Many perspectives have been shared on influencer marketing, but very few from the brands themselves. What are its business imperatives and ROI?



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In the heart of Sandton, Africa’s richest square mile, is
Brittany Preece, a social media manager at Investec Bank. 



As part of the Private Banking marketing team, Preece and
her team have managed to successfully implement disruptive digital strategies
to meet the growth objectives of the bank. 



Traditionally, the role of marketing has been to support business objectives. Yet when companies experience financial difficulty, more often than not, marketing is seen to be the first in line on the chopping block. As a way of adapting to this reality, most marketing managers have had to look at cost-effective, yet creative, ways of achieving business impact.



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Social and digital media have given room for new ways
businesses can engage and sell to their customers. 



Increasingly gaining traction in South Africa is influencer
marketing, an entirely new branch of the sales and marketing funnel which has
seen brands leverage popular personalities on social media to promote their
products and services online. Globally, the influencer marketing industry is
forecast to be worth $5 billion to $10 billion by 2020, according to a study by
Mediakix.



For Investec, attracting and diversifying into new markets
has informed their decision to leverage influencers as part of their marketing
strategy. 



“Since 2015, we as Investec, have predominantly used influencer marketing to reach the young professional audience,” Preece says. 



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“We (Investec Private Bank) have recently evolved our
qualifying criteria. We’re no longer just the preferred banking partner for
accountants, engineers, lawyers, doctors and actuaries. We’re positioned to be
the bank of choice for those who are under the age of 30, consistently earning
more than R600,000 ($42,582)a year, with a university degree and working in
their area of expertise.” 



Seated in front of a glass wall which looks out to a view of
a bustling and upbeat office environment, she elaborates that to effectively
reach the young professionals’ target market, it is important to identify
individuals that can speak to that audience. 



“What influencer marketing gives you, that a lot of the other marketing channels can’t, is great reach and engagement with your target audience. Using [influencers] brings a lot of authenticity to the brand, where Investec Private Banking was seen as unattainable to a lot of young professionals,” Preece says. 



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In the digital universe, content is king. Authenticity is
paramount. A study conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association reported that
most consumers have banner blindness and suffer from advertising fatigue. They
cannot recall the last digital banner ad that they saw. 



Ad-blocking continues to be a growing phenomenon, further
demonstrating the shift in consumer behavior. Consumers simply don’t want to be
marketed to. To this effect, influencers assist brands to reach their customers
through content that is more relevant to those consumers.



According to Business Insider’s 2018 Influencer Marketing
Report: Research, Strategy &amp; Platforms for Leveraging Social Media
Influencers, the average social media engagement rate from influencer marketing
averages 5.7% per post. 



This is a feat compared to content generated by brands which
fluctuates around 2% – 3% per post. 



With this in mind, it’s even more essential for brands to
involve influencers upfront to co-create an envisioned campaign. 



“You want your influencer to buy into what you stand for as a brand. It shouldn’t be a hard sell – consumers see through that. If not done properly, it can look very fake and [we] never want to make it feel like an ad,” Preece says. 



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Brands and agencies measure awareness and engagement by
analyzing a few parameters, including, inter alia, number of likes, comments,
shares and followers. Proponents of this theory believe an increase in these
parameters lead to brand success. 



Detractors of the theory believe awareness and engagement
alone are not sufficient indicators of brand success. “Likes and follows are
unimpressive without an increase in the bottom line,” says Sinesipho Maninjwa,
a financial analyst and commentator. 



But technology has its limitations. Dianne Joseph, the
Commercial Director of Digital at Nielsen, a leading global information, data
and measurement company, elaborates that there are real challenges in measuring
sales attribution as a result of influencer marketing. 



“The influencer models are difficult to measure because most
influencers use their own personal pages to post, and these organic posts don’t
offer us the opportunity to implement a tag (for tracking purposes) and,
therefore, we aren’t able to track the outcomes,” Joseph says.



