Agriculture has become an increasingly crucial issue for African governments. Poor infrastructure and lack of long-term finance have been fingered as the culprits blocking Africa’s path to food security.
Africa’s last decade belonged to telecommunications. To achieve meaningful development, the next decade must witness massive investment and progress in the education, healthcare, electricity, water, road, rail and air transport sectors. This means economic diversification, urban decongestion and its economic gains, namely, rural development, inclusive growth, innovation, heightened productivity and spiraling employment.
Solid infrastructure will boost knowledge and agro-produce exchange between African nations.
Beyond infrastructure development and food security concerns, expanding food production will also have a positive impact on local and regional labor markets, as more people are absorbed into the agribusiness value chain.
Small scale farms produce 80% of the food consumed across Africa. Consequently, the agribusiness value chain is a short one, delivering little value to national economies. According to the African Export-Import Bank, Africa’s global share of food processing is less than 20%.
The paucity of processing, trading and retail mechanisms has restricted Africa’s agribusiness sector to the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. The current practice of just cultivating-to-sell restricts the value chain to a primary commodity-level activity. Service providers involved in input supplies (seeds, fertilizers, machinery), packaging, exporting, transportation, processing, and converting basic produce into finished goods are urgently needed to extend the value chain. De-risking the sector might also require the establishment of public and private-sector initiatives which enable farms and agro-allied concerns to access bio- and agro-technology, financial credit and risk assurance.
According to the World Bank, Africa’s agriculture sector could be worth $1 trillion by 2030 if infrastructure and financing challenges are overcome.
Slightly over 60% of all the uncultivated arable land in the world is in Africa. In Nigeria, only 40% of its 84 million hectares of arable land is cultivated. These productivity gaps can become Africa’s competitive edge.
Coming out of the 23rd AU Summit of Heads of State and Government in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, last July, African leaders adopted the Malabo Declaration, reinforcing a decade-old commitment (the 2003 Maputo Declaration) to end hunger and cut poverty in half by 2025.
To meet this lofty goal, the leaders reaffirmed their resolve to devote at least 10% of their national budgets to agricultural development. Only 10 countries have so far met this target. The Malabo Declaration raises the bar of focus and commitment to smallholder farmers and rural communities across the continent, says One.org, a campaigning and advocacy group which helped to galvanize pan-African and global support for the pact.
Africa’s leaders however stopped short of agreeing on a common formula for measuring the 10% target. Whichever way one looks at this matter, the key point is that the local and international appetite for Africa’s agribusiness sector has picked up.
Embedded in the declaration are a set of risk management and strategic corporate social objectives namely, operationalization of the African Investment Bank; increased support for intra-regional trade; adoption of climate-resilient farming strategies; responsible private sector investment; youth inclusion and employment targets; and mutual accountability for results.
Hopefully, Africa’s next decade will be fruitful. Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya seem well adjusted to the nuances of commercial and small-scale farming, producing and exporting excellent quality coffee, wine, citrus, vegetables, tea and flowers.
In Nigeria, an     Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) has transformed a once comatose sector into an engine of growth. Food imports declined from $19 billion in 2011 to $4.35 billion in 2013; bank lending to the sector as a share of total loans has also risen from 0.7% to 6% within two years. Over $4 billion private sector investment commitments has also been attracted to Nigerian agriculture over the last three years.
Earlier this year, Aliko Dangote, president of Dangote Industries, reached out to Kenya for agro-expertise. The Kenyans initially hesitated, pointing at Boko Haram and Ebola as the reasons why they feared coming to West Africa. But when they were offered a remuneration package that was too sweet to refuse, they accepted the challenge. They are now supporting Dangote’s sugarcane fields in Nigeria.
Money talks and agriculture is a multi-billion dollar business.

YOU CAN GROW MONEY  AFTER ALL

The economic and political transformation of a country directly correlates with the education level of its demographics. With national priorities like health care, infrastructure, housing etc, it’s impossible for countries to manage supporting the entire value chain of education, from primary to secondary to vocational and tertiary. Add infrastructure and skills-development to the need for integrated research-based learning synonymous with quality education and what you have is a glaring resource gap.
This dilemma is consistent across most countries in the world, particularly those with low GDP per capita. Rather than concerted efforts, governments have spread themselves thin trying to do everything with limited resources. This has unfortunately resulted in mismanagement, no accountability, corruption and disillusionment. The intangible destruction of long-term wealth creation is in excess of the annual financial allocation as there is a widening gap between skills needed and the output from the efforts.
A growing question therefore is: where does a government allocate its resources and how does it integrate private sector investments? The answer is complex and not a one-size-fits-all solution.
During my travels in Africa over the last ten years, I have interacted with heads of state, ministers of education, regulators, and educational faculty. The maze of bureaucracy, legislation and processes created using historic models of education is shocking. It’s small wonder no one is willing to grab the bull by its horns and bring changes to help Africa leapfrog into the future rather than dwell in the past.
I will reflect on the tertiary sector. Looking at Africa, South Africa excluded, one sees a lack of good quality universities. It’s no surprise to see some 400,000 students going abroad for post-secondary programs annually, with nearly 300,000 originating from sub-Saharan Africa. With continuing growth of populations, economic output, and school and post-secondary enrolment rates, it’s expected one in five outbound mobile students will originate from Africa within the next 20 years.
It’s evident the business models of universities globally factor international students as a revenue source. These students pay higher fees. The irony is poor African countries are in many ways subsidizing the education of students of developed countries. The most unfortunate impact of this dichotomy is less than half the students return to the continent to add any value to the country that not only paid for their education but also subsidized their peers and for their pains, suffer a
brain drain.
Let’s put this in the context of the future. United Nations’ world population projections see it increasing to 9.6 billion by 2050, up by 2.4 billion from the current population. More than 50% of this growth will come from Africa (source: The Size of it, The Economist; June 18, 2013). Africa’s population will increase from about 10% of the world’s population to over 20% by 2050. It will undoubtedly have the youngest population on the planet and if transformation in the education sector is not made on a war-footing, the outcome is going to be catastrophic.
To cater to the population and given the overflow in current institutions, there is need to establish between 450 to 500 colleges and universities in Africa over the next 10 years. This growth needs investments in billions of dollars that governments clearly do not have. Firstly, legislation needs to be amended for foreign universities to establish on the continent. This is just one step to build capacity.
There are multifold advantages of bringing quality education brands to the continent. Firstly, these institutions are highly-ranked and bring with them best practices, systems, faculty, research capacity and world-class curriculum. The model should entail that the quality of academic delivery and entry requirements on the African campus should be the same as the home campus. It should allow students to transfer freely between various campuses for a global experience. The accreditations of these institutions should be based on degrees being offered by the home campus.
Secondly, there will be a slowdown of students going abroad focused mainly towards specialized training and not routine undergraduate or post-graduate courses. This will help retain skills in the region and conserve the foreign exchange drain. Thirdly, over time, the African branches of foreign universities will attract global students. Given the lower costs, excellent weather and natural beauty of Africa, there is no reason why education cannot become part of the continent’s export ecosystem. This will become increasingly important as universities in developed countries find it difficult to invest in new facilities owing to costs.
Another step governments must institute immediately is an offset program. All large defence, infrastructure, energy, mining and other contracts given to international or local companies should require a contribution towards setting up an international university in the country either through direct investment or through a centralized education fund. Similarly, all students sent to foreign universities through state funding must require the beneficiary university to offer some of their programs.
The other vital need is innovation. Education is no longer going to be about land and building. Consumption patterns of education are changing and with technology and broadband infrastructure development will emerge the opportunity for African states to bring about the latest delivery platforms. Changes from innovations are already being implemented by well-established universities in developed countries. Partnerships with them will help shorten the learning curve.
These illustrations demonstrate the need for the education ecosystem in Africa to be catalyzed. This can only happen through proactive steps for dynamic reforms from our leaders.
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&#8211; Rakesh Wahi is Vice-Chairman and
Co-founder of ABN Group.

