Five hundred years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli said it is much safer for a leader to be feared than loved. Anne Waiguru, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Devolution and Planning, is the kind of leader who elicits both love and fear.
Waiguru is spoken of as a combative, no-nonsense go-getter and hard-worker. Waiguru, the person, smiles, loves dancing, carries lunch to work and is a doting mother to three sons.
She is among six women in Kenya’s cabinet of 18 and the only female Cabinet Secretary in the Presidency. Outside the presidential framework, Waiguru wields considerable power and influence. Her docket has the largest budget in government – KSh84 billion ($967 million), controlling key government functions of devolution, public service management, economic planning, women, youth affairs, special programs, and arid and semi-arid land dockets.
Working with Waiguru is not for the faint-hearted. With a heavy docket to manage, she pushes hard and keeps long hours. Those who have worked with her describe her as detailed and forceful, breaking all barriers. A government officer who worked in one of the ministries under Waiguru says she rules with an iron fist, it is either her way or the highway.
Waiguru describes herself as “extremely focused, disciplined, hard-working, smart and flexible”.
“I am able to change when I discover I am going in the wrong direction,” she says.
She confesses to placing a very high premium on hard work, an attribute she inherited from her late father who was a police officer.
“He is the reason I am here. It didn’t matter where you ended up, discipline and standards were always a big deal to my father.” She studied in Kenya at the Egerton University for her under-graduation and later pursued a master’s degree in economic policy from the University of Nairobi.
Rolling up her sleeves is part of her character. While preparing for the launch of the KSh6 billion ($70 million) Uwezo (Swahili for empowerment) Fund meant for youth and women, she went to the venue on the eve of the event and did something that shocked her team.
“She practically showed us how she wanted the chairs arranged. They had to be the same without special preferences to the President, his Deputy or herself. She said uwezo is about empowerment and equality of Kenyans,” says Dennis Itumbi, Director, Digital, New Media and Diaspora in the Executive Office of the President.
Her hands-on personality is not only about work. She also sets the bar high for her sons.
“They have a strong personality for a mother and I spend a lot of time with them.” One of her sons is a musician and to support him, she also took up music lessons. Her youngest son, who is 10, wants to be President of Kenya and has even expressed his ambitions to his mother’s boss. The eldest, 19, is already running an IT business.
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Tears and Twitter
Now in her early 40s, Waiguru joined the public service under an initiative of the World Bank as a Technical Advisor to the Public Service Reform Secretariat in what was then the Cabinet Office. Prior to that, she had briefly worked at Citigroup NA.
After completing her term at the Reform Secretariat, Waiguru moved to head the Economic Stimulus Programme (ESP), to accelerate Kenya’s economic growth following the slump caused by the 2007/8 post-election violence.
At the helm of ESP, she was instrumental in ensuring all health centers had maternal units with beds.
“Many women in rural Kenya do not make it to a health center and give birth by the roadside. To avoid this, we tried to have them come to the health center every three weeks. We gave health workers bicycles and motorbikes to regularly check on expectant mothers at home. These are the things that keep me in public service.”
Waiguru confesses she did not nurse dreams of becoming a minister.
“The one thing I really wanted to be for a very long time, was a Permanent Secretary because it was the highest level a civil servant attained then that would allow me to influence policies,” she says.
After ESP, she moved on to become Director of the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS). This was a defining moment in her career. She had to lead the implementation of financial policies and programs to ensure efficient and transparent use of government money.
The media described her cabinet appointment in April 2013 as ‘a meteoric rise’. Waiguru was a trailblazer in government reforms and had upset the status quo. The rumor mills on social media went on overdrive. Having worked with President Kenyatta while he was Finance Minister, her appointment was seen as a reward. She was seen as a woman who had suddenly risen from nowhere. The stories got to her.
“I cried and worried in the beginning until I got used to the newspaper articles. You are used to someone criticizing you positively but some people are outright nasty. I now read comments on Twitter and laugh.”
Looking back, she wishes she knew earlier on in her public service career about the need to have the skin of a rhino.
“People asked why I was given the position. The same was not asked about my [male] colleagues. When we [women] do very well, people are surprised. When men do very well, it was expected. I see it even now when people tell me that I am doing very well as if they did not expect me to. They would not be surprised if a man did the same.”
The appointment suddenly threw her in the limelight, but she has never been a public person.
“I am very good one-on-one and in the background. I would never take myself to the media and hence people did not know I existed.”
Waiguru says women have to work four times as hard as men to get recognition because the society is still patriarchal.
“For a woman, half the time you must have proved a point before you are even considered for a position. It is very rare to hear someone say a woman has potential. A woman has to have a few accomplishments.”
Despite the high expectations, Waiguru does not have sleepless nights.
“I am very conscious of the fact that I am human and have limitations, so I do the best I can. Once I have done all I can, I go home and sleep easy because even if I stay awake nothing is going to change anyway. When there is a crisis you will not find me worried. What is the worst that can happen in life?”
Waiguru has had days when Murphy’s Law applied. In November 2013, she had to manage a crisis after health workers went on strike for 11 days over devolution of services from national to county governments. There were reported deaths as hospital services were paralyzed. In January 2014, Waiguru had to flag off food aid to Turkana, in northern Kenya. The media described the drought as a national shame.
“I don’t think flagging off food was a shame. With disasters, the issue is when it happens, are you prepared for it? We were prepared, you did not hear us asking the private sector for money or food. We are still buying and distributing food.”
While putting her heart in her work, Waiguru says she is passionate but not attached.
“Serving in the public service changes the way you see things. When you are out there, you tell government what it can do better but when you are in here with all our problems no one will ever give you a pat on the back. Your passion drives you.”
As Waiguru marked one year in office in April, she says devolution will be her main success story. She wants Anne Waiguru to be synonymous with transformation.
“I want people to talk about my contribution to the transformation of Kenya because I was committed to it and I had the ability to make that a reality,” she says.

