From the deserts of Rajasthan to the dunes of Dubai and the corporate dens of Africa, Rakesh Wahi has weathered the vagaries of life and business. When only 23, while serving in the Indian Armed Forces, he was electrofied and almost died. That early experience taught him to chase his dreams – and fulfil them, no matter what.
Wahi, founder of the Johannesburg-based ABN Group, including CNBC Africa and FORBES AFRICA, has been a leader in media, IT, telecoms and education. Also based in Dubai as Chairman of CMA Investment Holdings, prior to moving there, Wahi had served in the Indian army for about nine years, and for distinguished services to the country in peacetime, was awarded the Vishisht Seva Medal by the President of India in 1985.
Wahi has built companies in over 22 countries, employing a little over a 1,000 people. “Extremely passionate about education”, it is his vision to set up educational centers of excellence across Africa. His first university was launched in Ghana in 2013. He is also the co-founder of Murdoch University Dubai.
Here, Wahi talks about education, innovation, and his debut book, Be A Lion, which will be unveiled at the finale of the 2016 CNBC Africa All Africa Business Leaders Awards in Johannesburg on November 11.
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<h4>What is Be A Lion about?</h4>
It’s about people and the impact they have had on me. I think this entire journey I have made is about how people have influenced me. First, on your way up, it’s your parents who are your greatest influencers as that’s where you get your identity from; and then, over a period of your lifetime, it’s the people who come into your life and make an impact, some positively, some otherwise. And that is the greatest experience you can talk about.
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<h4>You own multiple businesses; what new innovative industries are you possibly looking at?</h4>
When it comes to innovation, the key is to focus on how the world is changing and how things are going to impact our existing businesses. You have to constantly think about how your consumers are reacting to your products and services, and constantly change and that’s what innovation is about; it’s about reaching your customers in a more efficient manner.
With regard to the education sector, it’s changing rapidly. The way children consume education is very different from our time. The traditional classroom environment is changing.
Now, is learning going to be classroom-based? Are holograms going to be the future of education? Can you superimpose a teacher sitting in New York into classrooms in core campuses across the world, and have concurrent teaching?  A lot is changing.
Online is a very important aspect of where education is going, but I don’t believe that is the answer to it; I think the hybrid kind of education is what is eventually going to come around. Face-time with teachers is critical, the social engagement with peers is critical, so therefore a lot of things are going to remain constant with education, and the rest of it will evolve in terms of where technology and innovation can be used to make it more efficient.
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<h4>What are your continuing goals for education in Africa?</h4>
We are setting up centers of excellence. In West Africa, with Lancaster University, we are going to be setting up an engineering college with strong laboratory-based learning. In East Africa, our focus is energy and a vast part of it will require simulators and modern training equipment, and we will be partnering with industry to make sure we get the best of breed. We will roll out energy programs in the rest of Africa, and encourage students from across Africa, Asia and emerging markets to come to Rwanda for instance, where we are partnering with the University of Aberdeen for our energy programs.
In southern Africa, we are looking to partner with one of the Scottish universities to set up a center of excellence for health sciences, including medical and nursing colleges.
We don’t want to bring in technology from the yesteryears just because it is cheaper, or because we think Africa is still an emerging market, we want to actually leapfrog and bring in the latest technical innovations into these centers.
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<h4>CNBC Africa turns 10 next year; what are the innovations in the media business?</h4>
The entire way in which people are going to view television is changing, so are distribution channels. What remains consistent is there will always be demand for high-quality content. Our focus on creating quality content, which stays with the values of CNBC globally, is going to be one of our core competencies, but how you distribute it is going to actually evolve in the next 10 to 15 years, particularly in Africa.
The viewing habits of consumers are changing, they are no longer watching channels; they are watching programs, and able to customize their own grids. What is relevant is you will be able to watch what you want, at the time you want, in a scheduled manner.
On the one side, we have to make sure we create best and compelling content; on the other side, we partner with distribution platforms able to cater to the needs of the consumers at an affordable price.
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<h4>How welcoming is the African economy today of innovation?</h4>
At conferences and workshops, people talk about innovation, but I am not very sure they are actually geared up for it. The practical elements of bringing innovation into your workplace, whether in government or large corporates, is about a change in mindset, when you have to change processes and the way you look at things. It’s about driving change, and also, the commitment of leadership.