HIGHER EDUCATION  IN AFRICA  AND THE RESOURCE GAP

Arise O Compatriots! Nigeria’s call obey…” – The well-worn opening phrase of the Nigerian national anthem has echoed from school halls and stadiums.
Firm hand against chest, Nigerians, home and abroad, declare a melodic oath when the occasion permits but how many believe in this allegiance they swear by today?
As Nigeria marks its 54th anniversary, I cast my mind back to when this day simply meant another public holiday and a few headlines in the papers.
Colorful parades and rallies fill the streets of Lagos as a carnival of enthusiastic youth and government convoys paint the town green. Speech after speech, march after march, millions of countrymen sharing momentous camaraderie – one all seemed to take pride in, yet understood so little about.
Beyond the festivities – its meaning still eluded me. Yes, we gained partial independence from Britain in 1960, with an official declaration of independence signed in 1963, but what did Nigeria’s independence really mean? When I looked around, there were large infrastructural bottlenecks, a defective educational system, gross unemployment, maladministration in key structures and a catalogue of unkept promises for a brighter Nigeria. What were we really independent of?
Many years away from home and I began to appreciate the wealth of my country; its wealth of talent. I saw Nigerians in the diaspora in high-powered roles, giving back wholeheartedly to societies that have given them a greener pasture, a new home and a chance to blossom. They were contributing to its enrichment and sustainability while a severe brain drain grew at home.
Each visit home was bittersweet. I had to face the reality that situations had merely altered marginally. While I applaud the racing pulse of today’s Nigeria and celebrate the diverse talent and insatiable drive that this country embodies, the enabling environment remains elusive.
In spite of its challenges, Nigeria has taken mammoth strides. The tide turns as entrepreneurial giants emerge from the rubble and bottlenecks, positioning the country at the forefront of investment and more recently overtaking South Africa as the largest economy in Africa. This inspires new debates; is it an ornamental or functional title? While this has been met with mixed reaction, there have also been some valid causes for celebration. We should nod to how far we have come while locking hands with harsh reminders of how much further we still have to go.
Today, it is refreshing to see an army of Nigerians return to the country, propelled by a daring mind shift, fresh ideas and a hunger to contribute to its growth, just as it’s heart-rending to see toddlers tap at my window while driving through the streets of Lagos, begging for some change when they should be in the classroom.
It is worth a toast to see more indigenous companies take the reins in areas that had once only been entrusted in the hands of expatriates, just as it is undeniably evident that more multinationals are investing in Nigeria as a fertile ground for returns.
As I celebrate Nigeria’s independence, I celebrate in the hope of brighter future, investment and empowerment of its youth. A future with a bigger appetite to harness our bountiful natural resources and build infrastructure. I dream of a Nigeria that invests in its human capital, shatters the glass ceiling in the boardrooms and prides itself in unity. A country that respects and guards the fundamental human rights of the girl and boy child and frowns upon ethno-religious crisis. A Nigeria that attracts all back home and rewards their enthusiasm and skill accordingly.
I might be asking for too much but ultimately, I want a Nigeria whose national anthem I can sing believingly.

What Are We Really Independent Of?

Rich Africans may make their money in Africa, but enjoy spending it in London. After all, London has it all. Nobody is going to be imprisoned because their face no longer fits. The legal system is fair and what’s yours remains yours. Best of all, London has a world-class financial system, which is quite happy to take an African’s wealth and grow it for them. Even with a first-world tax system, London boasts 45 billionaires, making it the world’s fourth richest city.
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<h4>Education</h4>
For successful Africans, nothing is more important than educating their children for future success. Britain is rather good at this, and school is where you make friends and contacts for life. It defines your social status. A recent Tatler article on wealthy Nigerians highlighted Florence Otedola, the 20-year-old King’s School-educated daughter of Femi Otedola, one of Nigeria’s richest men. Boarding fees for King’s in 2014-15 are $55,700, and according to Tatler, Nigerians spend $500 million every year at British universities and schools such as Benenden, Wycombe Abbey, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Eton, Harrow and Bradfield.
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<h4>Concierge service</h4>
Rich people employ a concierge business to open doors in London, and rich Africans are no exception. Veronica Voronina is CEO and Founder of her own concierge business, The Anonymous, which has a number of wealthy African clients. The idea is to allow the superrich to plug into a network of excellence.
“Our database is our best asset. We source the best of everything – doctors, lawyers, property agents, party planners, nannies, restaurants, hotels, even the best diamonds,”
says Vorinina.
It’s all about price and quality.
“Rich people didn’t get rich by wasting money.”
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<h4>Houses</h4>
Many wealthy Africans have business interests in London. So, even if they are only there for a few weeks a year, Africans like to buy. The preferred areas are Knightsbridge, Belgravia, St John’s Wood, and Kensington and Chelsea. The most controversial development is One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, described as the most expensive residential development on earth. One apartment reputedly sold for $230 million. Several billionaire Africans have bought there, but few live there; it is an investment not a home. Upper-class Londoners, priced out of their natural habitat by international interlopers, are said to be increasingly unhappy.
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<h4>Hotels</h4>
Africans fly around the world in pursuit of business deals and the hotel they choose to stay in often defines their social status. The most prestigious hotels to namedrop are the grand old London hotels, The Lanesborough, The Dorchester and Claridges. The Royal Suite at Claridges will set you back around $82,000 per week. And of course the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge is the quintessential business hotel chain. Younger entrepreneurs may prefer boutique hotels like Andre Balazs’ Chiltern Firehouse hotel. All reek of exclusivity.
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Shopping
Wealthy Africans love to shop. Their favorite stores in London are Harvey Nichols, Harrods and Selfridges. It’s a well-oiled world of shopping by appointment, private openings, personal shoppers and trips to private shopping departments, as well as limousines and drivers to carry the shopping home. The shopping company Premier Tax Free reports that Nigerians account for 46.3% of total African sales in London and the fastest-growing region for international sales in Britain this year has been Africa, whose spend has grown by 45% year on year.
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<h4>Experiences</h4>
The Beatles sang money can’t buy you love. But according to concierge company, The Anonymous, money can buy pretty much everything else. One client, convinced the world was coming to an end, decided to splash out. Alongside gas masks and copious quantities of food, they wanted the best, no expense spared, holiday ever. A private jet was hired for a three-week trip around the United States. Helicopters flew the family over the Grand Canyon and New York. The client splashed $25,000 on the illusionist Criss Angel and then went to Universal Studios in Florida on a VIP pass. Hopefully the holiday offset any disappointment that the world still exists.
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<h4>Private jets</h4>
For mere mortals, travel is conducted by commercial plane and train. For the uber-wealthy transport is done by private jet. And if you don’t own one, you charter one. Charter companies like Little Blue will fly you to Paris for the weekend for around $20,000. Nigerians don’t just use private jets to carry themselves; they take their lifestyle with them.
“If someone wants basic food &#8211; milk, bread, cheese, yogurt – I’ll go somewhere, like Whole Foods, and pick up the employer on the way to Farnborough (a small airport on the outskirts of London), load it on the plane and send it off,” says Ansema Fagapona, who works with rich families.
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<h4>Superyachts</h4>
Yachting is as much about the exclusive lifestyle as it is about owning a boat. With it comes access to a world beyond the reach of mere mortals. For those who can afford it, glittering European destinations like Monaco, Cannes and the azure seas of Sardinia beckon, and few luxury experiences are better than being on a yacht.
To order a new superyacht at one shipyard, tycoons need to put their names on a five-year waiting list. A weekly charter of the stunning 65-metre superyacht, Imagine, at $710,000 per week may be the preferred option.
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<h4>Celebrations</h4>
What is better than going to an Akon concert with friends to celebrate your 16th birthday? How about a private Akon gig? Did I mention that the 15 friends were all flown to a private island near Dubai, transported in limousines and given Michelin-star catering? Wealthy Africans certainly know how to party. And if you would like to treat your wife on your wedding anniversary, why not hire the renowned Cipriani’s Italian restaurant in Mayfair for a night. You and your beloved can be the only diners on the night, with Beverly Knight on vocals  to add a special touch of romance. Ahhh.
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<h4>Polo</h4>
Polo is famously the sport of kings and was introduced to Lagos in the 1930s through the Lagos Polo Club. Today, in Britain, you will find oil and gas supremo Kola Karim playing polo with Prince William and Prince Harry at Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s private estate, and at Cowdray Park, the best polo ground in the country. The Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup is the most prestigious competition and Nigeria’s Prince Albert Esiri has competed several times. A team of four players, each with a dozen or more top polo horses, would need millions of dollars to play a sing