The ability to measure what is happening on and off digital
platforms, or across social media platforms, is a challenge that most digital
marketers face. Different platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have their own
unique methods of tracking and storing data. The link between these platforms
is, therefore, a lot more tenuous. 



But in support of influencer marketing, a number of global
studies have come out and shown that influencer marketing does yield a positive
return on investment (ROI). 



Pierre Cassuto, of social media influencer platform Humanz,
who recently set up shop in South Africa from Tel Aviv in Israel, believes that
the use of influencers can lead to increased sales. “In the US market, there is
about a four times ROI on money spent in the influencer marketing space for
retailers, cosmetics and FMCG brands,” he adds.



Cassuto agrees that engagement on its own doesn’t yield conversion. For influencer marketing to yield conversion, the message being broadcast by influencers has to be well thought out and carefully constructed to achieve that objective. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">There has to be a reason for someone to do something now as opposed to anytime. That can be around creating urgency around something specific, it can be around creating a limited time availability offer.</blockquote>



Essentially, brands can become creative and purposeful in
how they design their entire campaign to track conversion from the ground up.
“The way we suggest measuring conversion is by making sure that the influencers
have a way that [brands] can track the relationship between the influencers
post and the actual conversion,” Cassuto says.



The first looks at providing the influencer a coupon code
that they can distribute and share. In doing so, the specific brands will know
that the people who redeemed the coupon code came from the influencers. The
second options measures sell over time related to increase in traffic due to
influencer marketing towards a landing page that the brand is driving to. With
this, Cassuto states that brands can do A/B testing to see the impact on days
influencers are posting and days when they’re not. 



With all the advantages of influencer marketing, should
brands solely invest in this sales channel? 



Preece firmly holds the view that influencer marketing on
its own isn’t the be all and end all. “I do believe that it should be a mix. I
believe that an integrated marketing plan that uses out-of-home, billboards, TV
and digital is where you see the most results.”



“Things can go wrong with influencer marketing. You are
putting faith and trust into a human being who is imperfect. We have a saying:
A tweet can tank an economy,” Preece says.



With consumers becoming increasingly selective about what
they consume, influencer marketing continues to grow as an attractive sales
channel. It is imperative that brands place the necessary care and due
diligence before partnering with any influencer. 



The perfect fit between an influencer and the brand will
determine the overall ROI. After all, effective influencer marketing is the
online equivalent of the highly valuable word-of-mouth advertising that
marketers have always coveted.

gettyimages-981661932-170667a

‘A Tweet Can Tank An Economy’

Online platforms have become an important site for political and social engagement. On the one hand they have been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/special-report/2014/11/07/technology-democracy-social-media/">praised</a>&nbsp;for their progressive characteristics. This is because they offer great organising potential, enhance political accountability and disrupt old media practices that tend to exclude less powerful voices from important social and political discussions.



On the other hand, they have invited notes of&nbsp;cautioun. This is because new media platforms embolden and even midwife bullies, ethnic jingoists, and nationalist radicals who are a threat to social cohesion.



Both points of view have merit. New media platforms can be powerful forces for democracy and also a space for dangerous, sectarian and divisive ideas. A number of governments seem to be exploiting these fears in a bid to control these platforms.



These attempts are likely to become a lot more commonplace across Africa. Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Gambia have already passed laws that target social media users specifically. Some of these laws&nbsp;criminalise free speech online, while others have made the use of social media too&nbsp;expensive for users.



Nevertheless, new media platforms are increasingly being used. Their importance on the political landscape can’t be over-emphasised. This is because they have allowed people excluded from public communication to articulate their fears and desires in a way that wasn’t previously possible. The widespread use of applications such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp has been particularly instrumental in including a broad range of users in public discussions.



Rather than rely on the mainstream press to cover important political stories, citizens are able to discuss issues in the digital space. When their stories go viral the mainstream media then begins to cover them as important news items.