You do find there are some leaders in Africa bringing about that change, and the one that I would single out is President Paul Kagame, which is why Rwanda is making strides the way they are. He has the ability to visualize the future. They also have restrictions in terms of the size of the economy, but when you are hungry, you are able to adapt faster.
Kagame has brought a culture of change in his country, and it is very visible in the way you do business in Rwanda. You can set up a company in six to 24 hours if you have your documents in order. Rwanda gives you the opportunity to adapt quickly.
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<h4>How do you balance profit and philanthropy?</h4>
I think these are closely related. There have been great leaders like Mother Teresa who have devoted their time towards a cause. And she has touched the lives of our family too – she was very close to my mother, and has been to our home. But eventually, even to enable what she was doing, required money.
Over time, our own CSR and philanthropy as a family has changed. When Saloni [Wahi’s wife] and I were starting out in our life, even when we didn’t have much, we were always engaged in making a contribution towards causes.
Over the years, we found we needed to have a cause of our own, and after we set up the ABN Education Trust, we rationalized what made sense to us as a family. We focused on financial journalism, and also, on helping destitute women and the girl child, a cause Saloni is very passionate about.
Money is an important contribution but you also need to make time. Saloni and I work as a team. The heart sits with her, while I become the machinery for generating the income.
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<h4>Your most prized possession is…?</h4>
Family. I am not a material person. If I were to pack my life, I could pack it all into one suitcase.
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– Interviewed by Methil Renuka; for the full text of this interview, visit www.cnbcafrica.com; All net proceeds from the sales of Be A Lion, published by Penguin Random House, will go to charity and  the ABN Education Trust.

The Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur

Across the continent, we are failing to get girls and women interested in IT,” says Ghanaian IT entrepreneur Enyonam Kumahor, who has been in tech for many years. Besides running her own firm, the Cobalt Partners, she is the co-founder of Ghana Women in IT (GWITT), a platform providing Ghanaian women working in technology an opportunity to network and share experiences, whilst encouraging others.
“Half of the African population is female, yet the number of women in tech is less than one per cent of the continent’s total IT workforce,” says Kumahor. She stresses that this however does not mean that the entire region is under-performing.
“Ghana is doing well. We have various women running their own very successful IT businesses. Others are heading large tech companies. Mobile phone operators Airtel and Tigo are headed by women, and so is the Ghanaian branch of Microsoft. Kenya is not doing bad either. In South Africa, on the other hand, there is a genuine lack of diversity. This is worrisome,” she says.
Statistics by the South African Institute of Information Technology Professionals confirm Kumahor’s statements. The data shows that women in the Rainbow Nation hold 20% of all professional tech jobs. The global percentage stands at 56%.
There are several reasons behind the poor appetite for tech amongst Africa’s female population.
“There is a sense that tech is too difficult for women, that it is a guys’ environment, and that we can’t be mothers, wives, and software developers,” says Kumahor.
“Female science students are often pushed into more traditional fields. Medicine and engineering are all seen as more preferable to IT. We need to demystify technology and make it more accessible to girls and women. We need to start harnessing the female interest from a young age, for instance by developing school programs that make tech fun.”
While men have a definite responsibility in opening up the field of IT to women in Africa, they are not the sole role players, Kumahor stresses.
“There is a shortage of visible and vocal female role models in IT. Women who have made it in technology, should show their faces more. They are too quiet,” she says. “I don’t hear many established tech women from Africa talking about giving up-and-coming counterparts a chance. Personally, I think that each and every successful female IT professional should take a couple of newcomers under her wings, and mentor and inspire them intentionally. This is not yet happening. GWITT hopes to play a part in changing this and persuade women to get involved.”

Enyo

‘Too Few  African  Women In Tech’

Stafford Masie brought Google to South Africa and paid a hefty price. With 20 years in IT, Masie worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. And if ever you want insight into his tenacity, you have to go back to Bloemfontein in the 1990s.