Loved And Feared In The Corridors  Of Power

It’s mid-September, and Volkswagen of America has a problem: It won’t have any new models coming out until the spring. Keeping VW front and ­center in consumers’ minds has drawn a group of marketing folks from the automaker and two of its ad agencies to Google’s BrandLab at its YouTube headquarters south of San Francisco. Dedicated to “evangelizing the art and science of brand-building,” the richly appointed meeting space is basically a man cave for ad creatives, complete with overstuffed couches, booze and the mother of all big screens, an assemblage of 32 flat-panel displays massed into 300 square feet of video overload.
In one corner of the BrandLab, Google’s Jeff Rozic goes to work running VW’s folks through a rapid-fire succession of video ad campaigns the BrandLab feels have worked. His earnest delivery is well-honed, courtesy of 100-plus similar “private workshops” held for potential advertisers from Coca-Cola to Toyota over the past year. VW has some catching up to do, a point Rozic makes intentionally or not by highlighting 13 travel vignettes produced by a rival, Nissan Mexico. His larger point: Don’t clutter a story with too blatant a call to action. “We shouldn’t apologize for trying to sell cars,” one VW exec protests. “Sure,” Rozic shoots back, “but you have to be careful to distinguish when you’re telling a story and when you’re selling.”
Fair point. Rozic is clearly selling—and it’s a product intended to change Google’s path. The king of the click is now lecturing one of the world’s most accomplished advertisers to forget those clicks and amp up the image ads. CEO Larry Page can go on as much as he wants about self-driving cars, wearable computers or any of the company’s other “moon shots.” But Google fundamentally remains the most disruptive advertising company of the past half-century. As its total advertising-revenue growth rate has halved in the past two years, from 29% to 15% (thanks in part to Facebook and Twitter), it’s now charging full-bore toward the biggest pot of advertising gold it doesn’t own: brand advertising, the image ads you see in glossy magazines and on television.
Most online ads—the banners that litter nearly every commercial website and, most notably, Google’s search ads—have failed to help marketers move the needle on classic advertising measures like brand awareness and intent to purchase. ­Instead, they mainly drive people to a product page to click the buy button. ­Direct marketing is lucrative: Search is still upwards of 60% of Google’s ad revenue, helping it earn an estimated 15.8% net margin in 2013—but image ads will come to dominate digital advertising in this decade.
Look at the numbers: Digital brand advertising is an $18 billion market this year, according to eMarketer. Its forecast implies that number will double by 2018, at which point it will have passed search and direct marketing, with plenty of room to grow.
Television advertising, comprising almost entirely image ads, is currently a $200 billion global market. And it’s a vulnerable one, as the medium’s iron grip on the bulk of ad spending looks a little less firm as younger people scatter to YouTube and Netflix when they aren’t Snapchatting or Instagramming on iPhones or skipping ads entirely on their DVRs. Some 75% of respondents to an Interactive Advertising Bureau poll of 5,000 ad execs expect to see some spending move from TV to digital video in the next year.
This explains the man cave. YouTube remains one of the greatest acquisitions of the Internet era. Larry and Sergey paid $1.65 billion in 2006 for a business that today would conservatively be worth $20 billion as a stand-alone. So what’s another $400 million or so to build out a brand ad business?
The return has been fairly quick: In October Publicis’ MediaVest, the ad agency for Coca-Cola, Honda and other big advertisers, inked a deal to spend tens of millions of dollars over the next year on Google video, display and mobile ads. It was Google’s first agreement with such an online partner to buy ads in advance, as agencies and marketers do on television. In November Publicis agencies DigitasLBi and Razorfish went bigger, committing to spend $100 million on YouTube and Google’s banner and mobile ad networks this year. “Google is one of the few players with a platform big and wide enough to attract these dollars,” says Razorfish CEO Pete Stein.
And Google sources insist that more of these “upfront” deals will be announced shortly, which has investors—who have driven the stock to a recent alltime high of over $1,150—feeling bullish. Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer at the asset management firm Solaris Group, a Google investor, figures the company could capture about 6% of TV ad spending by 2020, or $20 billion a year. Given that Google’s total revenue this year will come in at around $60 billion, this is the growth the company needs to continue its dominance.
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Susan Wojcicki was Google’s 16th hire. Marissa Mayer came a few hires later, yet it was Mayer, now Yahoo’s CEO, who became the flashy female face of Google. No matter. Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-ski), the senior vice president in charge of all Google ad products, plays the anti-Marissa. She favors jeans and hoodies around the office, displaying a self-deprecating plainness that one former employee says is reminiscent of Chance the gardener from the movie Being There. “She never felt she needed to be the smartest person in the room,” says another ex-colleague.
Instead, she’s become the most powerful person—male or female—in advertising. She manages effectively without drama and thus has been Page’s go-to exec for wins such as the introduction of AdSense, which pays other sites to run Google ads (now a $13 billion business), and the acquisitions of DoubleClick, an ad-serving pioneer, and YouTube. “She only works on big problems, not small ones,” says ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson, who worked for her a decade ago.
Her vision of the future of advertising (and hence Google)? Since content is flowing across so many digital devices—a trend Google is trying to accelerate with such initiatives as its Chromecast device for streaming online video to TVs and its flurry of Android smartphones and tablets—she sees nearly all advertising eventually going digital, too, putting it squarely in Google’s wheelhouse.
“Advertisers will have to go where the users go,” says Wojcicki, sitting outside her office at the Googleplex, sipping a “detox” lemonade with maple syrup and a dash of cayenne. “A big chunk of dollars will follow.”
Wojcicki envisions an operating system for advertising that can connect search, display, YouTube and branded content, and bundle it all up into campaigns that span computers, smartphones, tablets, connected TVs and—who knows?—maybe Google Glass. Some marketers are moving quickly in that direction. For the recent launch of its D Rose 4 sneakers, Adidas ran ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network, a partnership of some 2 million sites, backed up by mobile ads for a second-screen experience and search ads to catch those who want to buy them right away.
For some time Wojcicki has talked about the “perfect ad,” the one that people see at precisely the time they want to know about a product or are ready to buy it. Search ads now approach that ideal for direct sales, but Wojcicki pictures image ads, supplemented by data on personal preferences and behavior, that can plant the seed for brand or product preference just as well. It’s an advertising axiom that people are more receptive to messages when they’re leaning back on the couch watching TV than when engaged in online activities. Wojcicki contends the potential is for just the opposite. “If users are engaging with something, they’re choosing to see it,” she says, and Google can use that overt choice to serve even more relevant ads.
So how would a Web display ad—largely, the vilified banner—engage?
Upstairs at Google’s display-ad headquarters off the main campus in Mountain View, Calif. scrawled equations blanket a wall-size whiteboard. The equations are a scrap of the impossibly complex mathematical formulas that power its $12.5 billion display network business. “They turn into beautiful rich-media ads,” Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, explains dreamily as we walk by.
When Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, he told Mohan to “revolutionize” display ads so they’re just as useful as Google’s obscenely profitable search ads. Mohan, a veteran of pre-Google DoubleClick, is a true believer. (With a reported $100 million in stock grants to keep the likes of Facebook and Twitter at bay, he isn’t driven by the need for more money.) He has bought or built what even rivals concede is the broadest set of software needed by advertisers and publishers to sell and place ads, including a state-of-the-art ad exchange that sells space as fluidly as the Nasdaq sells stock.
Mohan, who likes to decry the 40% of “spray and pray” TV advertising he says is wasted on indifferent audiences, offers a vision of the future in which Google can marry its data about individual consumers with the reach of TV and measure the results, too.
Google can generate that reach with its display network, which ­ranges from tiny outfits to the New York Times and USA Today. It serves ads on those websites for a cut of revenue. (Tellingly, even NBC partakes, though Google has put a big, fat target on its back.) The network ­reaches 90% of the Web’s population and serves impressions to a billion people worldwide a month. It was tough sledding early on, as ads began showing up on dodgy niche sites, but an ongoing cleanup campaign has big brand advertisers increasingly interested. The number of advertisers booking space months ahead—an option chiefly used by big marketers looking to influence brand consideration—has quadrupled from a year ago, but Google isn’t offering specifics.
Still, the banner ads have been losing out to “native” ads, which use content rather than a boring banner to attract people’s attention. “Facebook is a bigger bet for us right now than YouTube,” says Laurent Fa­racci, the U.S. chief marketing officer for Reckitt Benckiser, owner of brands such as Lysol and Clearasil. Instead, Mohan has bet on rich “engagement ads” for the display network. For instance, one might expand to play videos, games or apps when hovered over for two seconds. Samsung recently ran millions of them to play a live video stream of a new smartphone and smartwatch. In June Burberry ran display and mobile ads through Google that prompted people to snap a photo of their own puckered-up lips and send the digital imprint of the kiss to a loved one.
They’re starting to work. Now used in about 1,000 campaigns daily, engagement ads command around double the price of standard banners, which vary wildly but average around $3 per thousand viewers reached. That’s partly because advertisers can choose not to pay unless someone actually views those ads—like those who pay for clicks rather than views in the banner world—so they’re more valuable. Still, branding remains a challenge for a company whose success so far derives from cold mathematics. Back at the BrandLab, there’s an elegant arrangement of two dozen digital photo frames mounted on a pedestal, all playing videos of flames. “Great stories are told around the campfire,” a Google project manager explains. Cute. Except this campfire gives off no heat. For that, Google needs some of the sizzle of Hollywood.
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The warren of studios and soundstages southwest of Hollywood is strewn with cameras, lights, toolboxes and half-empty coffee cups. One stage features stock horror-movie sets, like the hotel hall from The Shining. In another studio, three women, one of them with scissors in hand, are preparing to film a video on how to cut your own bangs. Once a hangar where Hughes Aircraft built the Spruce Goose in the 1940s, this 41,000-square-foot building is now YouTube Space LA, possibly the world’s largest production facility dedicated to online video.
It’s YouTube’s latest bid to shed its dog-on-a-skateboard-video image and make the site a cleaner, more well-lit place for big TV marketers. That bid began a couple of years ago with YouTube’s $300 million drive to create some 200 TV-like channels from the likes of Shaquille O’Neal and Amy Poehler. While they don’t have TV networks quaking just yet, YouTube has been able to command higher ad prices closer to those of TV than Web display ads. YouTube gross ad revenue jumped 51% in 2013 to $5.6 billion, netting $2 billion after payments to content and ad partners, according to eMarketer.
Here’s the funny thing, though: It turns out that some of the most popular channels are not network wannabes. They’re from producers such as PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles, invisible to those over 30. Likewise, some of the most popular ads on YouTube don’t even look like the TV ads that Google has hoped to capture. It’s dawning on big marketers from American Express to General Electric that to take advantage of the social and interactive nature of online they need to forge a new sensibility, not simply rerun TV commercials.
In a new take on its long-running Campaign for Real Beauty, for instance, Dove launched a video on YouTube in April that featured an FBI-trained forensic artist sketching two portraits of women. One was based on their own descriptions and another on a stranger’s, which produced more attractive images. By May the Unilever brand’s touching three-minute video had drawn more than 114 million views worldwide, becoming the most-viewed online video ad ever. “It’s not just 30-second ads,” says Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s director of content strategy. “It’s creating something that people want to engage with and share with friends.”
So now it’s up to Byrne, whose previous job was head of YouTube’s original programming push, to make it easy for big brands to reach YouTube’s 1 billion monthly viewers.
Similar to Rozic’s ad-campaign boot camps in the BrandLab, Byrne brings companies such as PepsiCo and Johnson &amp; Johnson to YouTube LA for a four-day workshop on creating compelling stories, videos and YouTube channels. He’s aiming to get more than 100 advertisers into the program this year, both at YouTube LA and in a new combo studio and BrandLab being built in New York.
If Byrne has his way, the new world of brand marketing online will look a lot like a shoot at an unassuming neo-eclectic house in Anaheim Hills, 45 minutes southeast of Los Angeles. In the living room a crew of six is filming the sixth episode of Grace’s Faces, on Bobbi Brown Cosmetics’ I love makeup channel on YouTube. It features Grace Helbig, a 28-year-old YouTube star whose own self-produced channel, Daily Grace, draws more than 2 million subscribers to her wacky takes on life. For this new show, Helbig shows up at the doors of fellow YouTube stars to do a makeover.
Her subject this day is Rebecca Black, the 16-year-old who became an instant star in early 2011 for her self-produced monotonous pop hit, “Friday,” that year’s most-watched video on YouTube. Marc Reagan, manager of artistry at Bobbi Brown, is showing Black how to apply various kinds of makeup. Dull barks from a dog banished to the garage only add to the authenticity, apparently. Helbig jumps into the frame, bubbling with a whiff of irony, “You look like an angel!” For a companion show, Touching Your Stuff, Helbig prowls the house rifling through personal effects. “In this medium you can get your Idol moment without paying $20 million,” says Reza Izad, whose Collective Digital Studio produces I love makeup and more than 200 other channels, such as the Annoying Orange—a piece of talking citrus that heckles other fruit until they get sliced with a knife.
It’s all pretty nutty, but there’s nothing amateur about Grace’s Faces. Or even overtly commercial. Bobbi Brown isn’t mentioned anywhere in Grace’s Faces despite the use of its cosmetics. Still, the company says it’s happy with the 300,000 views the channel got the first week and the 70,000 channel subscriptions it drew in the next two weeks. “We felt like comedic programming would be in line with our brand personality and would resonate with a younger audience,” says Bobbi Brown President Maureen Case. Marketers don’t pay YouTube to run the shows, but they do pay to run lots of ads to drive people to watch them.
Google will ultimately win this race for a simple reason: Video ads perform better than TV spots, says David Cohen, Universal McCann’s chief investment officer, based on multiple studies his agency has done. “But TV advertising is a frictionless system,” he adds, “a well-oiled machine.” Google can play around with Larry Page’s moon shots, one of which might eventually land, but what will pay for those flights of fancy? Making digital display just as free of friction, something Google knows how to do. It’s just a matter of time.