Twitter in particular has become a&nbsp;useful political tool&nbsp;for many. And Twitter’s standard vernaculars such as hashtags and memes have also been creatively appropriated to reflect local inflections. Humour, local languages, and idioms abound.



The fact that participants are also able to “tag” their leaders further means that authority is confronted directly. And a poor person living in an informal settlement is now able to confront the head of state with just as much authority as anyone else. These small victories matter.



These platforms have also enabled users to link local issues with international concerns to give them global currency and legitimacy. In Kenya for example, an anti-rape campaign which coalesced around #JusticeForKemunto could be seamlessly linked to the [#MeToo movement], a similar rebuke and articulation of anger against sexual violence against women.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Government control</h4>



The shift from legacy media has not been accidental.&nbsp;<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-african-governments-use-advertising-as-a-weapon-against-media-freedom-75702">A number of African governments still exert enormous control</a>&nbsp;over the media sector. The is because the state remains the single largest advertiser in the media in sub-Saharan Africa, and so can influence coverage and content.



In some countries, presidents and high-level politicians even&nbsp;<a href="https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/corporate/Kenyatta-business-empire-goes-into-expansion-drive/539550-2069704-liwltz/index.html">own media </a>houses.



This is why the digital space is so important. The emergence of a relatively new structure of communication – which is amorphous, unrestrained, and largely unaffected by state control – has meant there are new ways of&nbsp;holding governments to account.



But their popularity has drawn negative reactions from some governments.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Cracking down</h4>



Some are now&nbsp;employing digitally savvy state operatives&nbsp;to counter opposition discourses online.



Others have gone further by enforcing regulations to control online discourse through punitive laws and taxation.



In Tanzania for example, digital content producers – including bloggers – are&nbsp;required to get yearly licences&nbsp;which cost $900 dollars. In Uganda, data bundles are now much more expensive with a&nbsp;$0.05 levy charged per day. And Zambia plans to introduce&nbsp;similar measures.



Other countries have been a lot more brazen in their efforts to clamp down on free online speech. Cameroon, Egypt, and Ethiopia, for example, have regularly&nbsp;shut down the internet. Users considered too critical of the government are routinely arrested,&nbsp;threatened or even jailed.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Fake news</h4>



This is not to say that new media platforms are entirely without problems. Social media has been used to create and disseminate fake news. This has contributed to a dangerous regime of misinformation that has undermined democratic processes in a number of African countries.



This was the case during&nbsp;Kenya’s 2017 general elections&nbsp;when the ruling Jubilee party&nbsp;employed Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based public relations company, to boost its electoral prospects. The company was later accused of populating social media and using bots to create and circulate fake news.



Similarly, in South Africa, both the ruling African National Congress and the opposition Democratic Alliance were reported to have&nbsp;used social media to spread fake news&nbsp;to besmirch opponents during municipal elections.



These trends reflect the fact that fake news, misinformation and disinformation have infected the continent’s body politic, which is a dangerous development.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Future threats</h4>



It’s however safe to say that new media platforms are now firmly part of Africa’s public culture and any attempt to stop, frustrate or undermine their significance in public life is bound to fail.



However, the creative use to which they are put must be constructive and progressive. For example, in countries where collective political organisation and expression is increasingly being undermined by the state – such as Tanzania – instances of self-expression through new media form important pockets of resistance. These pockets, when viewed collectively, can help focus attention on state repression and excesses.



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INDIA-US-INTERNET-FACEBOOK

How New Media Platforms Have Become Powerful Across Africa

Snap Inc is considering changes to its Snapchat app, known for disappearing photos and videos, that could make users’ public posts longer lasting or even permanent, people familiar with the matter said. 



The company is also weighing an option to reveal the identities of Snapchat users who make public posts, a person familiar with Snap’s plans said.



Together the changes would mark a big step in Snap’s effort to lure and keep users by making content shared publicly via the “Our Story” section, more available outside Snapchat. They could also create a new revenue source for money-losing Snap, which has seen its user base shrink and executives flee the company.