“When I came back to South Africa, I worked at Telkom as a network analyst. I then became an instructor; they sent me to Cape Town and Durban to do a training course and then they sent me to Bloemfontein. It was a five-day course; I was prepared to do it and then these white guys walked in, asked if I was the instructor and walked out. They refused to be taught by someone of color. I was confused and angry; I didn’t know what to do. A lady came to me and said ‘look this is the situation, we are dealing with it, please go back to your hotel’. So I went back to my hotel distraught. I remember calling my dad and he said ‘You have to choose between two paths, you could be the victim or you could go back in there tomorrow morning and make sure you are the best of the best,’” says Masie.
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“I went back in and today some of those guys are my best friends.”
By 2006, Masie had traveled and lived abroad, and held one of the top positions at his then company Novell SA. His success, however, kept him away from his wife and children. Just when Masie thought it was time to rekindle his relationship with his family, he was given the biggest opportunity in his career – Google SA. Stafford did it all; he developed Google Search, Maps, Street View and he hired staff.
It was three years too many for his family and his personal life ‘hit the wall’. Masie was forced to leave Google SA to spend time with his crumbling family.
“I left Google reluctantly, I left Google negatively, I left Google unwillingly, I was hoping to salvage a marriage and spend time with my children again,” says Masie.
But it was too little, too late. His marriage ended.
“I got lost over all the years of giving so much to my career. I lost family and a marriage.”
Masie, the husband, lost, but Masie, the entrepreneur, was determined to win. He threw himself into his work. Masie sent shockwaves through the payment space, creating Payment Pebble, a device that turns your smartphone or tablet into a mobile card machine to receive credit or debit card payments on the go. It was a world first through his founding company, Thumbzup, founded in 2010.
“I have the greatest team, that’s what I have. So whatever anyone else is building out there, I don’t care. I’m not building a product to compete, I am building a team to be sustainable,” says Masie.
The idea of Payment Pebble came to Masie in an unexpected way that he will never forget. While waiting to see a mayor in the Gauteng province, a woman with a baby strapped to her back with a towel was rushed into the mayor’s office in tears. Stafford asked the receptionist what was going on, she explained that the council had turned off the woman’s utilities because she hadn’t made payments. The woman had the money, but wasn’t able to make the payments because she had just given birth to twins and fell ill during childbirth. With no lights or water in the middle of winter, one of the twins died.
Masie knew he had to do something.
“The Payment Pebble wasn’t a technological thing; my love for IT is personified by this. IT can solve that woman’s problem. That guy could have showed up at her house, if he had a payment pebble, he could have accepted her card payment and there could have been a full reconciliation of payment. He would have left and not switched off the lights and the child would be alive today,” says Masie.
“The Payment Pebble is a good example of African innovation solving African problems, it’s a great product,” says Mark Walker, the Regional Director for Africa at the Industrial Development Corporation.
Stafford took his idea to the banks.
“We spoke to all the banks and we realized that all the banks wanted a product. What we liked about Absa was that they wanted a partnership,” says Masie.
Four years later, the Payment Pebble is the largest mobile point of sale in Africa and is launching in one of the largest financial institutes in Australia and Latin America.
Masie believes his leadership style is the reason for his success as an entrepreneur.
“First of all, I am not a boss. I think I am more a leader, someone who is in the trenches shooting with the soldiers. Even though I may be a higher rank, I am in there with them. It is the only way I can be,” says Masie.
Lydia Paledi, an office manager at Novell SA, worked under Masie during his time at the company and has high praise for the entrepreneur.
“He was the best boss I’ve ever had and I wish he could come back.”
Despite his success, Masie dwells on his mistakes. He admits that he thinks of quitting at least once a day.
“It’s a constant battle with yourself; when you invent something, it’s nice to see it on billboards. When you pass Melrose Arch there is this massive billboard, when you look on the TV, it’s on CNN. It’s an incredible feeling but it’s short lived. You are always looking for the next big thing,”
he says.
Masie’s dream was to become a rescue helicopter pilot. Even though that didn’t happen, he is settled with his Payment Pebble and his microlight and six-seater Jabiru planes that he flies privately.

The Smile That Says  I Survived

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

It must be lonely at the top, sometimes. Since Kenyan geek, lawyer and political activist Ory Okolloh became Google’s policy advisor for Africa in early 2011, she is one of the few women in senior management in information technology (IT), a still largely male-dominated industry.