How Africans Splash Their Cash

The early twentieth-century South African educationist and writer, Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, was no stranger to irony. Responding to news of the outbreak of the First World War, he commented wryly in September, 1914 that Africans had been ‘taken by surprise that the European nations who led in education and Christianity should find no other means than accumulated destructive weapons to settle their diplomatic differences’.
Like many others at that chilling moment, this pacifist viewed the war as a distant European catastrophe. As we reach the centenary of the cataclysmic Great War of 1914-1918, images of the Western Front and of the conflict as a bloody European affair continue to dominate popular historical memory, and not solely in Western countries.
Further back in time, significant figures grasped that it was a dramatic global struggle, far-reaching in its destructive and transforming impact on Europe’s enormous imperial territories overseas and their hundreds of millions of colonial inhabitants. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was just one of those observers. With Britain the major colonial power in Africa, for Churchill it followed that British Africa would be at war with Germany, just as night followed day. Italian leader Benito Mussolini observed that every continent was engulfed by the same crisis and not a single part of the world had been able to avoid being shaken by what he called the cyclone of 1914 to 1918.
In that sense, the war experiences of imperial Britain, imperial France and imperial Germany were as much about the fortunes of Africa as about the fate of men in the trenches of Europe. Aside from anything else, even those soldiers were by no means all European. In all, the French recruited almost 400,000 West African and North African colonial troops to fight German invaders. Many others who were pulled into Europe kept their heads down, serving the war effort as military laborers. Even crops exported from its African territories helped keep France on its feet. Africans thus became an inseparable part of the war.
Another perspective points us towards Africa itself. After all, it was there that the war actually started. The very first shots were fired by West African infantrymen of Britain’s Gold Coast Regiment early in August, 1914 when British and French colonial forces invaded Germany’s colonies of Togoland and Kamerun. That extinguished the delusions of some local colonial administrators that Africa might have been left to remain neutral. What they feared was the unsettling effect of European hostilities on the security of white rule.
Africa was also where the war finally ended. It was still simmering on the continent after it had ended in Europe. In the week following Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, East African askari &#8211; guerrilla fighters under German command &#8211; picked off a British motorcyclist in Northern Rhodesia. Among his scattered papers was a notice that the war had ended. It came as a rude surprise to the German commander, General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now obliged to surrender, he did so grudgingly, moaning that he was only giving up because his country had been defeated in Europe.
Some of the war’s quirkier stories were as good as any fiction, if not better. In the Union of South Africa’s conquest of German South West Africa in 1915, they included General Louis Botha’s decision to swop his horse for a motorcar for his triumphal entry into the enemy capital of Windhoek. With an eye on awaiting war correspondents, he had been keen to shed his rural Boer commando past in favor of appearing as a modern industrial soldier. Unfortunately for the prime minister’s dignity, his driver had possibly had one brandy too many on the way to victory and drove into a ditch. A year later, the obsessively fit and healthy Jan Smuts, commander-in-chief of the large Allied campaign in East Africa, was not exactly popular among his more idle and chubby generals. At the sound of their commander’s approaching Buick car, officers ducked out of their tents and tried to hide away, desperate to avoid having to accompany him on some strenuous mountain walk.
Meanwhile, lower down in the ranks, ordinary soldiers and army laborers enduring arduous tropical bush conditions faced another kind of daily menace. On top of malaria, typhoid, dysentery and other parasitic diseases which toppled many thousands, there was the aggravation of wandering elephants, giraffe and rhino getting in the way, the threat of venomous snakes around tents and the danger of hungry lions and leopards prowling near campsites.
Of course, the real human costs of the war in Africa were not inflicted by wild animals. Forming a grim undercurrent, these losses were immense. On one hand, it is true that Allied campaigns to deprive Germany of its West African and South West African ports and wireless facilities by conquering its colonial territories involved little effort and minimal loss. Pretoria, for instance, gained control of a huge south western territory at a cost of a little more than 100 troops.
On the other hand, German East Africa was a nut that could not be cracked as easily. There, in an unrelentingly ferocious and destructive contest which oozed across from East Africa into Central Africa and down into South Eastern Africa, opposing forces engaged in a long and gruelling see-saw struggle. The wholesale plundering of peasant lands and mass conscription of villagers that it brought imposed a terrible toll. With horses and other draught animals laid low by tsetse fly and trucks unable to cope with the poor terrain, both sides resorted to conscripting men to work as transport porters and carriers. Britain alone recruited at least a million laborers. Overworked, malnourished and exposed to appalling conditions, up to 200,000 died. At the same time, around 300,000 inhabitants of German-occupied areas perished from the effects of famine as their livestock and crops were looted by soldiers. The suffering didn’t end there. Late in 1918, the deadly worldwide Spanish influenza struck hard, spreading throughout the continent to infect populations already weakened by the war.
By then, the region had not only been feeling the burden of a war that was embraced by many white colonists but which was otherwise resented by the vast majority of their black subjects. It was also adapting to its momentous consequences. In what has sometimes been termed the second partition of Africa, Germany was eliminated from the continent. To the victors, including South Africa, went the spoils. Jan Smuts was now able to advance his vision of the new Union of 1910 becoming a Greater South Africa. As for Britain, by securing control of German East Africa as Tanganyika, it was finally able to realize Cecil Rhodes’s bombastic vision of an all-red road from the Cape to Cairo. Until African decolonization and independence decades later, the First World War settled which powers would keep what.
Still, looking back from where we are now, we can also see that the end of hostilities did not mean a simple return to business as usual. Following the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, control of the conquered colonies was mandated by the newly-created League of Nations. Although limited in practice, for the first time this introduced the principle of international humanitarian trusteeship into colonial Africa. In effect, those states which had gained new territories were their guardians and could not do entirely as they wished with them.
In post-war decades both Britain and France found themselves having to commit new educational, medical, administrative and commercial resources to the development of their African possessions to beef up the legitimacy of their colonial rule. After the blood and chaos of the war, colonial rule needed to provide Africans with security, stability and progress.
Inevitably, the glimpse of mighty European powers on the ropes left a deep mark on the consciousness of returning African war veterans. The hollowness of Europe’s claims upon superior civilization and enlightenment had been laid bare. There was widespread disillusion that Africans’ wartime sacrifices and contributions had gone virtually unrecognized and unrewarded.
Black South African papers like Abantu Batho applauded United States President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of national rights and freedom from oppression. If that was being prescribed for European nations after 1918, should there not also be recognition of the justice of African claims? Less than a century ago, it was still too early.