But such changes to Snapchat, which launched in 2011 and became an instant hit among teenagers and millennials, could trigger backlash from users who cherish their privacy, especially as rival Facebook Inc has been plagued by scandals over how it handles user data.



Snap is carefully weighing the privacy, technical and legal considerations of revealing user identities on public posts, said the person familiar with Snap’s plans.



Only Snapchat photo and video content shared to “Our Story”, which shares the snaps publicly to a wider audience and not just a user’s friends, would be affected and users would still have the option of deleting those stories, said the person.



Snap has already extended the shelf life of public stories, but making them last even longer or revealing more about the users who create them would be a further departure from Snapchat’s hallmark features.



Snap declined to comment.



The changes would come in response to feedback from Snap’s four partnerships with news discovery platforms that help media companies spot, analyze and republish public breaking news content on Snapchat, sources said. Reuters is a customer of SAM Desk and NewsWhip, two of the news discovery platforms.



The news partnerships are part of Snap’s “Stories Everywhere” initiative, launched last year to push content to more places outside Snapchat.



Snap announced the partnerships last year and will sign four more deals in the near future, said the person familiar with Snap’s plans.



Initially, public stories would disappear after 30 days but now remain viewable for 90 days, according to Snap’s support website.



Some partners have said that the disappearing and anonymous nature of public stories makes them difficult to work with, the sources said.



Some news organizations will not embed Snapchat stories into articles because the content eventually disappears, while others will not use them because they are unable to verify anonymous users’ Snapchat videos.



One source familiar with the news partnership said Snap is already talking with one partner about making public posts last even longer and to make some content from celebrities permanent.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">LUCRATIVE BUSINESS</h4>



Snap’s stock has been under pressure as investors question the company’s plan to reach profitability. Snap shares on Friday closed some 60 percent below their March 2017 initial public offering price.



Making user content more valuable for partners has helped boost revenue at Snap’s rivals.



Twitter Inc was one of the first social media platforms to sell access to public posts or tweets and reported $108 million in third-quarter revenue from non-advertising businesses like data licensing, its fastest-growing division.



Twitter sells access to more than 500 million daily tweets to customers including analytics firms, news organizations and financial institutions that use trending tickers and stories to place trades.



Snap does not currently charge for access to public data, but could earn more advertising revenue if snaps embedded outside of Snapchat last longer, said Debra Aho Williamson, a social media marketing analyst with research firm eMarketer.



“The advertising would be visible for longer, and I could see advertisers paying more for it,” Williamson said.



Taxi protest blocks main road in Madrid



Facebook, viewed as a rival to Twitter in the data licensing market, recently implemented strict restrictions that have in turn made Snap’s content more valuable, industry sources said.



Snapchat’s video-heavy posts also offer elements that Twitter and Facebook’s largely text content cannot, especially in breaking news events, one of the sources said. -Reuters



-Angela Moon and Sheila Dang

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Snapchat Weighs What Was Once Unthinkable – Permanent Snaps