“The absence of women in technology is a challenge, not just in Africa but across the world,” Okolloh sighs. Through her work at Google, she wants to change that—by getting more Africans online, encouraging the creation of local internet content relevant to Africans and creating opportunities for young Africans to become developers and entrepreneurs.
Google, in a clever way of growing its own next generation of potential employees, is focusing on attracting women to the IT sector through close collaboration with universities, fellowships and internship programs. As a result, the number of women in IT should increase, Okolloh believes, and should translate into women taking up leadership positions.
<div id="attachment_960" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-960" class="wp-image-960 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/369-198_1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Ory Okolloh, Johannesburg; 7 June 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
“You need to build a pipeline first before you can look at how to get women into the higher, more visible roles,” she says.
She also hopes her own career path—after growing up in a relatively poor family in urban Kenya, she graduated from Harvard Law School in the United States, then accepted a high-powered position at multinational tech giant Google—will be an inspiration to other African women: “I hope I come across as very normal, so women can look at me and think, ‘I can do that too’.”
It was at Harvard that Okolloh discovered the power of the internet.
“I started blogging, which as a woman, gave me a voice and a space that I didn’t have to negotiate with anyone,” she says. Freedom of speech, liberation from patriarchal structures and participation in current political and social debates were no longer abstract concepts. Okolloh could exercise them every day and perhaps, most importantly, without intermediaries.
It was a realization that gave her life a new course. In 2006, she co-founded a parliamentary watchdog site Mzalendo (‘patriot’ in Swahili) which increased the accountability of Kenya’s government by recording bills, speeches and other official documents and making them available online. A year later, when the east African country was engulfed in violence following disputed presidential elections, Okolloh created yet another site, Ushahidi (Swahili for ‘witness’) that collected and mapped eyewitness reports of violence. The open source software created for the website has since been used to track violence in Eastern Congo, monitor elections in India and Mexico and map crime in the middle-American city, Atlanta.
Although Okolloh describes herself as a nerd, she is far from geeky. Fashionable, witty, warm and charming, she says working in the IT sector doesn’t mean hiding behind a computer screen.
“I can’t code to save my life,” she admits. “I’m much more interested in how technology can change lives.”
Her role as Google’s Africa policy advisor allows her to pursue this goal. The 34-year-old spends her days jetting from one of the continent’s 54 nations to the next to convince governments and private sector representatives of the importance of internet access for everyone.
“I try to encourage them to adopt policies that lead to getting more people online, to put in place regulations and come up with initiatives that can give people more access to the internet,” she says.
Internet connectivity and expansion should be a key aspect of any African country’s economic growth strategy, Okolloh believes: “The internet needs to be treated as an ‘infrastructure’. It’s as core, as critical, as electricity, water or roads in terms of growing the economy.” Optimistic about Africa’s future, she trusts in the continent’s ability to generate economic growth, but is wary about how it is being harnessed.
“This is a key decade for the continent in terms of opportunities. The question is how we make it a sustainable, inclusive and transformative growth, not just a boom decade.”
One way to do this is to improve internet access—currently only about 10% of Africans are online—which will have a direct impact on people’s pockets, Okolloh says, because the internet gives everyone, even those without much capital, access to the world.
“That’s why I’m drawn to technology. It’s an opportunity for people without resources, particularly young people and women, to place their stake in the ground. Those who can’t get a loan, can’t set up a manufacturing plant, can’t get an agent, but have access to this platform where they can make something happen for themselves. You can’t create jobs for everyone, you have to encourage entrepreneurship,” she says.
That has certainly been true in her own life. A mother of three young daughters, it’s largely thanks to the internet, and a supportive husband, that Okolloh manages to juggle a demanding career, frequent travel and family life as well as she does.
“The internet is a key enabler for women because it gives them mobility, flexibility and connectivity wherever they are. It helps them juggle multiple roles, work from home, be more efficient,” she says.
But until Okolloh reaches Google’s goal of Africa reaching a level of connectivity that matches that of Western nations, she will have to overcome some major challenges. Although the necessary undersea cables have been landed to connect the continent to the world’s major data hubs in the States and Europe, transmitting data inland is still too expensive.