Fighting And Famine On The African Front

Alegion of precocious iPad-toting mini Steve Jobses sit in a circle on the carpet at Little Ashford Preschool (LAP), in Johannesburg. This is South Africa’s first iPad preschool. It is the brainchild of educationalist and parent Jena Mukina. The woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo has a Master&#8217;s in business management from the University of Johannesburg. Her thesis tackled the impact of communication, technology and social media on children’s decision-making processes, so LAP is right up her street.
Thirty-year-old Mukina has led the introduction of cutting-edge technology into the classroom, with the establishment of LAP 2009 in Saxonwold, Johannesburg. Today, the city is home to three such learning institutions. She aims to transform the learning environment through innovation – not only within the pre-school environment but also in higher education.
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Mukina, also a full-time lecturer at her alma mater, was awarded a ‘best lecturer’ and ‘most innovative lecturer’ award in the faculty of management sciences. She struggled to find a preschool for her eldest daughter that met her expectations. At work at the time, her biggest challenge was to encourage her university students to think out of the box. She discovered that the issue was rooted in their foundational education and that the first eight years of a child’s life are the most vital for their future development. Fearing the same fate for her daughter, the hands-on mother began teaching her daughter and the neighbors’ children from home, before she lectured in the afternoon. Her class grew until she could no longer accommodate the children arriving each morning. It was then that Mukina traded the lectern for the ledger and became a business owner.
Being a mother of two has helped her learn to multitask and prioritize duties in her business, That means play time is play time, work time is work time and of course holiday time means no interviews for FORBES WOMAN AFRICA, she teases.
Educationalist Sir Ken Robinson dispels the myth that intelligence can only be measured through the one-dimensional lens of academia. Physical and emotional intelligence are equally important in the spectrum of human competency. Mukina’s preschool belongs to a new tradition that follows this philosophy. It was initially modeled on  Les Biboux, a progressive preschool in Brussels, Belgium. LAP has since come into its own by using Montessori best practice to nurture creativity, self-expression, individuality and confidence-building in children, in a playful environment. The curriculum encourages problem-solving and skills development. The preschool’s director, Marli Hoffman, stresses the importance of balance in the curriculum.
“The iPad is used in addition to, not in place of traditional learning. The children learn by doing,” she says.
The teachers also use the iPads to communicate with the youngsters’ parents, and even take photographs of the learners during the school day.
“All our communication happens via email, so parents have an idea of what their kids do on a daily basis,” says Hoffman.
Understandably, the question of costs is not far from the minds of prospective parents. The school subsidizes the cost of the iPad if it is bought from them. Parents agree that they get value for their money, especially when five-year-old Hlumisa begins teaching the other children at the park about the life cycle of the frog.
These upstart preschools are challenging their well-established competitors that act as gatekeepers into Johannesburg’s best primary schools. But realizing the dream of a world-class preschool has its downsides. As a small business with nearly 180 toddlers to run after and an annual turnover of around R9 million ($825,000), finance and HR have been bugbears.
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Mukina has ambitions to expand across South Africa, especially into Angola and Malawi, but the sensitive nature of early childcare means expansion is slow.
In her sights is a doctorate in education. It will help her influence policy changes to improve the state of education on the continent, where enrolment remains low and quality education is scarce. According to UNESCO, less than 12% of African children have access to early childhood care and education (ECCE), and 43 million school-aged children find themselves outside the formal education system in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Early education is an essential, if we are going to have a better education system,” she says.
Slowly but surely, African governments have begun to step up efforts to ensure that more children enroll in pre-primary schools. For Mukina the question remains how to expand quality educational services so that they are not confined to pockets of Africa’s biggest cities.
If Mukina’s ambitions are anything to go by, we have reason to be optimistic about the future of Africa’s youth.

Pencil, Eraser, iPad

My passion is Africa. My focus is to impact Africa, positively, through sustainable infrastructure, skills development, technology transfer, the empowerment of women and education.
I was raised in post-independence Africa, shattered by coups and dictators, by a single mother—a strong, independent, optimistic, selfless and loving African woman. She made many sacrifices to ensure that my brother and I received the best education and exposure to the world so as to grow into leaders. My mother pushed me to be the best I could be, helped build my confidence, nurtured my sense of purpose and grounded me in spirituality, which allows me not to fear failure. This historical time and my upbringing nurtured in me a strong consciousness of the role I must play in Africa. My motto is: “Dream big and execute bigger!”
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For many years, and to this day, I worked 15-18 hour days—nothing great is achieved without hard work and 200% commitment. I am realistic and know that success doesn’t fall from the sky.
In 2010, I wanted to build a company. My skeptics thought I was crazy to leave a successful corporate career but it was a natural evolution of my career, and personal aspirations. However, setting up a company with limited means would be a different ballgame. I gave myself 18 months to make the transition from the corporate to the entrepreneurial world. During that time, I completed an executive MBA.
I did my homework, held focus groups, traveled for research, met with potential suppliers and created a 200-page business plan for Yswara, a luxurious tea brand. Then, I worked my butt off to make things happen.
As an African female entrepreneur, you face three challenges: namely challenges every entrepreneur faces regardless of gender and geography; challenges you face as an African entrepreneur and challenges you face as a female entrepreneur. Some of my greatest challenges were: not being taken seriously, access to finance, encountering the lack of skills and proper infrastructure, as well as balancing business and family.
At first, people did not take Yswara seriously; it was viewed as a hobby. The lack of potential investors’ confidence made it difficult to access finance, and the lack of seed financing and angel networks is an issue in Africa, but it is even more challenging for women. I had savings and the support of family and friends, who invested $280,000 in the project. This was just enough to get the business off the ground. Now that there is a global market for our product, we are raising money to finance our ambitious expansion plan. It’s not easy: there are too many female-owned businesses that have not grown beyond their potential because of lack of capital.
Balancing business and family remains a challenge for women; pregnancy, childbirth and infant care affect women in ways they don’t affect men. Running a household and caring for a family are time-consuming and demand a great deal. Often, female entrepreneurs are torn between commitment to the family and their business.
Despite all these setbacks, women need to persevere, and change societal perceptions that both can’t be done well. They should turn these challenges into sources of strength.
Fortune 500 estimates that only 1% of CEOs at the world’s top 500 companies are women. In Africa, this percentage is probably halved. Women should pursue leadership roles to challenge the status quo. I wish to empower Africans, especially women, to believe in themselves and understand that there are no limits to what can be achieved by applying the mind and working smart.
Women tend to be prisoners of their fears, spend too much time on the past or merely dreaming about the future, they forget to make the most of the present. Women must create a compelling vision for their life; own it; define the roadmap to execution; and drive the energies, talents and values necessary for success. As an entrepreneur, you must develop the ability to execute plans, solve problems and energize teams. Building a venture from scratch is not for the faint hearted, you need to be courageous, tenacious, perseverant and resilient. Never take no for an answer and always be solution-oriented.