Google Wants It All

In the next three years, China will spend close to $1 billion buying a share of Africa’s digital satellite television market.
It is big business that is not welcomed by everyone.
As dozens of African countries migrate from analogue to digital television, China has already purchased its way into a strong position that is likely to get stronger.
Since 2000, China has invested in Africa’s broadcast networks. This firm hand has seen China shift from technical support to supplying what is on the screen.
“China has been in Africa for a lot longer than most people think. If you remember most liberation movements, Africa got assistance from China as well as Russia. Back then in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, it was more of cooperation in the struggle for liberation,” says Wellington Radu, head of programs at Media Monitoring Africa, a non-profit media watchdog.
Chinese media group StarTimes is at the heart of Africa’s digital terrestrial migration, with roughly 2.5 million subscribers on the continent.
“We can only speculate as to why China is increasingly investing in Africa’s media space. It is about how African governments choose to handle China’s investments so that they work to their advantage,” Radu says.
So far, a mere handful of African countries have launched digital terrestrial television (DTT), and it is expected that 100 million homes in the continent will switch by 2015.
DTT migration on a national level is a relatively new venture for the continent, and in many cases a number of countries do not have the policy or the strategy to switch to a fully-digital landscape.
African countries are looking to companies like StarTimes, already present in eight of the continent’s countries, to bankroll the migration.
One of the issues is that this could put most of Africa’s pay television market in the hands of a foreign player.
“To me it represents a serious question around how [this] will this impact democratic processes and spaces. On the one hand it empowers you. At the same time it scares me if I think about the fact that if I allow the Chinese to do this, how much power does my government have over what they know I’m accessing on the net, what I’m writing, who I’m talking to?” says Sanusha Naidu from the Open Society Foundation of South Africa.
Meanwhile, StarTimes has spent $127 million in Nigeria to make sure that 16 of the country’s states will receive its digital signals.
“I think what’s interesting as well is the Chinese don’t want to go to the media partner, they want to go to the state. They understand where the power to release licenses lies, who has the power to make the decision,” says Naidu.
Earlier this year, the Pan African Network group, a part of StarTimes, won a controversial signal distribution license tender in Kenya.
The license provides the group with ownership of the platform on which broadcasters will have to grant transmission of their content, giving StarTimes a large portion of Kenya’s television market.
The company has however been accused of attempting to heavily monopolize the continent’s DTT space even before its birth, which has drawn criticism of China.
“In an infrastructure sense, it’s providing that platform, but I think it’s the next step, the content. What’s interesting is [African countries] are earning a name for themselves but not actually creating their own content,” says Yu-Shan Wu, a researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
Naidu nevertheless believes that China’s role in Africa’s DTT migration could provide the possibility of a number of countries turning into Big Brother states.
“It does empower African countries, which can be positive and negative at the same time. It can actually be a paradox within itself. What happens with enabling African countries to launch, or helping them with the digital [migration], is that you run the risk of actually using the way in which China interprets its own technology, its use of its own digital space and capabilities to spy on its own people,” Wu explains.
The fear is that Africa is going to lose control of what people watch, and countries will have to be cautious of what China could do once in the continent’s digital space.