“We still have a long way to go to tap the internet’s full potential in Africa,” Okolloh admits.
Another obstacle to innovation is lack of regional integration, which would allow entrepreneurs access to all 54 African markets.
“For innovation to really flourish, as an innovator, entrepreneur or business, you need to be able to at least sell to the continent, if not worldwide,” she explains. The basis for this would be a regionally accepted online payment system, like PayPal in the States, to facilitate e-commerce continent-wide. To date, Africa doesn’t have one.
In addition to that, Okolloh, who was on the Forbes list of Names You Need to Know in 2011 and named by Foreign Policy as one of the world’s top 100 thinkers in 2010, is rooting for more local content creation including text in local languages and country-specific geo-mapping to create “an internet that speaks to you where you are”. Currently, local content is at a dismal 2%.
“I would like to see Africans not only consume technology, but produce it. It’s about making the internet more relevant to Africa but also about sharing our content with the world,” she says.
The more Africans use the internet daily, the more likely Google is to make a profit on the continent. Since the web-search giant started operations in Africa in 2007, it has expanded into South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Uganda and opened offices in each of them, employing a total of about 90 staff.
“We are still laying the groundwork, understanding the market. We will grow as a business if people are online and local content is online,” Okolloh says, predicting that Google will profit in Africa within this decade.

Google Her

Herman Chinery-Hesse is piloting an orange Porsche sport utility vehicle around the hairpin bends leading up a mountain to his house in Aburi, in the misty hills just outside of Accra. “Put your seat belt on,” he warns, and screeches the tires.
These days, Chinery-Hesse’s racing hobby mirrors his life in the fast lane. He is the founder and CEO of SOFTtribe Limited, a company that provides business development software to African companies. On the Accra business scene, he’s known as the “Bill Gates of Ghana”—a title the 47-year-old shrugs off. The unabashed Pan-Africanist would likely prefer a Ghanaian nickname than one borrowed from an American software developer.
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“Africa is it,” he says. “It’s the next big wave. It’s waiting for development—every place else is so saturated, and people are finally spotting it. And they’re coming to us.”
Chinery-Hesse’s goal is to ensure Africa doesn’t miss the global information technology (IT) boat. His client base includes Nestlé and Unilever, and he has a regional development partnership with Seattle-based technology pioneer Microsoft. But despite the influx of global companies coming into Africa, he says there’s not yet a homegrown technology brand name synonymous with the continent and hopes that his company, SOFTtribe, working from offices in an understated two-level house near Accra Airport, could be the first. The company has just launched what it calls a “virtual mall”: an online hub where you can buy everything from a cinema ticket to a sweater from Angola.
“We want an African Google, an African Facebook. And it’s possible,” he says.
Despite Africa’s weak technology infrastructure, Ghana, at an estimated 20%, boasts the highest penetration in the region. He sees more potential in Africa than any other technology market in the world.
“Africa is where the richest need is,” he says. “If we get even 1% or 2% of African companies to buy our products, we [will be the next] Google.
“You should be able to access Africa from wherever you are in the world,” says Chinery-Hesse, mentioning his company as being “the gateway, the highway. I want something stable that makes people money.”
At SOFTtribe’s headquarters, there’s a decidedly mellow vibe—in his trademark khakis, rubber sandals and bright button-up, Chinery-Hesse maintains the casual style of Silicon Valley. Staffers mill on the balcony and walls are adorned with large canvas paintings of the beach.
On a recent day, the boss was in his favored work position—lying down on the sofa, four computers humming on the nearby desk. He dictated to his Hong Kong-educated Ethiopian assistant as she typed on a small pink laptop.
Chinery-Hesse paused to answer calls on his wireless mobile headpiece, a confusing move that causes his colleagues to joke: “Is he still talking to me?”
The space to sprawl is an achievement for Chinery-Hesse. When he first founded SOFTtribe in 1991, its programmers sat side-by-side in an outhouse—remodelled as a cramped office—behind his parents’ house in the same neighborhood.
“We were doing an international contract with Nestlé’s head office, and we would say ‘don’t come visit’ because they wouldn’t believe that this [cutting-edge software] was coming from the bush.”