How To steep A FEMALE ENTREPRENEUR

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is immensely rich in resources but past conflict has held back the realization of this wealth, leaving its people amongst the poorest in Africa. The country is expected to be home to the world’s eleventh largest populationa by 2050. Raw mineral deposits are estimated to be worth in excess of $24 trillion but lay idle as fighting plagues the country.
It has seen at least four million people killed and another three million displaced.
Government forces continue to fight the rebel group M23 in the east, and recent peace talks have been suspended. Rene Abandi, leader of the M23 delegation, was quoted saying that negotiations are meaningless.
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This could jeopardize the economic foundations that have already been laid. Eustache Ouayoro, country director at the World Bank, says that over the past few years, the DRC has been able to make significant progress to restore security across most of the territory, political reconciliation and economic recovery with the support of international partners, including the World Bank. So the world waits with bated breath.
Experts look to the country’s vast untapped wealth to pave the way to economic freedom, but say the road to this is likely to be a long one. Ouayoro says that positive signs are there, albeit tentative. The DRC may be emerging from instability and taking its first steps towards a new development era.
The country’s citizens suffer from poor healthcare, limited education and poverty. According to the World Bank, the DRC ranks last among the 187 countries in the Human Development Index. Poverty is widespread, with 71% of the population living on $1.25 a day.
The DRC, however, has been making steady strides in economic growth. Inflation was under control and in single figures in 2012, compared to 500% in 2001, and the World Bank says that with economic growth of 7.2% in 2012, and 8.2% expected in 2013, the DRC is among the countries experiencing some of the fastest levels of growth in the world at a time when it is non-existent in Europe.
Debt relief has helped. DRC was granted an estimated $16 billion debt relief under the World Bank and IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The write down has helped improve the country’s fiscal position and has allowed it to invest its debt savings in to development opportunities.
The World Bank reports that only a mere 10% of the DRC’s huge tracts of arable land are farmed, and only 13,000 hectares are irrigated. The country has four million hectares, but is currently importing at least 30% of its food. The World Bank believes its land could feed a billion people.
Ouayoro says that for the country to realize its full potential, there needs to be: improvement to the business climate; progress on anti-corruption measures; economic governance and stronger government institutions. It will also have to address the large infrastructure gap and prioritize food production and agriculture.
“We must promote inclusive growth in the DRC by making its economy more irresistibly competitive and helping to spur the creation of new, well-paying jobs, especially for the country’s growing ranks of young people,” Ouayoro says.