It is estimated that one in 10 women have already experienced some form of cyber violence since the age of 15.
Research also suggests women are disproportionately the targets of certain forms of online harassment and cyber stalking. This is according to a report complied by the European Institute for Gender Equality titled Cyber Violence Against Women And Girls in June 2017. It defines online harassment as – but not limited to – unwanted, explicit online messages; hate speech, insults or threats; and inappropriate or offensive advances on social networks.
In South Africa, the Protection from Harassment Act covers both online and physical harassment. For those who think they can hide behind the anonymity of sending emails or SMSes, the act requires service providers to give the addresses and ID numbers of perpetrators to the courts.
Social media law specialist Emma Sadleir of The Digital Law Company says if someone is sending you threatening messages, you should block them immediately.
“Don’t feed the trolls, don’t give them the airtime they seek.”
Sadleir stresses the importance of using privacy settings; and the ‘block and report’ functions across social media.
“You can take legal action by getting a protection order; sending a letter of demand; or a cease and desist letter,” explains Sadleir.
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A local journalist and author Shubnum Khan was a victim of stalking and online harassment. It started off innocently through a primary school friend who wanted to catch up after 18 years.
But, he wanted more from Khan and claimed she was giving him mixed messages. “If I sent a message to tell him to leave me alone because I wasn’t interested, he would say I made a typo,” says Khan.
The messages became intense when he spoke about their wedding, and referred to Khan as his wife.
When I stopped replying to his messages or calls and eventually blocked him, he took to harassing me on Twitter, says Khan. “I think social media became a platform where he felt he could force himself on to me because it was in a public space and I was active there.”
“I considered police action when he came to my house. I was so afraid to leave home because I thought he might be waiting somewhere – to this day, I get nervous every time I see a black BMW,” says Khan.
The turning point came when he posted photos of her house on Twitter.
“A few people tweeted at SAPS when he posted photos of the front of my house, but my father managed to phone his family and it died down from there.
“I consulted with a police officer as to what my next steps should be and I was considering taking out a restraining order just before it died down.
“I think having a profession where you’re in the public eye doesn’t help. Sometimes, people read my personal essays or novel and think they &#8216;know&#8217; me and understand what I need or want.
“I’m more careful about what I post now, but due to the nature of my work it’s a difficult place to negotiate,” says Khan.
“Twitter suspended the account and I feel better about it but things can quickly spiral out of control so I would suggest finding a balance in what you post in public.”
Sadleir thinks social media companies are failing their users, and should be better and quicker at responding.
“For me the problem lies in the anonymity, they are not very good at providing information about who started the account, with what device, and the IP address, which is information they have.”
“The truth is they don’t give a damn about South African laws, or any laws,” concludes Sadleir. &#8211; Written by Nafisa Akabor

The Dark Side Of Social Media

Twitter is is a great platform for raising brand awareness and driving traffic to your business.
It can be used to increase sales and to improve your customers’ experience. Yet, there are a lot of businesses that have not yet taken advantage of Twitter to achieve their goals.
Twitter it is one of the best places to have conversations that support, educate, and delight people. It’s a place for authentic business interactions with clients.
Twitter never sleeps. It gives you access to what’s going on in your industry, community, and around the world every moment of every day. People go on Twitter to discover something new, which makes them open to interacting with businesses.
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People often talk about the products they use on Twitter, so it’s a natural place to provide customer service. In fact, 85% of Twitter users say it&#8217;s important that businesses provide customer support on the social network. Twitter allows you to follow and interact with people outside of your personal network. It’s a great way of joining, or starting, discussions with influencers and industry experts to raise the profile of your business and build valuable connections.
Here are steps to set up a Twitter business profile:
Use a unique Twitter @name
Nothing expresses your brand on Twitter more than your account username, your @name is your unique identifier of your business on Twitter. It can contain up to 15 characters and should help people easily find your business.
Use your business’ name as the profile name and avoid using punctuation; it needs to be easy to find and type on devices. If your exact business name is not available, choose a similar name for consistency.
Your profile photo should represent your brand 
Your Twitter profile photo should probably be your company’s logo so people will instantly recognize your brand. Twitter uses your profile image to represent your account. Your profile picture shows the world who you are, and first impressions count. The image should showcase your best content and accurately sell your brand.
Choose a profile photo that visually represents your business or brand and fits well in a small space. This image isn’t just on your profile page; it is the icon in every Tweet you post.
The recommended image size for your profile pic is 400&#215;400 pixels; the image will be resized to fit.
Your bio must tell a story
Use your bio to explain what your business is about and what people can expect from your Twitter profile.
You have 160 characters to let people know what makes your business special, and why they need your products/services. Include useful information, such as what you tend to Tweet about, your location or business hours, and a link to your website. Use a unique link, so you can track visitors to your site from Twitter.
Jon Ferrara, the CEO of Nimble, says that Twitter marketers should make sure that their company’s identity and voice has great branding. It is important that the bio has a consistent tone so that other people can clearly understand what your company is about.
Your header image 
Your Twitter header image is a large background photo where you can tell a story about your business. It’s important that you use this to tell your business story as well.
Consider it a billboard for your company. You can use it to feature your products/services, or highlight your work and team. Change this image periodically to spotlight promotions, events, product news, or just keep things fresh. The recommended size for a Twitter header image is 1500&#215;500 pixels. On mobile, it’ll be cropped to a 2:1 aspect ratio.
Your pinned Tweet
Keep an important Tweet at the top of your timeline by pinning it there. Use this feature to make sure visitors to your profile can’t miss the biggest and latest news about your brand. &#8211; Written by Wale Bakare, Digital Marketer and Founder of www.webfala.com