A few years later, when the team had swelled to 28 people, Chinery-Hesse, unable to afford rent on the kind of space he needed, bought a freight container and piled in his operation. It housed the entire team and two air-conditioners for six years.
Today, from the comfort of its new home, the company is expanding at a clip that rivals one of the orange Porsche’s tight turns. By providing the internet bandwidth, hosting and software development capabilities to African companies—and the regional branches of multinationals—it has amassed more than 250 clients.
Chinery-Hesse is an unabashed Africa enthusiast who hopes to use technology and the internet to aid the wide spectrum of African business, from the Ford Foundation to a craftsman in Mali looking to sell his work overseas.
“We help clients with delivery, logistics; we make sure the merchandise is working. A lot of the time, we’re dealing with ordinary folks who may just have a mobile phone. We’re hand-holding,” he says. “My team is from everywhere—here, Ethiopia, Kenya. We see Ghana as a springboard to expand further into Africa.”
He speaks from experience—his home country provided the springboard for his own ambitions.
Born in Dublin, Herman’s mother is Dr Mary Chinery-Hesse, the former deputy director general of the International Labor Organization and the vice chairman of Ghana’s National Development Planning Commission. Her son was schooled in both Ghana and the United Kingdom and attended Texas Tech University, where, with the first computer boom underway, he discovered a talent for software coding.
Ever the pragmatist, he began his professional life as an engineer at a UK plasterboard manufacturer.
“If everything went wrong, I’d have a fallback,” he says.
The pay packet from the plasterboard manufacturer helped buy a computer costing 800 British pounds, and Chinery-Hesse began tinkering with it at home. At work, bosses took note of Chinery-Hesse’s interest in technology, and his American education, and moved him from mechanical to computer engineering.
Returning home for Christmas in the late 1980s, inspiration struck in an unlikely spot – an Accra nightclub, where friends were complaining that they didn’t have jobs.
“I made a 100 pound bet that I could find a job here by Monday morning,” he says. “Monday I woke up, jobless, and said ‘ouch.’ Then I remembered I had done programming in the UK, went onto the street, found a travel agent with a broken computer, fixed it, and…”—as word of mouth spread in a society that knew next to nothing about technology—“… I was inundated with offers.” A few years later, he founded SOFTtribe.
If the company’s original hurdle was to introduce software to a nation that didn’t know what it was, today its challenge is a bit more complex—figuring out how to incorporate traditional software with the growing influence of the internet.
In a sign he’s been successfully able to navigate Web 2.0, Chinery-Hesse was invited to speak at tech conference TEDGlobal in Tanzania in 2007, where he introduced SOFTtribe’s most advanced venture, Black Star Line (BSL), an e-commerce business which coordinates trade carried out via mobile phones and the internet, a model “combining transaction brokerage and a virtual marketplace”.
Funded by an angel investor, it’s a system of technology that’s a cross between eBay and PayPal, both of which are scarce in Africa, but are booming in the US, Europe and Asia.
“Africa can’t trade with the world, hence our poverty,” he says. But before it can open its gates to the world, the tech czar would like to see a businessman in his country transact with someone in Nigeria or the Congo or Malawi—without the usual red tape. “We can use technology to bypass borders and bureaucracy and unleash inter-Africa trade,” he says, “where someone in Kenya would be able to buy something from a man in Ghana.”
SOFTtribe is being recognized globally. The TED platform was a sign of acceptance from the international tech community, as were invitations to speak at the US’s top two business schools, Wharton and Harvard, and at Cambridge in the UK.
Chinery-Hesse’s profile in Ghana continues to rise; he is currently an Assessor at Ghana’s Commercial Court and his homes—and office balcony—are more popular among Ghana’s elite than nightclubs.
On a misty September night at his weekend home in Aburi, the deck was filled with the usual motley crew—business associates, locals, friends in from London. Everyone drank good wine. Mist swirled in the distance. Someone asked about road directions, inciting a spirited discussion. Chinery-Hesse, of course, was ready with the only answer that made sense—maps, after all, are for a world before technology.
“Use GPS,” he said, and the discussion was over.