The Poor Rich Country

At the front entrance of Oprah Winfrey’s school, flanked by blue gum trees and veld grass, the South African flag sits at half-mast. Four days earlier police opened fire on striking workers at a platinum mine two hours north, killing 34. At daily assembly in the campus’ plush auditorium, 296 girls in grass-green blazers and pleated skirts bow their heads, some muttering prayers.
Grieving is a practiced skill for pupils of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (OWLAG). The school’s student body collectively endures, on average, the death of one primary caregiver a week, and they formally mourn together every Monday. “This is the real South Africa,” says Anne van Zyl, the school’s fourth head of academy in five years. “They’ve seen AIDS. They’ve seen violence.”
Eighteen-year-old Mashadi is typical: Her father died four years ago, leaving her mother as the sole breadwinner. But as her former classmates remember the miners, she’s preparing for a new ritual. That same week in August, Mashadi and Winfrey hit Bed, Bath &amp; Beyond in Boston picking out twin sheet sets and other necessities for Mashadi’s dorm room at Wellesley College with the six other girls from the first graduating class at OWLAG (“oh-lag”, as students call it) starting at a U.S. college this fall. Mashadi comes from Alexandra, a poor, dangerous township of corrugated iron shacks on Johannesburg’s northern outskirts. At home she shares a single bed with her mother, a domestic worker for a white family. She didn’t consider college until the 11th grade. “I wondered, who do I leave my mom with?” she says. Adds Winfrey: “There isn’t a toilet in her house, there isn’t water in the house. And she’ll be at Wellesley.”
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Following the sheet-shopping, the woman who students all call “Mom-Oprah” drags the freshman posse to a Target. As starstruck back-to-school shoppers gawk and the seven girls fill their baskets with notebooks, cutlery and other supplies, Winfrey has to unexpectedly compose herself.
The 58-year-old media billionaire held it together at her school’s first graduation in January 2011, when 72 girls in neat white dresses filed out of the auditorium into the midsummer sunshine, every single one headed to university in a country where only 14% of the black population graduates from high school. But picking out dorm towels, the kind of rite that an upper-middle-class American takes for granted, drove home the magnitude of their journey.  “I just realized: Oh, Jesus, this actually happened,” Winfrey tells FORBES days later, back at the 42-acre coastal estate near Santa Barbara, California. Where she’s lived full-time since wrapping her Chicago talk show in May 2011.
While she won’t say it explicitly, the emotion surely also stems from relief—and a feeling of redemption. Soon after it opened five years ago, Winfrey’s school was the subject of a sex abuse scandal that reached international scope, owing to its founder’s fame, with a dose of schadenfreude from those weary of a woman who five times a week for 25 years had effortlessly turned no-names into bestselling authors, shrinks into gurus and audience members into shrieking new car owners.
Winfrey responded by shuttering outside access to the school. But while headlines receded she didn’t give up on her philanthropic goal: not just to educate her girls but also to change the trajectory of their lives. On Labor Day weekend Winfrey found validation in the unlikely form of nerve-wracked text messages from her valedictorian. Eighteen-year-old Bongeka was worried she wasn’t good enough, that she’d fail. Winfrey reminded her that at home, she’d washed her clothes on her hands and knees in a river. Now she was in Atlanta, at Spelman College. She’d already won.
With the specter of the sex scandal fading and her second group of seniors sending out college applications, Winfrey is opening the school back up to the outside world. She invited FORBES to South Africa, giving us exclusive access to the school. The story found there is one of good intentions gone awry, persistence—and vindication.
Winfrey’s school began as a rather outlandish promise. In 2000 Winfrey and longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham were vacationing at the home of Nelson Mandela in the country’s Western Cape. For 10 days Winfrey and the former South African president swapped stories, exchanged ideas and passed newspaper sections back and forth. When the topic turned to poverty, Winfrey spoke up. It’s a subject she knows something about.
Growing up in Kosciusko, Winfrey’s childhood wasn’t far removed from the average South African. She lived on a farm without indoor plumbing and watched her grandmother, who largely raised her, hand-wash her clothes. At nine she was raped by a cousin; at 14 she gave birth to a son, who died after childbirth. Her way out came in the form of a federal program that gained her access to a rich suburban school, where she was one of only a handful of African-Americans. Each day she bounced between a home of poverty and a classroom of possibilities. Here she discovered a knack for public speaking and debate, which earned her a part-time radio gig and, later, a scholarship to Tennessee State University.
When she started making real money—millions, then billions, from her eponymous talk show and subsequent media empire—she vowed to pay for other poor black kids to go to college. And she has: To date she’s shelled out around $400 million toward educational causes, including more than 400 scholarships to Atlanta’s Morehouse College. Sitting on the floor at Mandela’s house, in thrall to her hero and saddened as he described the state of schooling in his country, she vowed to take her giving a step further.
Winfrey pledged $10 million toward a South African school then and there. “When you go to Nelson Mandela’s house, what do you take?” she says. “You can’t bring a candle.” Ten years ago this December she broke ground in Henley-on-Klip, until then an unremarkable cluster of ranch-style homes 40 miles south of Johannesburg. When Winfrey and her team started recruiting in 2006, she was adamant that she’d accept only the brightest but most disadvantaged kids: those at the top of their public school class but from households with an income of less than $950 a month.
By the time Mashadi, Bongeka and the 150 other members of the first two classes arrived in 2007, that $10 million had grown to $40 million, as Winfrey turned 52 acres of scrubland into a campus closer to Ivy League standards than even the plush suburban school she had attended. “It started out as an emotional giveback,” says Winfrey. “It has developed into a way of life for me. What it really is, is an investment in leadership and an investment in the future of a country. That’s how I now see it. I don’t look at it as, ‘Oh, gee, my little school.’”
Touring the school, it’s not difficult to see how the costs spiraled. A brand-new swimming pool adjoins a workout room where the “learners,” as they’re called here, take spinning classes on stationary bikes. The administrative building could double as a gallery of South African art, and the auditorium feels like a Broadway theater. As with all aspects of her work, Winfrey is a perfectionist. When the school officially opened in January 2007, groundskeepers sprayed the dry, yellow grass with green dye in preparation for the arrival of dignitaries like Mandela and celebrity friends like Diane Sawyer and Spike Lee. “It stained your shoes,” laughs Sam Blake, director of operations at the school and Winfrey’s eyes and ears on the ground. The image of that veneer would quickly come back to bite.
The school wasn’t exactly popular in Henley-on-Klip. Blake fielded noise complaints from neighbors who claimed the sound of tennis balls bouncing on the school’s courts was disturbing them. “I got phone calls saying, ‘I hope all your trees die,’” Blake says. “There are people who didn’t want us here, 150 black girls in an all-white area.” Townspeople idled in their cars, hoping to get a glimpse of Winfrey’s chosen few. “They watched the girls play soccer and netball,” Blake says. “We put up fences. Oprah had us put hedges up, too.”
The venture was also greeted with uncertainty by some American media outlets. Why was Winfrey spending $40 million on one school when she could build a bunch for that price? Why were the girls sleeping on 200-thread-count sheets? Why were there chandeliers hanging from the library ceiling and brightly colored mosaic tile pillars outside the cafeteria? Blake grimaces when he’s reminded of those early articles.
“When you walk into a beautiful place, you think better of yourself,” he explains simply. Walking the perimeter of the campus, he describes the first batch of blueprints from local school authorities, who’d leased Winfrey the land. She wasn’t pleased. “She said it looked like a chicken coop,” Blake laughs. Winfrey severed ties with the state and decided to go it alone, hiring the architects behind Johannesburg’s famous Apartheid Museum. She donned jeans and a hard hat and oversaw every aspect of construction. She thought of the little things: the tubs of umbrellas outside each building for use during South Africa’s rainy season, when it pours almost nonstop for 40 days. They’re green, her favorite color, to match the girls’ uniforms.
At the school’s first convocation Winfrey took the stage to address the girls and their relatives, bused in from across South Africa. “For many years people always asked me why didn’t I have children,” she told the crowd. “Now I know.”
In October 2007 Winfrey’s philanthropic dream turned toxic with one phone call. Winfrey learned that a group of girls had come forward alleging that a 27-year-old dorm parent had been molesting them. “The security guard would see the dorm parent going in and out,” says Winfrey, shaking her head, “and say, ‘Yeah, I asked her what she was doing; she said she was helping her with her homework.’ At five in the morning?!”
Winfrey jumped on a plane, wracked with guilt and worry. “By the time a girl gets to my school, normally she’s suffered on average six major life traumas,” Winfrey says. “They’ve lost a parent or both parents. Multiple accidents, death in your family, AIDS, rape, sexual molestation, all of it. Unimaginable things have happened.” Every year a handful of incoming students are diagnosed by the school’s on-campus team of psychologists and social workers as having post-traumatic stress disorder simply from living their everyday lives. Now it appeared to be happening on her watch.
The situation on the ground grew still worse, amplifying the subtle media criticisms that predated the scandal. In the ensuing months and years, seven girls were suspended for “inappropriate behavior” that included sexually harassing classmates, and the body of a dead baby boy was found in a 17-year-old student’s schoolbag. “The fact that this place did not implode is a miracle,” says English teacher Clare McIntyre of the early years. Some of the girls feared Winfrey would grow frustrated and abandon the school. “She could have closed it and sent us away elsewhere,” says Bongeka.
The sad irony is that Winfrey had set up an unprecedented safety barrier in a country where more than a third of young women are sexually abused, with barbed wire fences, a high-tech entry system and all-female security. “We thought our risks were all men-related, so my goal was to keep the men out,” she says. It turned out her crisis was completely internal.
Part of the underlying problem stemmed, in retrospect, from an oversensitivity to local culture. “The thing that held me up for a long time was people would say, ‘That’s not the African way,’ or ‘That’s not culturally appropriate,’” she says. “I’d say, ‘Well, you know, I would think that people should show up on time and be dressed appropriately.’ I was trying to balance what I felt was the right thing versus not interfering with whatever was the cultural norm.”
Communication was an issue: The 152 12- and 13-year-old girls, hand-picked by Winfrey herself from an application pool of 3,500, came from all nine South African provinces, speaking all 11 of the country’s official mother tongues. Bongeka came in speaking 7 of them, with English her weakest.
Winfrey quickly fired the alleged child abuser—who was later acquitted in a South African court—plus every other residential staffer and the school’s head. “She wanted to clean house and start again,” says Sibusisiwe Thembela, the school’s librarian, who took over during what Winfrey calls “the crisis.” To add insult to injury, the former head sued Winfrey for defamation in 2008 for implying she was, per legal filings: “untrustworthy, failed the students of the academy, did not care about the students at the academy, knew of alleged physical and sexual abuse at the academy and participated in a cover-up of the alleged abuse.” The case was  resolved only in 2010, when they settled for an undisclosed amount.
The press, of course, moved on to other stories, having pierced Winfrey’s invincible image. Many people forgot the school existed or assumed it had quietly closed down.
A little-known statistic even the most altruistic don’t realize until they wade into heavy-duty giving: The majority of philanthropic initiatives don’t work; 75% close up shop in their first year. Even so, there’s merit in the effort: As in business, failures lead to insights and breakthroughs. But Winfrey, rather than chalk up her school as a costly life lesson, quietly redoubled her efforts to make it work.
That rebirth started in earnest in 2010 with the hiring of Anne van Zyl, tall and no-nonsense, the descendant of an Anglican minister who immigrated to Malawi. Van Zyl had the pedigree and the guts: She led the integration of Pretoria High School for Girls, the first all-white school in the region to accept black students as the veil of apartheid lifted.
Supporting van Zyl is Winfrey’s trusted confidante, Blake, a bald, bespectacled Texan who spent 27 years in the Air Force before becoming Winfrey’s pilot. He spent 15 years with Harpo Productions during Winfrey’s talk show heyday, shuttling her across the country in a Gulfstream 4. After vertigo rendered him unable to fly a plane, Winfrey found another role for him, first with her charitable Angel Network rebuilding homes in post-Katrina New Orleans, then in South Africa, where he oversees day-to-day operations. “Uncle Sam,” as the girls call him, promised Winfrey two years at the school. He’s been there six.
Winfrey considers building the school without community buy-in another one of her early mistakes (“I could write a book, ‘101 Mistakes,’” she says). Today the girls volunteer at a children’s home in nearby Meyerton. Local kids are invited to use the school’s top-notch dance studio in off-peak hours. Winfrey has also built two public schools at a cost of just over $3 million each as a model for the South African government to show what is possible for well under a $40 million price tag. When the school day ends at one of those pilot schools, the campus hosts adult education classes.
“When I arrived in 2010, the school had turned inward,” says van Zyl, citing the ongoing defamation suit against Winfrey as a reason for its insularity. “I wanted it to be open to the world and to let the girls out.” She also dictated that her faculty—the vast majority of whom are South Africans, of all races—not allow the girls’ often tragic upbringings to cloud their mission.
“This is something you’ll find the world over when people are dealing with children from disadvantaged backgrounds: Anything is good enough,” she says. “Oprah stands for … I mean, the brand is compassion, excellence, all those other things. She takes no prisoners. If I write an e-mail to Oprah, I’ll get someone to check I haven’t made a typo or something. Her expectation of everybody who works for her is absolutely professional and excellent. Nothing short of perfection is good enough.”
For new students, achieving their benefactor’s expectations—she tells them all she expects them to go to college and will in fact pay for it—starts by drumming out the cultural assumption that women don’t have to study since they’ll just get married and have kids anyway. “We drill, actually that you can, you have, you do. Their role model being Ms. Winfrey makes a huge difference. They’ve noticed a woman can do it,” says Mampho Langa, the school’s head of academics and a popular math teacher. From there the girls work around the clock, buoyed by their opportunity and the chance to learn. “They go home and bury Dad, bury a brother who burned to death,” she says. “And they come to me on Monday and say, ‘Can I take your test?’ It has changed completely for me the meaning of excellence. I don’t know how they do it. They’ll make you cry.”
Winfrey’s expenditures have shot past $105 million as she shoulders college tuitions for the first time. But she’s now seeing the return on her investment.
In July the school’s “magnificent seven” U.S.-bound girls spent two weeks on the Boston College campus. Winfrey organized an assimilation program for them. None of them had left South Africa before touring 15 universities in 12 days in 2010 (they took time out to meet one of Winfrey’s good friends, President Barack Obama, at the White House).
An English professor took the seven teenagers through what he called cultural texts: an issue of the New Yorker, a Brooks Brothers catalog, a vegan cookbook. Thando, a movie-star beautiful 19-year-old in a short skirt and long braids, winced at the idea that Americans would eat non-dairy ice cream. Bongeka scrunched up her cherubic face as she flipped through the clothing catalog, noting aloud that only one of the Brooks Brothers models was black.
Their classmate Mpumi wasn’t as talkative. She hadn’t been well recently, having overcome a bout of strep throat. Between lunch and the afternoon’s race-relations class, she said she’d been cheered by a call from Winfrey, asking if she’d recovered. “There are not too many people who I have to call,” says Mpumi, tears gathering.
To help more Mpumis, Winfrey is reaching out to corporations and wealthy individuals in South Africa, hoping to boost the school’s endowment. Her fellow billionaires are pitching in, too: Michael Dell donated laptops, Spanx inventor Sara Blakely cut a $1 million check and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gave each girl a Kindle. Winfrey, meanwhile, is mulling her next big move: a school in the U.S., possibly in her home state of Mississippi.
“Being able to see in human form those girls blossom into who you knew they could be, there’s really nothing like that for me,” she says. “You can see over and over again the possibility of your own self being lived out in somebody else’s life.” Winfrey begins this next chapter armed with five years of tough lessons and the knowledge that, as she puts it, “If you can do it in South Africa, you can do it anywhere.”

