrastructure on a daily basis (roads, rail, health, education).
- It is not difficult to trade between countries, or to find partners, markets etc. because of various barriers (I think Europe and Asia is ahead of us in overcoming technical and cultural barriers to trade – whether perceived or real)
- Our societies spend a huge amount of time arguing, blaming and politicising that could probably be better applied to solving problems and exploring opportunities
- We have many government and market failures (more on this in another post) that only benefits elites (public and private)
Most people think that we have to innovate to reach markets that are far far away, line Europe or the US. Or we think that we have to out-innovate the Asians. But we have something right here under our noses. We have demands from consumers, businesses, policy makers. These demands are not yet always expressed as needs. If you think it is important to save energy in Europe to save the planet (or save money), then we have an additional and more urgent reason to save energy – our constraints to produce enough to go around. Same for water, food, technology and other areas.
So why are we not exploiting the opportunities created by local demands and unexpressed needs?
I think part of the answer is about our policy incentives, and then another part is about our low self esteem. Ok. There is also the fact that innovation is increasingly becoming difficult, because consumers are getting so smart at selected the better products that combines elements of good design with functionality (functionality alone often doesn’t make the cut). What I mean with difficult is that you have to spend a lot of time searching for the right components, process technology (and perhaps even patents).Many of you will probably come up with other reasons as well.
But here is a question worth spending our collective brain power on: what can we do to stimulate more demand led innovation here in Africa?
The OECD last year had an interesting seminar on this topic. I am relieved to find that industrial countries are also thinking about these things (it means we are not so far behind), but I am very envious because we also need to be discussing these things in Africa. Perhaps our greatest resource is not our minerals. Perhaps it is the huge number of problems that we still have to solve, and the millions of demands that are not yet articulated. But how do we turn these challenges, problems (or opportunities if you like) into profitable ventures?
Any ideas?