Life In The Fast Lane With The Bill Gates Of Ghana

<div id="attachment_326" style="width: 272px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-326" class="wp-image-326 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Airtel-037-262x300.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="300" />Manoj Kohli</div>
Forget oil and gold, there is new treasure in Africa—mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2011, Africa will have surpassed the half a billion mark in mobile phone subscribers and the number is rising. In 2008, there were 246 million and three years later, this number has nearly doubled.
Manoj Kohli is at the heart of this growing business as the CEO (international) and joint managing director of Bharti Airtel. It launched in November 2010, after acquiring Kuwait-based mobile telecommunications company Zain for $8.3billion. The company inherited operations in 15 countries, cementing its position as the world’s largest single country mobile operator.
As of March 31, 2011 the operator had 220 million customers around the world and $5.9 billion in revenue. At the time of this interview, Airtel had hit 50 million paying customers in Africa; its target is 100 million customers by 2013.
“The Bharti Airtel business is doing well and we are satisfied with our first year in Africa. We are making good progress on all fronts, in terms of financial performance, market growth, market share growth, cultural aspects, government relationships and brand equity. We are happy that the first year has gone very well,” says Kohli on the seventh floor of Parkside Towers, the Bharti Africa headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.
Bharti, the number one player in India, landed in Africa knowing that it was going to have to fight it out with established players like Britain’s Vodafone, South Africa’s MTN, France Telecom (Orange) and Luxembourg’s Millicom.
“India has a population of 1.2 billion and Africa has about one billion. India is very diverse; Africa is more diverse not only because it is large geographically, but it also has different communities, different countries and therefore different governments and regulations—whereas India is one nation, with one language, one government, one currency, one time zone, and one cricket. Therefore, in that aspect India is less diverse than Africa. Both have scale in terms of population and opportunity, but because Africa is more diverse, it makes it more complex. India has 13 to 14 competitors, which is not viable for any market. Africa has anywhere between three to five major competitors but the quality of competition is good,” says Kohli.
The Airtel brand made its presence felt by slashing call rates, sparking a price war in major markets. In Kenya, for example, where Airtel is number two—with 3.6 million subscribers by June 2011—there was a major decline in average tariff for on-net calls from KSh3.92 ($0.04) per minute to KSh2.67 ($0.03) per minute, according to the industry quarterly statistics in May from the country’s industry regulator, the Communications Commission of Kenya. Bob Collymore, Safaricom’s CEO, was quoted as saying that the price cut was “morally reprehensible”. Safaricom is Vodafone’s brand in Kenya. As the new kid on the block, Airtel was not letting up and Safaricom followed suit.
As Kohli looks back at Bharti’s performance in the last year, he says the company has established its brand. This, Airtel has successfully done by associating itself with the youth and the two big passions in Africa—music and football. In 2010, the operator brought together American R&amp;B musician R Kelly and eight African music superstars—2Face, Amani, 4×4, Movaizhalene, JK, Alikiba, Fally Ipupa, and Navio.
In football, Airtel has partnered with Manchester United in launching the Airtel Rising Stars program for under-17 boys and girls in 15 African countries.
The second major milestone, says Kohli, has been replicating Bharti’s Indian business model in Africa.
“It is still a work in progress, but all the initiatives of bringing in our global strategic partners like IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei have kicked off, which is a huge transformation for Africa. For example, IT education, training and employment will go up because IBM has come along with us to various countries in Africa.”
Bharti has entered into a 10-year agreement with IBM where the latter will install and manage the operator’s information technology infrastructure and applications in line with its objective of ensuring affordable and innovative mobile services in Africa.
In the coming years, Bharti has several strategies. One is taking networks deep into Africa’s small towns and villages not currently covered by mobile networks. The second is a wide distribution.
As Africa opens up, thanks to fiber optic cables, Bharti is keen on enhancing the internet culture in Africa through 3G data. Already, the operator has 3G licences in 12 African countries. In November 2011, Airtel was awarded licences to operate 2G and 3G GSM services in Rwanda.
Although Bharti is betting on 2G and 3G services to increase penetration, the telecom brand is also eyeing a mobile money service, already  a major cash-cow for Safaricom—to date, $1.8 billion has been transferred through its money transfer service M-Pesa, which was launched in 2007.