The Education  Of Oprah Winfrey

When 12-year-old Alex Okosi convinced his parents to allow him to stay in the United States with his older brothers following a family holiday, they reluctantly agreed, hoping that their last born would quickly become homesick and return home, with his tail between his legs.
“We had gone on holiday to visit my older brothers who were living and studying in the US. At that point in time, sending your kids to go study in the States was the ‘in-thing’ in Nigeria among parents who could afford this privilege,” says Okosi.
It took only two years after he arrived in the US for Okosi to awaken to the realization that his parents would not be financially able to support his US education for very long.
“Being the last of seven children, my parents had basically put six people before me through school. In as much as my father had been an excellent provider, it was obvious that by the time I would need to go to university, he would have long retired by then,” he says.
At the age of 14, Okosi started playing junior high basketball, in the hope that he would excel at both the sport and the books enough to earn a basketball scholarship.
“I pushed myself to work extremely hard at both my studies and basketball. Even though it was obvious that I was a better student than I was an athlete, I managed to get the scholarship that paid my university tuition,” says Okosi.
Having excelled at his studies and sports, Okosi also managed to pack in numerous after-school jobs and internships that made it easy for MTV Networks, now Viacom, to hire him on a practical training basis after he had completed his economics degree.
“As an international student, getting a company to hire you after you complete your studies was a major feat. I joined MTV in New York knowing that I would only be there for a year, after which I would have to go back home to Nigeria, or apply for a work visa, hopefully sponsored by MTV,” says Okosi.
From the moment he walked in at the iconic music television channel, Okosi says he immediately dreamt of taking it to his home continent. To achieve this, Okosi resolved to work harder than everyone else, like he had been doing throughout his entire schooling career in America.
“After serving my practical training year in the New York branch of MTV, I was then moved to Los Angeles where I was to learn about all the other functions of the cable television network business,” he says.
After some time in Los Angeles, Okosi began studying for his MBA, but the idea of taking MTV to Africa was still very much alive, and circumstances were about to conspire in his favor.
“On a typical day at the office, I was called from my office to come meet the group CEO of MTV Networks at the time, where I was introduced by my boss to the big boss, as the star of the Los Angeles operation. I honestly expected that the compliments by the bosses were only for the purpose of boosting my morale and nothing beyond that,” recalls Okosi.
To his surprise, Okosi received a call from the head office summoning him to a lunch meeting with the group’s CEO he had met days before.
“I realized that this was going to be my one and only chance to table my big idea. It was going to be now or never. Even though I had a comfortable life, knowing that MTV was present everywhere else but in Africa really bothered me. There was music in our continent; there was youth culture just like everywhere else in the world. It just felt like Africa was the last frontier at that point because the business was everywhere but [in Africa],” says Okosi.
After that promising lunch meeting, Okosi was then sent to London to experience the launch of a new branch. This move was designed to test him.
“The idea was that I should go to the United Kingdom and start the process from scratch to see if by the end of it, I would still be interested in going ahead with my plan to launch in Africa. Above all the other requirements, the most important objective was that I had to make sure that the London branch was financially viable, a business that actually made money,” says Okosi.
After a successful run in London, his bid to launch the channel in Africa was given the final stamp of approval. This was in 2004 when Okosi started the journey back and forth between Johannesburg and London, where he was putting together a team that was to launch “MTV Base” in February 2005.
“Besides the challenges that came with setting up smaller supporting branches in Nigeria and other lesser-developed countries in Africa, after we had a successful launch of our African headquarters in Johannesburg, my team’s number one major challenge was getting quality content from African artists. Here we were, as a youth music channel, hoping to cater to a global youth who wanted to see both international and local material, but the majority of the local material—especially the music videos—was just not up to par with our requirements,” he says.
This new challenge gave birth to another of Okosi’s winning ideas: the MTV Talent Reps, a non-profit program which would see Okosi’s MTV team members go to musicians to train them on the basics of creating and shooting music videos that would be worthy of being aired on the channel and on other sister channels across the global MTV network.
“Our talent reps acted as the middlemen between the record labels, artists and us as a content carrier. How we, as a station, saw it, is that we needed good quality content to carry on our channel, so that we could attract viewers, so that we could in turn, attract advertising that would make us a financially-sound business that would ultimately be a successful business,” says Okosi.
After the initial teething problems expected from a project of this scale, today MTV Base is one of the predominant music industry players across the continent, reporting a double-digit financial growth year-on-year. Besides playing an important role in taking African music to the rest of the world, Okosi says one of his most rewarding experiences is seeing the company launch the careers of some of the continent’s most loved video jockeys.
“Seeing people—like Sizwe Dhlomo—come to us as presenters and go on to become business people, is something that makes me very happy,” says Okosi. As senior vice-president and managing director of Viacom International Media Networks Africa, Okosi has also spear-headed the launch of other global channels in Africa: Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon. And to think that it all began with a childhood holiday.