Megabucks China Coming To  A TV Screen Near You

When Marlon Parker, 36, founded Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs) in the poverty-stricken township of Athlone near Cape Town, where unemployment, gangsterism and drug abuse are rife, his main aim was to give people hope. He quickly realized the best way to do this was to create sustainable ways of income generation.
In 2008, Parker launched a volunteer-driven IT and social media training program for the many unskilled people in his community. The RLabs Academy, as he called it, has trained more than 14,000 people in the past five years. It offers 15 courses, from technology to entrepreneurship, social innovation and project management.
As the program grew, Parker launched Living Labs, a sideline project where newly trained people create mobile and internet solutions for social change. Products include mobile chat platforms, crowd-sourcing mobile applications for consumer pricing data, mobile publishing and web data analytics applications.
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“I realized that the human capital we are creating is a major resource. We could compete with other service providers. We started selling our products to companies, or hire out consultants to firms that want to leverage their social and digital media strategies,” says Parker.
Parker realized that RLabs, which employs 70 full-time staff, needed to think entrepreneurially to sustain itself in the long-term. In 2010, he started an entity to sell Living Labs’ community-focused technologies to the private sector.
“We get ideas to a stage where they can become businesses in their own right,” he says.
One of those successful ideas is Jammix, a counseling service application that allows people to chat to a counselor using a text messaging system on their cellphones. More than three million people in poor communities have been using the service.
“When we saw how popular and useful the application was, we commercialized the technology and sold part of it to external investors for a substantial amount of money,” says Parker.
Another RLabs invention is Uusi, an application that allows artisanal, semi- and unskilled workers to browse job ads on their cellphones. The free service, financed by advertising, has been used by more than 300,000 people, with one out of five finding work.
“The best thing about the application is that it was developed by a man who was unemployed for almost 20 years. He was trained by RLabs and now makes money helping others find jobs,” explains Parker.
When Parker realized how many ideas developed in the Living Labs had the potential to become businesses, he launched an incubation program. Every year, RLabs selects seven or eight product ideas and, with a financial injection of $20,000 each, grooms them into fully-fledged ventures within nine months.
In just over two years, RLabs incubated 22 businesses. It owns a small equity stake in each of them, using the profits to fund new ventures.
“Of those 22 businesses, we already sold three and managed to make 10 times our investment back,” Parker says with pride.
Today, Parker replicates the RLabs model by incubating other social enterprises through impact investing and social franchising around the world.
“We have expanded to 20 countries, mainly in Africa, but also in Europe, Southeast Asia, Canada and Brazil. For us, it’s amazing to see something that started in the Cape Flats to be used in the United Kingdom,” he says.
In South Africa, RLabs created more than 1,000 full-time jobs through its offshoots. By the end of the current financial year, the social enterprise expects to make $1 million.
Parker keeps pursuing new opportunities. His goal for the next two years is to establish RLabs on seven continents.
“The only problem is who will be going to go to Antarctica,” he jokes.
“If you create something that has a big impact, it makes a big echo. I want to create something that echoes into eternity.”
Parker has a skill for creating something out of nothing, because he was once an unskilled worker from South Africa’s poverty-stricken Cape Flats.
“I grew up in the typical scenario: single parent, lots of siblings, all living in my grandmother’s house, in an area where there were gangs, lots of drugs and hardly a future,” he says.
Although he was the first in his family to complete high school, there was no money to attend university. As the eldest of five, Parker was expected to contribute to the family income and took a job pushing trolleys at Cape Town’s international airport. Despite his slim prospects, Parker kept dreaming. He remembers yearning to join the middle class.
“My biggest ambition in life was to get a job where I can wear a shirt and a tie.”
For two years, he saved every penny until he had put aside $50—just enough to pay a university administrative fee.
Parker quit his airport job to study computer programming at the Cape Town Peninsula University of Technology. Because he was broke, he walked the 20-odd kilometers to and from campus every day.
What saved him from falling into deep debt was his knack for statistics—a subject most students struggled with. He became a statistics tutor before graduating, at the age of 21, financing his studies along the way.
Parker worked as a business intelligence consultant for an IT company for a while, and later as a full-time lecturer. But his entrepreneurial spirit propelled him to do something bigger.
“I wanted to use technology to bring about social change. Although the term social entrepreneur wasn’t even coined yet,” he says.
With RLabs, he has done good and made a profit.

Profit vs Gangsters

Few people are as keen to bridge Africa’s digital divide and connect the continent to the global information infrastructure as Funke Opeke.
As an engineer, entrepreneur, mother, mentor and founder of Main Street Technologies and CEO of MainOne Cable Company, a trailblazing telecoms infrastructure provider out of Africa’s most populous economy, she is helping to attract more females into the “meritocracy” of  science and mathematics and deepening the strategic alliances between the business, computing technology and telecommunications landscape.
Once described by a telecoms industry buff as a “brilliant mind; and a nice, easy going, friendly geek”, FORBES AFRICA also found her to be a witty, diligent executive with a canny flair for corporate diplomatese. She was also once worth millions of dollars on paper… but that’s a story for another day.
Opeke excelled in mathematics and physics at school but loathed biology. Her father’s career choice for her was medicine. She however had other ideas, enrolling for undergraduate and graduate-level degrees in electrical engineering at Nigeria’s University of Ife in Ile-Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, and Columbia University in the United States. She spent the next two decades in North America gaining invaluable international engineering and management experience, and during that time she noticed that the poor statistics of females in engineering did not significantly improve.
“I was the only female in my class at Ife,” she says. Social profiling is partly to blame for this. Engineering in Nigeria, and even in a matured market economy like the United States is still somewhat riddled with gender stereotypes.
“Even in computing today, you still hear things like ‘whilst guys write code, women can only check or test code,” she says.
While engineering might be struggling to attract more female talent, Nigerians have had no qualms embracing digital mobile technology. The country had about 450,000 functional telephone lines for a population of about 140 million people as at December 2001. By December 2012, it had 113 million active subscriber lines, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the industry regulator.
Nigeria’s cellular transformation began with telecoms industry reforms that culminated in the 2002 auctions of GSM licenses for $285 million each to Econet Wireless in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s MTN and Nigerian-owned CIL. All the new operators had grossly underestimated their market projections for Nigeria. As the country gradually became one of the fastest growing telecoms markets in the world, Nigerians flocked home in droves, especially professionals in computing, engineering and telecoms law, whose skills were in short supply.
In 2005, Opeke quit her job as executive director of Verizon Communications Wholesale Division in the USA to take up a role as chief technology officer of MTN Nigeria. The MTN experience lasted only a few months. She moved on to help with the resuscitation and privatization of state-owned Nitel (Nigerian Telecommunications), acting for a while as chief operating officer of the still moribund entity. With entrenched institutional graft and high-wired politics, it became obvious that Nitel was a complicated case; and barely two years after upending her career and cozy life in the States, Opeke was jobless, unfulfilled and in search of new meaning for her life in Lagos.
This turbulent landing into the deep waters of Nigerian telecommunications helped Opeke identify salient opportunities in the sector, especially the need to upgrade West Africa’s internet infrastructure. It also prepared her adequately for the rough and tumble realities of doing business in Africa. She could see an opportunity: everyone was tilling the retail space, but Nigeria lacked robust connectivity at the enterprise level. She galvanized private and institutional investors, and established Main Street Technologies, a telecoms infrastructure provider, which gave birth to MainOne. No mean feat for someone who was barely three years old in town.
“After almost 25 years in the US, I saw an absence of telecoms infrastructure for business. I found it fascinating that we were running our ATMs on GPRS networks, and based on my experience, no country ran its business on mobile networks. The mobile network infrastructure is not robust and resilient enough, even though technology is developing to allow us to push data around more efficiently, I still don’t know serious stock exchanges functions or defense applications that run purely on mobile infrastructure…that was one of my key motivations for joining Nitel.”
“Because a lot of African countries never had well established telecommunications infrastructure, we were able to start with mobile and create a veneer of infrastructure but that underlying, unifying infrastructure, that enables different companies new services to plug in to, does not exist,” she argues.
A decade after the GSM auctions, and despite multi-million dollar investments in the sector, cellular teledensity has clearly improved. But decades of underinvestment meant a lack of bandwidth capacity for international traffic, a decrepit nationwide backbone and total disregard of the all important ‘last mile’ infrastructure, which is the bedrock of municipal and metropolitan access to data and voice-based communications services. She therefore disagrees with the view that Africa is awash with bandwidth, notwithstanding the plethora of fiber optic cables between Africa and Western Europe.
“The real challenge is getting the capacity to the people who require it. We are leapfrogging in some services but we are not necessarily deepening the infrastructure. We are dealing with situations now where some of the landlocked countries have so much difficulty getting access to the internet because they do not have the infrastructure, but they have mobiles for phone calls. No backbone, no last mile, only mobile, and mobile voice.”
To plug this gap, MainOne Cable Company is investing in its own terrestrial infrastructure in Nigeria. This pan-Nigeria link will enable ‘efficient, more affordable’ connectivity inland, and assist the hook up to the company’s coastal fiber optic link. MainOne currently employees 250 people; its initial capitalization of $250 million was for its trans-Atlantic submarine cable, which was completed in 2010. With clients in Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Ghana and Nigeria, the company is looking to expand its services to Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon. Opeke reckons the current worth of the business is about $500 million. The firm continues to reinvest extant revenues into the business and will open its new data center in 2014, a strategic milestone development for the company and tactical response to customer needs for hosting and outsourcing services.
“The new baby when fully deployed will cost us between $40 and $50 million,” Opeke says.
MainOne’s large institutional customers wanted more than reliable connectivity from the company.
“As connectivity improves and becomes the norm, companies will migrate to outsourced facilities. Private cloud computing infrastructure as a service will grow. Our data centre will provide co-location spaces and handle disaster recovery activities, and we believe this is the first of its kind in this environment, indeed in West Africa.”
The fact that MainOne will be competing for a share of the corporate services market with established operators like MTN, Airtel, Glo and Etisalat, Vodacom, across Africa does not bother the bandwidth queen.
“Our focus is our key asset. We operate at the high-end of the market where customers expect 100% reliability. We’ll continue to invest in world class infrastructure. We will continue to grow because we provide a high degree of quality and accountability that is not typical of service providers in this region,” Opeke says.

