During a special media roundtable event hosted by the Hollard Insurance Group, business experts gathered to shed more light on the subject of “Business excellence and risk mitigation in Africa: the vital link.”
The event, held at Hollard’s historical Villa Arcadia campus on 30 November and also streamed live to viewers around the continent, highlighted Hollard’s sponsorship of the Company of the Year category in the 8th All Africa Business Leaders Awards (AABLA), won the previous evening by Ethiopian Airlines.
Sam Bhembe, head judge for the AABLAs, who spoke about the rationale for the awards told the audience that the thinking behind the awards, an initiative of the ABN media group, was “to show the world what Africa has to offer” in the business realm.
Importantly, he said, the AABLAs have set verifiable standards against which African companies can now be measured and benchmarked against their peers. The awards have now also been in existence for long enough that companies’ performance over time can be assessed.
‘Africa is not a country!’ Business experts tell roundtable
Keynote speaker Professor Adrian Saville, founder and CE of Cannon Asset Managers and director of the Centre for African Management and Markets at GIBS addressed current trends and challenges for business in Africa.
Saville, using the example of cartographers drawing wild animals in place of towns on early maps of Africa to fill gaps, said, “I think there’s a tragedy in this because it’s the way it’s mapped still … It is impossible to talk of Africa as a single place and the gaps in knowledge are vast.”
Because of this, Africa is persistently “caricatured” as one entity, often portrayed as either a “dark” or “hopeless” continent or collectively “rising”. Which belies the many changes and challenges on the continent.
Saville then described a number of African success stories and highlighted the fact that Africa is second only to south-east Asia in terms of economic growth over the past 15 years. He revealed that Ethiopia and Rwanda have had the world’s fastest-growing economies for the past 15 years; that Kenya has improved its position on a global ease-of-business index by 21 places; and that sub-Saharan Africa enjoys economic growth that is 2% higher than the rest of the world.
However, one of the challenges for many businesses in Africa is access to funding. In an interview with Ventures Africa, Saville suggested ways that these companies could improve their chances of getting funds to aid the development of their products.
“There are a number of ways to square up to this challenge, including partnering with larger exchanges; promoting regulatory certainty; promoting electronic trading; improving access to information, including research. But if anything, there is an irony here, in that many African-listed companies are simply “too small” to be of real interest in the large markets of Europe, Asia and America,” Saville.
The Director of the Centre for African Management and Markets at GIB also added that another way in which this could be promoted is to put companies onto a well-regulated and highly traded regional market. “BRVM has this intention, but the market is small. The JSE could be a candidate to form a regional board or African board, alongside its traditional boards,” he added.
“There is no single way to do business on the continent”
Mandla Shezi whose Hollard international division currently operates in seven African territories used a series of maps to illustrate perceptions of Africa. Global corporates see it as one “dark” continent; more enlightened players may differentiate between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa; South African companies tend to segment much of it as extensions of their own country – or struggle to see South Africa as part of the continent at all.
“These things, while they seem clichéd, shape how you do business in Africa,” he said, before explaining that it necessary to look past economic indicators and factor in such elements as existing brand presence, accessibility, big cities, networks, regulation and, above all, people – including partners, customers and suppliers.
“There is no single way to do business on the continent,” Shezi argued. “We have to understand customers, we have to understand suppliers and we have to understand the nature and role of all other stakeholders in each individual market.”
What customer-centricity really means in the context of an “opportunity market”
In her presentation, Sarina de Beer, director: client experience at research firm, Ask Afrika argued that the continent is plagued by poor understanding of customers and customer segments, what drives them politically and socially, and why they spend the way they do. This has a negative impact on organisations’ ability to meet consumer needs.
Trust and emotion are also very powerful customer drivers, she argued. Trust is dropping because customers don’t feel heard, as is people’s emotional satisfaction with brands.
“If we want to be customer-centric, then we really need to understand consumers,” she said – and that means not over-simplifying customer segments, adopting an authentic approach based on true customer understanding, and building trust.
While responding to a question from Ventures Africa on how the financial services sector can leverage on customer-centricity, De beer further stressed the importance of researching how the consumer perceives the category or the product and how that influences their decision making.
“Companies often take a linear, Western approach to business that is tailored to a developed, formal economy and then adapt it to various regions in Africa. By doing this they are not truly being relevant to African consumers who live in a circular, community- and family-oriented society,” she said.
“In Africa, business is often conducted in the informal sector, entrepreneurship is common and people often have unpredictable income. Because of this, fixed monthly bank charges or insurance premiums are not necessarily well-suited to the African middle market.”
De Beer also explained that businesses have to start thinking very differently in terms of how they are driving access in Africa, and what sits behind the uptake of financial services from a behavioural and attitudinal point of view.
“Traditional financial service products may not be relevant for this market, but there is a great opportunity for the financial services sector,” said De Beer.
Please click here to watch a video of the presentations.