King Of The Last Frontier

Educor has been around for decades—Damelin and Intec college are household names—now the private education group is going back to school. It’s jumping into Nollywood—the vibrant, chaotic and informal film industry of Nigeria. The industry produces thirty new titles a week at $2 per DVD or VCD, which sell at traffic lights. It’s only getting bigger and better.
There is money in the madness. Nollywood is valued at $3.2 billion a year and produces around 2,400 films annually. It is the second largest film industry, next to Bollywood in India. The films are shot on location in two weeks, on average, for the cost of a stagehand on a Hollywood set: between $15,000 and $30,000. The average film sells between 25,000 and 50,000 copies worldwide; a blockbuster can sell up to 500,000.
New investment in Nollywood is on the way. With the support of the Nigerian Department of Culture, Educor Africa will open a multi-media and creative arts center to support Nollywood. The industry’s rapidly growing potential has also been recognized by Multichoice—a subscription-based South African satellite provider—is spending $300 million to produce local content within the Nigerian market, according to Julian Kannigan, CEO of Educor Africa.
<div id="attachment_968" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-968" class="size-large wp-image-968" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_5663-1024x680.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="315" />Julian Kanningan, with students at the Randburg Damelin Campus</div>
“It’s going to require local skills which are scarce at best… you’re going to have trained sound engineers, lighting people, actors, actresses, 3D animators, journalists which are all world-class and it’s going to support a burgeoning community,” says Kannigan.
He acknowledges that the larger part of the population want business, information technology (IT), human resources (HR) and marketing skills, which are part of the education staple diet.
But running a business in Nigeria, isn’t always easy.
“Like everyone else who is conducting business in Nigeria, you buy your own generators. It just makes the cost of doing business more expensive but at the end of the day the numbers will bail you out if you get it right.”
It is part of expansion into the continent. In the next 18 to 24 months, Educor Africa plans to expand into Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, with an investment of R100 million ($12.38 million). The education group runs classroom, correspondence and online education. There are 16 Damelin campuses in South Africa with a franchise in Botswana and a correspondence business in Namibia.
“While the company has had certain overtures in Zimbabwe, with regards to potential partners, we’re just waiting for the right climate to explore those opportunities,” he says.
Educor Africa is busy with regulatory processes to start a correspondence business in Lagos, Nigeria. The education group is also applying for a university license through the national universities commission in the capital, Abuja.
“We aim to change the hearts and minds of the young and the not so young. Our initiative and passion for our business is that we change lives. It’s really important to us,” he says.
Kannigan’s pragmatic approach to business in Africa means the profit will be reinvested into the region.
“It’ll be an investment from one business to another, the correspondence branch will support the multimedia branch and together they’ll support the establishment of the university,” he says.
While the regulatory environment in South Africa doesn’t permit the Educor brands to call themselves a university—even though they can award degrees—that’s not the case in other African countries.
“Certainly some of those governments are aware of their own incapacity to provide, and therefore they welcome players such as Educor. Government’s capacity to spend on public education, with a burgeoning population at the same time, is creating a gap that is growing larger… we are actually assisting those governments to minimize that gap,” he says.
He is witness to the demand for higher education on the continent. The wealthy of West Africa pay a fortune to educate their children in the United States or Great Britain.
“When you take a world-class university experience to them, they embrace it. Now, you’re going to see that in many other African countries, especially those with a high GDP growth. If you want to increase your GDP, you’re going to need a skilled labor force,” says Kannigan.
Educor is going after big partners: “We are approaching the World Bank, who have a mandate with regards to education for Africa. We are busy talking to international universities which require an African or South African partner for various reasons to go into the African continent together… The education sector is recession-proof. People want to upscale themselves during a recession, to make themselves more marketable,” he says.
It hasn’t been smooth-sailing. Educor South Africa bought the business from Media24—Africa’s leading media publishing company—in 2008. When Media24 and Naspers—Media24’s majority shareholder—divested, the business was in the red. Not only has the Educor group brought it back into the black but it has also managed to expand.
“If you have a conversation with me in ten years time, firstly, I’ll be too busy to see you… we would have built something phenomenal across Africa in terms of education,” says Kannigan.
“Now is the time for Africa,” he says.

Nollywood: A Longshot

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I will go to school and study hard. I’ll be a success. I promise mama,” vows 10-year-old Lucky, at his mother’s grave. Lucky (Sihle Dlamini) gathers his few belongings, and like so many other South Africans leaves his rural Zulu village to the city.
Lucky (2011) is a poignant depiction of contemporary South African society and its problems. It explores the complex cross-cultural and racial relationships. It steers away from well-worn depictions of relations between black and white South Africans as depicted in archetypal post-apartheid South African films. The film explores the rainbow nation through relations between black and Indian South Africans. The film is in Zulu and Hindi with English subtitles.
Lucky’s arrival in the city is overshadowed by his uncle, Jabulani, (James Ngcobo) who has spent the schooling money—from the boy’s mother—on alcohol and women. He hands the boy an audio cassette with a final message from his mother. Jabulani says the youngster should make himself useful by finding a job instead. The boy sleeps hungry on the doorstep.
The film tracks the relationship between Lucky and Padma (Jayashree Basavaraj) who lives in the same building as Jabulani. She is his only hope of listening to the audio cassette. The Brahminic Indian widow, receives him with caution. She does not disguise her racial prejudices when she handles the audio cassette with a cloth and uses her walking stick to prod Lucky. The boy sleeps on her balcony, behind locked doors and drawn curtains, in a manner adopted by many South Africans in the face of poverty and guilt; Lucky is shut ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
Padma cares for the boy, but what seems to be a sudden change of heart, is actually a façade to receive a R200 government grant allocated for AIDS orphans. In return for cleaning her house, she sends him to school.
Together they undertake an emotional journey to Lucky’s village to escape from his neglectful uncle. Here they are met with the deeply-ingrained stigmas associated with AIDS, the disease which took Lucky’s mother. “Mother told me not to share food with you because you will spread the disease,” he is told by a girl from his village. Together with Padma, he goes in search of Dumisani (Vusi Kunene), a man who was believed to be dead and who might be his father. Dumisani, a funeral singer, is a constant reminder that in the midst of life we encounter death. The musical score, written by Phillip Miller, features African instruments and allows Kunene to explore his musical range.
Over time Padma’s maternal instincts overcome her Brahminic racism when she sells her belongings to help the boy. In a heart-warming scene, their bond transcends the language barrier when they talk about family, over Padma’s open family photo album.
This is award-winning writer and director, Avie Luthra’s, second feature film. It is based on the 2005 short film, by the same name, which won 47 awards. “Improvisation made the scenes and relations between the actors appear real and believable,” he says.
Willie Nel was well cast as the director of photography. The hand-held nature of the cinematography gives the film an authentic feel, allowing for a sense of voyeurism. “We wanted to strike a balance between documenting the story moments, and creating an intimate connection with our characters,” Luthra says. The camera attempts to go unnoticed, it hides behind grass, balconies, window panes and burglar bars. By doing so it simultaneously delineates the divide between characters to illustrate that understanding and compassion are needed for real reconciliation and to break down prejudice.
The film will be released on July 21 in South Africa; and is expected to be released in other parts of Africa in the coming months.

Tag: Education

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