The Bandwidth Queen

She sits at the helm of a multinational cable and satellite company and is one of the most powerful women in African media, but for Abiola Alabi, this is a long way from the character in the initial script.
As a determined young college entrant, Alabi’s interests were elsewhere. From an academic Nigerian home, her future as a doctor had been scripted. She enrolled as a pre-med at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the United States. It wasn’t long before Alabi’s interest turned to pharmacy.
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“After one summer as an intern pharmacist however, I realized that these careers, were not the best match for my personality,” she says.
An interest in Africa led to a new path. Alabi, who had become very active on campus, became affiliated with groups and organizations that nurtured her new interests. She became a member of international student groups and president of the African Student Organization on campus.
Identifying ways in which her new experiences could affect her interests in the continent, Alabi made the decision to major in public health with a marketing minor.
“I knew that if I majored in public health, I could still end up making a contribution to the continent, in one way or the other,” she says.
After college, an opportunity saw her move to South Korea to work for an international student organization that promotes international exchange programs.
“I was able to start seeing different parts of the world that I had never experienced before,” she says.
“I moved to Seoul for two years and was completely fascinated by the type of development happening there. I thought, ‘this place is on the precipice of something really big.’ There was a huge investment in education in Asia and I was mind-blown, by the unbelievable work ethic. It was also cultural and felt very intense but the development was just as intense,” says Alabi.
After two years in Seoul, the Asian affair was far from over, as Alabi secured a role with Korean car company Daewoo, where she worked to launch a new product in the United States.
After this, Alabi put her marketing knowledge to use in a new e-commerce venture with a focus on youth marketing and destination sites development for students where everything from course books to dormitory furniture was sold.
“The company didn’t survive long but this was an important phase for me as it really helped me develop as a professional by understanding the upside and downside of taking risks when it comes to businesses. It was also such an exciting time and a great learning curve to understand how technology was going to change people’s lives tremendously with e-commerce. It was clear that we were in the digital phase and everything would change with it,” she says.
After working in traditional marketing jobs in the automotive and e-commerce industries, Alabi decided to take a leap as she explored a new career path in broadcasting and production.
“This was an interesting experience. I started off doing sponsorships and marketing for Sesame Street in New York, which was a production viewed in over 120 countries.”
Alabi’s international portfolio created an avenue to visit Africa more often.
“I was exploring partnerships and opportunities in different African countries and through that, I started to have meetings with M-Net. On one occasion, I was on my way back to the United States when they called me up and proposed a partnership with me,” she says.
As this was in perfect synergy with her desire to be involved in the development of the continent, this was an opportunity Alabi had to embrace. In 2008, she joined M-Net Africa, a multinational satellite television company, as managing director. With this fresh start, much lay ahead for Alabi and her team. She had one question: how to expand, build and elevate the brand from where it was to a greater level.
“That was my challenge,” she says.
Expanding M-Net’s African content portfolio was her biggest task. With only one Africa Magic channel at the time, Alabi’s team needed to create a home for African programing. The plan was to create a diverse portfolio of content. Relevance became vital as they produced and bought content tailored for the continent. They were on a mission to build a strong African brand that viewers could identify with and call their own.
“It’s not just about telling externals how you’d like to be projected. It’s also about how you want to project yourself to yourself. Our images are like mirrors and we were very particular about improving the quality of our programs,” says Alabi.
The need to create an array of choices as well as a home for African content for their viewers saw the development of additional channels to the Africa Magic platform. M-Net launched local language channels, starting with the Yoruba, Hausa and Kiswahili language channels. This increased the amount of content being produced in local languages and created a distribution outlet for independent African producers. Five Africa magic channels were rolled out as part of M-Net’s stable.
Content had to be moved from the existing M-Net international platform to a premium channel, Africa Magic Entertainment, earlier in the year. This saw a complete overhaul of the Africa Magic platform.
In spite of the infrastructural challenges that affect doing business in Africa, Alabi attributes the success of the brand to the dedication of her team and the can-do attitude of Africans at large.
“This really is the ingenuity of it all, for me. Yes, there are challenges but finding ways to deal with them, is the only way forward,” she says.
Despite her dedication to the brand she manages, there is room for Alabi to do more.
“I believe we all have a role to play, no matter how small and I love engaging with organizations that have a purpose of making a difference,” she says.
She recently joined the Pan African Civil Society Organization, Africa 2.0; she’s also a member of the Africa Leadership Network (ALN) and was named a 2012 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Alabi has kept to her ambitious track record as she also served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Entertainment in 2010.
When she isn’t working, Alabi enjoys spending time with her family and travelling with her husband.
From pre-med days to M-Net Africa, Alabi might have come full circle but also believes there are never enough circles to draw.  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2031" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Biola-Alabi-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />

From American Medicine  To African Television

At the age of 20, Rob Stokes was sitting in his room at university, thinking of how he was going make pocket money. Then it came to him—why not follow in Mark Shuttleworth’s footsteps and start a business? Thirteen years later that company, called Quirk, has a $10 million turnover and an unusual name.
“I was literally lying on the couch, thinking I need to start a business… I looked over at my cat and her name was Quirk and I thought ‘That’s an unusual word, it’s short and I’ll probably get the domain name’ and off I went. So Quirk is actually named after my cat. I’d like to have something more fancy to tell you but that’s the reality,” says Stokes.
Stokes is an easy going roller. His backpack contains nectarines, apples and pumpkin seeds along with documents and magazines. He says it has nothing to do with being a health enthusiast; he just likes to eat on-the-go. A decade ago, when Quirk was still in its infancy, Stokes was so broke that all he had to eat were carrots.
“I once had nothing but carrots for two weeks, true story. I actually went yellow around my mouth, and I’m already orange so it was really weird… But hell if you’ve got no money, what choice do you have?”
For the first five to six years, he was so broke his parents paid his rent. The fact that his friends were earning fat salaries in the corporate world frustrated Stokes, at times, but his entrepreneurial spirit kept Quirk alive. He was inspired by a lecture given by South African entrepreneur and millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who was also the country’s first space tourist.
“…I didn’t get to meet him but he was massively inspiring… And I remember watching that lecture and I thought, ‘I can do that. I can be that guy’. I’m definitely not as smart as him, I definitely know that, but I’m entrepreneurial.
“I’d [also] been reading about a guy called Michael Dell, from Dell Computers. He started in his dorm room, he cut the door in half so he could sell computers over the counter, and I just thought, ‘That’s an awesome story’. So I was kind of inspired by those guys,” says Stokes.
Stokes is described as inspiring by one of South Africa’s respected journalists and ICT commentators, Arthur Goldstuck.
“Initially [Quirk] struck me as just another SEO, then I saw the book he wrote and realised he’d become one of the thought leaders in the online marketing environment and not just an SEO,” says Goldstuck.
The term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process that companies, such as Quirk, use to get a company’s name read more often by those searching on search engines such as Google and YouTube. The aim is to increase a website’s popularity by gaining more hits.
Quirk has branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London and employs 200 but in the early days things were different.
“I remember the first client who came to our offices; he was just blown away because it was the filthiest office in the world. Our ‘boardroom’ was about five chairs, none of which were the same, around a beer crate, with a tray on it… I think he appreciated that we were doing our best, so he gave us a piece of business…”
“There are many times when, if we hadn’t landed a piece of business within a week or two, we would have gone bankrupt,” says Stokes.
Stokes is also the chairman of the Silicon Cape Initiative, a private sector community movement founded by two South African hi-tech entrepreneurs, Vinny Lingham and Justin Stanford. The initiative wants a community of entrepreneurs, the best tech talent and foreign investment.
The Western Cape Province has produced some of the country’s brightest tech entrepreneurs including Stokes; Lingham—who lives in Silicon Valley in California; Herman Heunis—founder of MXit and Ludwick Marishane, who was recently named one of the 12 brightest young minds in the world in 2011, by Google.
Stokes thinks that more could be done.
“My biggest frustrations at Silicon Cape is actually how few university students start businesses… it creates an opportunity cost to become an entrepreneur because a [graduate] leaves UCT and suddenly Old Mutual pay him R40,000 ($5,000) a month. So now becoming an entrepreneur is not only about risking what you have, it’s about risking what you could have.”
It irritates Stokes that the tech business is not yielding more. An unreliable internet connection and bureaucracy are just a couple of problems that Stokes sees in the way.
“Internet connectivity [is a] huge issue. I mean, business would be much bigger and more successful now, on a global level, if there was better internet. So the more customers there are online, the more [our] kind of marketing is going to be of value.”
As for bureaucracy, when he registered his business in South Africa he filled his form out with a blue pen. The form stated black pen only, so what would’ve have taken him three months, took six.
“When I first registered the Quirk cc, it took me six months. When I first registered the limited company in London it took me 24 hours… Is it worth holding back a small business for three months because they used the wrong color of pen?”
What is his tip for upcoming tech entrepreneurs?
“Hitting the road and selling the stuff, that the best thing you can do when you’re young. Don’t wait.”
The thirty three-year-old’s next dream is not to be a space astronaut; in the next ten years he wants to open a cricket academy in the Transkei in the Eastern Cape.
“I want to be remembered for my cricket school, it’s going to be the greatest cricket school in the world”.
It seems like a quirky plan

Name The Business After Your Cat And Paws For Success

This is the story of businessman Ronnie Apteker, his money and his expensive passion. A man sharp enough to get in early on the internet boom in Africa’s biggest economy; a man wise enough to have sold out before the market became crowded, three years later, for $55 million. He doesn’t know how much he is worth, but does admit he never has to work again.
This is also a man who has lost nearly $7 million in 11 years, chasing the elusive dream of fathering a blockbuster movie.
“I would be far wealthier if I had done nothing for the last 11 years, but my life has been richer for the risks I have taken… I love story telling. I love magic and I love trying to inspire people,” he says.
This month will see the release of a film he thinks is a winner that will compensate for the years of pain and losses. It is a low-budget film called Material, set in the gritty inner-city district of Fordsburg in Johannesburg and starring South African stand-up comedian Riaad Moosa. He says it could be a cheap and cheerful international hit like Bend it Like Beckham or Billy Elliot.
It all started in the early 1970s in Cape Town, when Apteker’s father won a 16mm film projector in a game of backgammon. From then on, Sunday night was film night at the Aptekers.
“The whole neighbourhood in Cape Town used to come in and see them. You remember those leather cases with the handles. In our rented house we used to watch Dirty Harry, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I grew up in a movie-watching home. I watched more movies by the time I was 13 than most people watch by the time they are 30,” he says.
Apteker’s working life took a different turn. It was the internet, not movies, that became his bread and butter. In 1993, he founded Internet Solutions in the days when 99.9% of South Africans didn’t know even what it was.
“People used to phone us and say the internet is broken, or they used to ask who they can email. I used to give them my email address and they used to email me because they had no one else to email!” he laughs.
The internet made Apteker a fortune before he was 30. Then he tried a much harsher business—movies.
“If you build a cheap house, you can sell it for half price and get some money back. If you make a bad movie, you may not sell one ticket and lose everything. You can even end up owing money. It is not a normal business, it’s like a casino.”
Apteker started writing scripts in 1996 and the first film came in 2000—a 95-minute movie shot in Los Angeles called Purpose, the tale of the battle for the soul of a young entrepreneur working in California’s Silicon Valley.
“A lot of people said it reminded them of The Social Network, but sadly, it wasn’t as good,” says Apteker.
The film didn’t do well. It cost $8 million and Apteker was lucky enough to claw back $3 million by selling it to distributors Lakeshore International.
A string of homegrown movies with limited success followed, including: Jerusalema, The Flyer and Crazy Monkey: Straight Outta Benoni.
Fast forward to the latest offering, Material, starring South African comic flavor-of-the-month, Moosa. In many ways, the film mirrors his own life. In a nutshell, Material is the story of a father who wants his son to stick to his day job—that is, running the family store—instead of telling jokes on stage.
In real life, Moosa also gave his day job the slip. He trained as a doctor at the University of Cape Town and carried out his internship at Natalspruit Hospital, near Johannesburg, before settling down to practise as a GP in Cape Town for a couple of years.
The draw of the stage proved too strong and in the evenings, Moosa was cracking around the small theatres of the Western Cape. He had no illusions and already knew what it felt like to “die”—as the actors say—on stage.
“It used to happen a lot when I was younger. The most difficult time was when I was doing magic in high school. It was comedy magic. I had studied at the College of Magic in Cape Town. I was supposed to make a ball fly across the stage—there was a wire involved. There was a dude taking photos with flash and every time the flash went off, you could see the washing line across the stage. I was trying to make it dramatic and it was obvious. I heard one little girl say: ‘There is a wire there, mum!’ At that moment, I thought ‘I had another eight minutes to go of this sham.”
Material is Moosa’s first foray into film and he identifies with his character. “I am really proud of it. I think when people watch, they will laugh and cry. They will be challenged.”
So what happens if Moosa makes it to Hollywood and the big time? He pledges not to let success go to his head.
“What is this fame thing? One minute you are normal, the next minute you are shaving your head on the cover of Heat magazine. One minute you are normal, the next you are getting an 18-year-old pregnant. I prefer driving home at night and getting shouted at by my wife… I shouldn’t let it go to my head; I think through medicine you face reality head on.”
Apteker believes any success would be a good thing and refuses to give up his movie quest, whatever the cost.
“It is an obsession. I have got to get this right. It is like you either get this right or die trying. There is no middle ground in love, there is no middle ground in art. There is no middle ground when you are an entrepreneur—you either win or go home in a coffin,”  he says.
<h3>Well, Is It Any Good?</h3>
There is mistrust when it comes to homegrown cinema. Everyone has waited long for the great African movie—maybe, just maybe, Material is it. So says Rea Bantseke, who went to the preview screening in Sandton, near Johannesburg.
The story is simple. A young Muslim man wants to become a stand-up comedian, but has to do it behind his family’s back because it clashes with their culture. The movie examines clearly the struggle of a Muslim family to uphold its traditions in 21st century South Africa.
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I was looking for the mistakes and the glitches, but there was nothing. The movie is shot beautifully and it makes you feel like you are part of the family. The story flows and is well told.
Everyone will have something that they can identify with in this movie. It will make you laugh, it will make you question, it will bring a tear to your eye.
This unique movie is hard to classify as a genre because it fuses drama, romance and comedy. It is likely to appeal to all ages. Material will leave you with hope that if this story can see the light of day, there must be many more.
&nbsp;

Who Would Spend  $7 Million On A Dream?