Kohli admits mobile money has been a small aspect in the business because in India, the business has had to comply with strict restrictions by the Central Bank. “Our M-commerce product will be a great differentiator for us in the long-term,” he says.
According to Jupiter Research, the number of active users of mobile money services will exceed 200 million by 2013. Nearly 40% of active users by 2015 are expected to be in Africa and the Middle East.
Looking into the crystal ball, 2012 will be about supremacy and transformation of wireless broadband. “There are many countries that are already mature on the voice side, but on the broadband, they would like to have more capacity and better experience. In Africa, where the average subscriber age is 18 years old, there is a propensity for youth to need voice (2G) and internet (3G),” says Kohli.
As far as mobile use in Africa goes, the only way is up; 2012 is likely to see massive investment aimed at increasing internet penetration through wireless internet.
The other growth will be driven by penetration into Africa’s smaller towns, not covered by wireless. This expansion will see the further growth of M-commerce as more of the unbanked population log on.
For new technology, Kohli says his company will test 4G in India first.
“Regulators in Africa will have to make licences for that and it could take anywhere between two to three years.”
Bharti Airtel will invest nearly $1.5 billion in its 2011/12 financial year. Also in 2012, there will be HSPA+ (an evolved high-speed packet access) to Africa. This will see internet speeds of up to 21 megabytes per second.
So does Kohli see more investors coming to Africa in 2012?
“I believe that in small countries, the viability of operators beyond the third is not likely. In small markets, I don’t think you will have more than three players. In larger markets, it could be four; I think that is the right level of viable competitive intensity for Africa, primarily because huge investments are required for Africa and it is very important that the operators are financially healthy for them to make all those investments in the coming five years.”
As a first-time investor in Africa, Bharti is grappling with poor infrastructure and power shortages. For a company that has to run its networks round-the-clock, it has forced the operator to turn to diesel generators which is obviously pushing up operating costs.
“That is why we are converting many of these sites to be run by solar and wind energy because the diesel cost is high and we want to avoid polluting the environment.”
The other hurdle for Bharti has been a high cost structure. The operator is benchmarking with its Indian operations, where costs are significantly lower. To deal with this, the operator is exploring economies of scale and sharing. “We are currently engaging regulators and competitors to support sharing of passive towers, networks and fiber optic. In some countries we have already had positive responses.”
In an earlier interview, Kohli told telecomasia.com that Bharti was talking with Etisalat, MTN, France Telecom, Millicom and Vodafone.
Bharti also has to handle the problem of weak telecom skills in Africa. “Ideally, we would like 100% of employees in each country to come from the country itself. However, this is not possible today because many skills are not available locally. Therefore, we have to bring skills from other countries in Africa, as well as from India. But we are determined that in the next two to three years, we will invest a lot in building these skills in each country and grow young African leaders to lead our operations in their home countries,” he says.
Kohli adds that, despite the challenges, Africa is still a great place to do business because of the available opportunities of growth and a growing population that is embracing technology. “In India, infrastructure only improved in the last 10 years. The cost structure is lower because India has a local manufacturing and service sector whereas in Africa, the manufacturing and service sector is not as big. India has gone through that improvement period in the last decade and I am confident that Africa will go through a similar improvement period in this decade.”
With unemployment plaguing the continent, Bharti wants to contribute towards job creation by involving young entrepreneurs in its business operations.
“We are developing young entrepreneurs who like technology and would like to sell technology as distributors of our various services and products. There is tremendous scope. Silicon Valley and India have many entrepreneurs doing outstanding work for value-added services, content creation, new applications. I am confident that in the next two to three years, young talent from Africa will also work towards development of new value-added services and applications.”
Kohli believes telecom can be the growth engine for the continent.
“Because the infrastructure in Africa is weak—roads, rail and air connectivity—it makes telecom an integrator that can bring speed, efficiency and productivity to Africa. With internet wireless broadband coming, I think the contribution of telecoms will be far greater in the next three to five years in building Africa into a strong economy, with growth going up from 4-5% and maybe 8-9% in the coming five years.
“India went through the same curve. We had a 4% rate of growth and because of IT and telecom, we have gone up to 8-9%.”

Tag: IT

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