ResurgeAfrique is back to the drawing board. We are talking to more potential partners and will be carefully selecting our partners, going forward. We are selecting partners who understand:
  • Distribution is the question. You can make the best of products but what good is it if no one buys it or you cannot get it into the hands of the people that need it. Distribution is the big question. We need creative, game-changing distribution strategies.
  • Think solutions, not products. No one wants the burden of a lighting device. Everyone wants lighting, everyone wants power and energy. Everyone wants to flip a switch. Do not make the mistake of thinking even village dwelling Africans will be satisfied with a lantern that is only in some respects an improvement on kerosene lanterns. They are not looking for lanterns but for lighting.
  • Think beyond lighting. Think power. Our research even in remote villages, shows that people are not satisfied with just lighting their rooms. They need refrigerators, they need access to the outside world through TVs and Radios. Lighting needs to be seen only as a first step.
  • Eliminate the aid mentality. The aid mentality pushes products in small quantities one village at a time. In Africa, we are talking of providing solutions for close to a billion people. We need to be thinking like the cell phone companies and be asking ourselves, how do we provide affordable power to 150 million Nigerians and do it very quickly?
  • This is not a time to be local. This is a time to be global and solutions must be designed, business models need to be created to enable quick widespread adoption. We cannot even begin to address the need if we do not think beyond a few villages to thousands of villages and hundreds of millions of people.
  • Leverage the entrepreneurial energy in Africa. Sustainable and successful ventures in Africa must tap into that energy. Most Africans either do not have a regular job or have very low paying jobs. How do they survive? They are entrepreneurs. That inherent quality we have imbibed in response to adversity is unparalleled and is there to be leveraged.
  • In Africa, we like deals. A social enterprise going into Africa needs to find a way to combine million dollar deal making with grassroots benefit. Deal making needs to go hand in hand with desire to help the poor, or else your project will become stillbirth.
  • Africa is not a dumping ground. Previous generations of Africans may have accepted the dumping of fake or poorly manufactured products because they did not know better and they had few options. Not anymore. You will fail woefully if your product or solution is based on an assumption that you are selling to people who are clueless. Going forward, products will need to meet stringent quality and environmental standards. 21st century Africa is not 19th century Africa.
  • Africans have primary responsibility for Africa. Any sustainable initiative needs to have active involvement of the right Africans, who understand the terrain and the culture. Do not think you can exploit them, prepare to partner with them.
  • Prepare to be wrong. Africa is not Europe or Asia or Latin America. Prepare to junk what worked in North America or what you learnt in B-school.
2 Comments
 
 
There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to cry and a time to laugh, a time for everything under heaven, says King Solomon. There is a time to be small because smallness has advantages that bigness does not have. Having read E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, I see even more, the advantages of smallness. However, smallness has limitations. 


In Africa right now, we have pockets of good things happening all around but they are so tiny compared to the magnitude of the challenges that I am not sure keeping initiatives small and localized is advantageous, especially for systemic change. That is why I like Bill McDonough saying that growth is not necessarily bad. Afterall, there is growth that at times bothers on excessive, in nature. The question is what do we want to grow? I think we need to grow our initiatives or link up small initiatives happening around so we can have systemic change. 


I think the new JoinAfrica initiative led by Kayak's Paul English is a great idea. I think the time for localized good initiatives is passé and this is the time to scale up good ideas that have the advantage of being local but broader and much more widespread. 

In Africa, we have experience in being small and local but what will completely change the landscape for the better is having many good small and local initiatives linked up to become not just fringe ideas but the new reality. We need truly game changing initiatives with the intention of addressing existing Africa-wide inefficiencies rather than within a tiny geographic area. I think this is a time to take local global.
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