More than 700 emails await Toby Shapshak, according to his Apple iPhone 4, lighting up on the retro red cabinet in the doorway of his Johannesburg home.
<div id="attachment_310" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-310" class="size-large wp-image-310" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTX8990-678x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="716" />“[The cellphone] changed from something you hold next to your ear, to something you hold in your hand and look at.” Toby Shaphak</div>“I’m sure there’s many more than that,” he says.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. During the late 1980s, Shapshak wouldn’t have known what an email was and would have been carrying a cellphone that you could hammer a nail in with.
Compare again the iPhone of 2011 to the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X of 1983—the iPhone has 200 hours of standby time, a global positioning system that can geographically locate where you are and can send a picture of your mother to Thailand in two seconds. You had to charge the Motorola DynaTAC for 10 hours to make a one-hour call and it was as light as a lump of lead.
Shapshak, the South African editor of international men’s electronic magazine, Stuff, was one of the first journalists in the country to own a cellphone. “I remember being one of the only journalists with a cellphone and it was completely remarkable to be able to call the newsroom and tell people where I was or what I was doing [and] for people to be able to get hold of me. I remember putting my cellphone number on my first business card. You had a land line, your office address and your postal address, then I had a cellphone number and along came email.”
Motorola came up with the mobile phone in 1983; it weighed nearly a kilogram and could only be used to make calls, nothing else, with a small black screen used to see the numbers punched in the keypad.
Two years later, it reached African shores. Its first African customer was the then government of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
<div id="attachment_312" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-312" class="size-large wp-image-312" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/7-1-1024x689.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="319" />Albert Gatare 2011</div>
According to the African Leadership Academy, President Mobutu Sese Seko issued the first ever private telecommunications licence to a company called Telecel, founded by Rwanda-born, Miko Rwayitare (who died in 2007) and American, Joseph Gatt.
Rwayitare and Gatt bought 200 of Motorola’s cellphones for President Mobutu and his administration, in a bid to convince the government to switch from land lines. They sold each phone for substantially more than what they were going for in the US at the time. It meant these phones were merely for the moneyed elite of Kinshasa.
Albert Gatare, Rwayitare’s youngest brother, was one of the first Africans to use the phone and says back then it was a symbol of wealth in the city.
“That time those phones were $3,000 or $4,000. It is difficult to understand [now] how people could have bought phones for that much.
“After the commercial launch, it became a symbol of high class; everyone knew that only ministers, CEOs and rich people had those types of phones. Today you take your phone and put it in your pocket, but that time when you went to a restaurant you would put it on the table, just to show off.”
<div id="attachment_311" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-311" class="size-large wp-image-311" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/4-717x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="677" />Joan Joffe 1994</div>
Telecel’s success was also helped by the continent’s poor fixed landline system, says Gatare. According to Mobile Monday, an international networking organization run by mobile industry professionals, their 2011 Africa report showed that the number of mobile phones exceeded the number of fixed lines by the year 2000. The African Development Bank says the number of land lines is declining.
The company expanded from Zaire into nine other countries: Burundi in 1992; Guinea in 1993; Madagascar in 1994; Central African Republic in 1995; Ivory Coast in 1996; Zambia in 1997 and Zimbabwe, Niger and Togo in 1998.
In South Africa, Joan Joffe was one of the people who launched Vodacom in 1994, the same year she picked up her first cellphone.
“It was amazing that you could walk around and speak. It weighed a ton, though; you could not put it in your handbag, but it was amazing,” she says.
“Our forecast was for 250,000 subscribers in the first 10 years. I can tell you that we had a huge party when the number of connections reached 50,000 towards the middle of the first year. It was a big deal for us,” says Joffe.
Vodacom has customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, and is considered one of the top four networks on the continent along with MTN, Airtel and Orange.
“Today single operators cannot survive, they must be part of a bigger group,” says Gatare.
Rwayitare sold 80% of his Telecel shares to various telecommunication companies, including Orascom in Egypt, MTN in the Ivory Coast and other smaller companies, for
around $47 million. He moved to South Africa, where he built the most expensive house in Johannesburg’s wealthy suburb, Sandhurst.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2010 41.4% of Africans had a cellular subscription.
One of them is South African entrepreneur Jenna Clifford. The founder and designer of a luxury jewellery brand, in the late 1980s, she had what she called her “porty”—short for portable telephone.
“It looked like a little metal suitcase, but it was state of the art at that time. My previous husband bought his first porty and I saw the benefit of being contacted outside of the office and bought one of my own, [but] you could not take it overseas, the costing was huge in those days,” she says.
As her finger glides along the iPhone 4 in her palm, she says: “It has liberated me. It is not rocket science; you check the picture and you click.
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“I felt intuitively that with the advent of the porty, more people would be using them and they would get smaller. Just like computers were once the size of rooms,” says Clifford. “I’m a bit of a prophet.”
Africa is second only to Asia regarding the highest number of mobile subscriptions. And it is not finished yet.

From A Brick To A Flick

Amolo Ng’weno always wanted to be a doctor. But when she went to college, it all changed. At Harvard University in the Unites States, Ng’weno, a then 20-something ambitious Kenyan girl, became fascinated with computers and everything they could do—especially transmitting information. Overnight, she fell for the new, wide world of technology.
“My first experience with computers was at a US trade exhibition when I was in high school, but I didn’t actually get to use a computer until I got to college,” she says.
<div id="attachment_304" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-304" class="size-medium wp-image-304" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Amollo-028-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Amolo Ng&#8217;weno</div>
Luckily, Harvard had a course for every student to learn the rudiments of computers.
“This experience totally changed my perspective on the tools for getting any kind of work done and has shaped my career ever since.”
Ng’weno studied psychology and social relations at Harvard, but the computer bug had bitten and not even a master’s in economics and public affairs at Princeton University, or working for the World Bank would get in the way.
Fate took a hand through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the east coast town of Cambridge. Here, two fellow Kenyans—Ayisi Makatiani and Karanja Gakio—had developed a similar obsession. So, when the three met one evening, breaking bread and sipping black coffee at a small café in Cambridge, the idea of an online news service was mooted. It began on an internet community, hosted at MIT, called KenyaNet. In 1994 it became Africa Online, the internet giant that lives to this day.
“We saw the utility of local news to the African diaspora and we thought the opposite would also be true; people in Kenya would want to communicate with the world and know what was going on internationally,” recalls Ng’weno, who quit as an economist with the World Bank in Washington to help set up Africa Online.
“It was the very early days of the internet in the US and although we were ambitious for our company, we didn’t dream it would change all our lives the way it has.”
As the internet boom kicked off, Africa Online shifted focus from providing news to connecting Africans to the internet. In 1995, it was bought by Boston-headquartered International Wireless, which became Prodigy. That year, Ng’weno was sent to launch the Kenyan operation, becoming the first internet service provider (ISP) in East Africa’s largest economy. A year later, perhaps after proving herself as start-up honcho, she was moved to Côte d’Ivoire to set up a subsidiary.
Africa Online was on a roll. It expanded to Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, with the three coffee drinkers from Cambridge in charge. It acquired several ISPs, such as Pipex Internet Solution (Swaziland), Net2000 (Kenya), UUNET (Namibia) and Swift Global (Uganda).
In 1998, Prodigy sold the company to African Lakes Corporation, a British investment firm that was diversifying from agriculture and mining. For a while, the company traded on the London Stock Exchange, enjoying favor from investors, then listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in 2001.
As the new century turned, the internet (dotcom) bubble burst, wiping out many companies around the world and leaving erstwhile eager investors in the red.
“The company needed additional cash for growth which could only be supplied by international investors,” says Ng’weno, who won’t reveal what stake she held in the company, in a country where too much wealth is frowned upon.
“At the same time, the internet bust and investor jitters about Africa had really hammered the share price of our UK parent company, The African Lakes Corporation, forcing its management to de-list from the London and Kenyan stock exchanges.”
In 2001 the three founders exited, with the company firmly in eight countries and the largest ISP in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa.
<div id="attachment_303" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-303" class="size-medium wp-image-303" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Amollo-035-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Surveying the scene: Amolo Ng&#8217;weno looks over Nairobi&#8217;s bustling city</div>
Six years later, in 2007, South African fixed-line telecommunications company Telkom SA bought Africa Online Limited from African Lakes Corporation for £10.32 million ($15.8 million). The ISP, which had been running at a loss, had just started to make some profit, but it was not enough to raise the necessary capital to take full advantage of the opportunities in Africa’s fast-growing telecoms industry.
Ng’weno left to work for a number of organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now, aged 46, Ng’weno is trying to make a comeback in the industry where she made her name, at a time when many would be slowing down.
In April 2011 she launched a business process outsourcing (BPO) company in Kenya, just a month after leaving Bill and Melinda Gates. Digital Divide Data (DDD) Kenya blends a for-profit technology business with social welfare.
“We’re a social enterprise,” she said recently in an interview at her office on the seventh floor of Paramount Plaza in Nairobi.
“Which means, while we’re a for-profit company in Kenya, we also have a social mission which is to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds a path out of poverty.”
Most of DDD Kenya shares are owned by the US NGO, also called Digital Divide Data (DDD), which received a grant of $895,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to bring its social enterprise model to Kenya. DDD has invested in an information technology services business that targets to train and employ 300 youths from slum areas in Nairobi.
The grant is part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Poverty Reduction through Information and Digital Employment (PRIDE) program. PRIDE is working in Africa to foster and scale up a new arm of the outsourcing industry called “impact sourcing” by supporting projects aimed at creating jobs for the poor.
Ng’weno, who is managing director at DDD, says the organization hires young people from Nairobi’s vast slums to deliver high-quality BPO services. There’s also a team of deaf people working as digital management operators.
“Our staff works with us half day and go to tertiary education the other half day,” she says. “It’s a model that has worked well for DDD in Asia, where our staff typically graduate from their university education, and from the company, after four to five years.  When they graduate, they are on a path to careers in IT and other fields that would have been difficult for them to access without our support.”
From 35 workers at inception, DDD Kenya has grown to more than 100.
“We don’t think profit is incompatible with achieving a social mission. We actually believe the profit motive is an important one—and the only way that we can grow our business sustainably so that we can fulfill our goal of providing employment and career development to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. If we don’t make a profit, we can’t deliver on our mission,” says Ng’weno.
It is this social enterprise that has anchored Ng’weno’s second coming on the internet platform, albeit at a more advanced level. The company is championing digital marketing by helping organizations use the internet to grow their brands and markets. Recently, the company became the first in the region to be certified by Google to offer advisory and technical services for the search engine giant’s AdWords advertising service. Ng’weno says DDD Kenya has a growing number of clients in Kenya drawn from various sectors including tourism, real estate and financial services as well as big clients across Africa and overseas.
Digital marketing covers a broad range of channels marketers can use to communicate with their customers. It could be anything from email, desktop text and banner ads, social media marketing or mobile and text ads.
But it is the banner ads placed on websites that have been attracting the attention of marketers and brand managers lately. With more than 25% of the 44 million people in Kenya online, according to the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), advertisers are increasingly realizing that they need to fish where the fish are.
“The internet has become an integral part of everyday life in Kenya and Africa and it’s changing the way people work, shop, look for information, communicate and meet people,” says Olga Arara-Kimani, Google Kenya’s country manager.
“This, coupled with the fact that advertisers are increasingly looking for mediums that deliver high, measurable returns on their investment, has led to higher proportions of ad spend going to online channels.”
A number of big businesses in Kenya are advertising online. Kenya has one of the highest internet penetration rates in Africa and emerging markets, currently at 25% and growing at 17% annually. About $8 trillion exchanges hands each year through e-commerce, but only a tiny fraction of that is in Africa. DDD Kenya hopes to increase this figure.
“Because it’s so targeted, this kind of online marketing is cost-effective. Many people want to get into digital marketing because it’s possible to know exactly who you are targeting.”
DDD Kenya recently diversified into electronic books. It is already digitizing reading materials for the government-run Kenya National Library Services, with a number of other projects in the pipeline. It’s betting on e-books and hopes publishers will buy into the idea.
“The Kenyan education system seems to give us a great pool of candidates, despite having gone to schools that are not seen as being high achievers. Our staff speak, read and write good English, which is important for all our international and many local clients.”
Harking back to the days when they set up Africa Online, Ng’weno says technology has come a long way on the continent. The infrastructure has improved dramatically, especially with the arrival of undersea cables.
“However, it’s still not clear to me why the entire internet slows down in the late afternoon (especially on Fridays),” she says.
For Ng’weno, training at Harvard, the world most prestigious business school that has produced some of the world’s biggest entrepreneurs played a part in shaping her into a shrewd entrepreneur. “Harvard is a great place to be challenged and to grow intellectually,” she says. “I’m sure it has contributed to my life in many different ways, which is the purpose of a good university education.”
Tenacity appears to run in the family. Her father, Hillary Ng’weno, was the owner and editor of the Weekly Review, Kenya’s first independent news magazine. He was a ground-breaker in lively and objective journalism. Ng’weno had a degree in mathematics and nuclear physics from Harvard. Fleur, her mother, is a naturalist and expert on bird life. She ran the Rainbow Magazine for children in the 1970s and 1980s.
So what does it take to be a great entrepreneur? Amolo Ng’weno says it is simply taking advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself and surviving disasters, so you are still there to fight another day.
In a patriarchal society like Africa, where men dominate business and leadership, success stories like Ng’weno’s are rare. You may wonder if being a woman has worked against her in business.
“People usually think it would be a disadvantage. But I’d say I was raised to see the potential in each individual, regardless of their sex or social background. And I think that’s what I’ve also found in my dealings with others.”
Tall and endowed with an African female figure, Ng’weno does not cut the image of a tech nerd. She’s easy in her attire and conservative in her use of jargon. Unlike the noisy tech types Ng’weno, who loves horses, talks as if it is not her job to be audible, yours to listen carefully.
On a warm Wednesday in Nairobi, she paces in her hi-tech office to oversee the Kenya National Library Services e-books project is completed on time. She is undeterred by road construction noises outside, which includes a huge trench outside her office building. It means she has to park her car 300 meters away and walk through the mess of rubble, earth, man and machine.
“Right now I’m too busy for hobbies,” she says when asked if she finds time for leisure. “Given the Nairobi traffic situation, maybe I will say, sitting in traffic listening to radio while doing email on my laptop computer. Our car was imported from Japan and can only get two stations so I listen to Ghetto Radio (a Nairobi radio station that broadcasts in local slang known as sheng) a lot.”
To succeed in business, she has learnt to turn what is perceived as her weaknesses on their heads. It all depends on how you look at strengths and weaknesses, she says.
“I am frequently told I’m impatient but I regard this more of a strength than a weakness. Similarly I can be detail-oriented and meticulous, which my staff complain about, but I think I’ve found a line of work in which that is, again, a strength rather than a weakness. Overall, I think most attributes can be strengths in some circumstances and weaknesses in others and the trick is to find the right combination.”
With a meticulous eye for detail backed with zeal for results, it is surprising that a team with Ng’weno on its side could go wrong. Yet, while running Africa Online, she realized that even IT wizards can make terrible miscalculations.
“We had acquired a company in Zimbabwe but we failed to take into account that our corporate cultures were very different,” she recalls. “Their IT people could not get on with our customer service people. Within a month most of their staff had resigned, taking with them most of their customers.”
Africa Online ended up paying money in Zimbabwe but getting next to nothing in return. “This,” Ng’weno says with a shy smile, “was a big lesson in thinking about corporate culture issues.”
Many more big lessons surely await the comeback kid in Kenya’s tough and competitive digital world.
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