Buy A Friend

How To Use Twitter To  Boost Your Business

In June, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, claimed that more than two billion people now use the social network every month.
Facebook continues to grow at a spectacular rate and is the most popular social media platform. Due to this, Facebook has become a vital tool for marketing. Facebook marketing can target new customers and increase brand loyalty. However, in order to create a successful Facebook campaign, one needs to provide contents that are unique, creative and engaging.
Facebook marketing is essential for both small and large businesses. It helps them effectively and efficiently promote their brand online.
While running a Facebook marketing campaign, one must consider the following seven tips to convert your target audience to customers.
1. Choose the right images for your campaign and obey the rule of 20% image text: Images are essential in creating a Facebook Ad. However, try to avoid stock photos as much as possible. Focus on images that your audience can easily relate to. But bear in mind, no matter the type of ad you want to create, your image needs to be visually appealing.
2. Keep you campaign short and simple: Make the title as attractive as possible, but do not make false claims. In cases where you cannot edit the title (like when advertising a Facebook page), you can enter the URL of the page and then edit the title. However, if you do this, you will get limited Facebook ad analytics. Keep this short and crisp. Always end this with a ‘call to action’. In terms of importance, this is less crucial than images and title. In terms of the entire description, the call to action is the most important part.
3. Run different campaigns for the same product/service: Instead of creating different ads and split testing them, create variations of ad that performs best, and change one element at a time. For example, take your best ad, make copies of it and change the headline of each version. You now have multiple ads that are identical, except for the headline that you can test. After you determine which ad gets the best response, make copies of it and test another element like description or image.
4. Your ad must be relevant: This is the most important factor for an ad to perform well. Your target audience must be able to relate to the ad. Only once your audience connects with the ad, will you gain the most from advertising on Facebook. Relevancy can be obtained in many ways and there are no set rules on ‘how to be relevant.’ You need to ask yourself if the majority of your audience will click on this ad? If the answer is yes, then your ad is relevant.
5. Be engaging with your audience: Don’t automate everything. If you want people to engage your Facebook campaign, you need to create highly engaging content that is simple. “Highly engaging” means the content is relevant to your audience and compels people to click on it. Your content should make people stop in their tracks. When your audience stops to read your content, they should feel encouraged to engage with it.
6. Follow the 80/20 rule for posts: Keep 20% of your campaign content relevant to the product or service of your business while 80% of the campaign content should be social, but relate to your business and the targeted audience.
7.    Use Geo-targeting: If you’re looking to connect with potential customers in a specific location, it’s a must-have to use geographic targeting. To find the right customer base for your brand, provide content to your desired audience and also generate leads, one needs to set up ad according to geographic target areas. &#8211; Written by Wale Bakare
<div id="attachment_33083" style="width: 683px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-33083" class=" wp-image-33083" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Facebook-infographic-e1502450117421-300x168.png" alt="" width="673" height="377" />Source: Google</div>

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A few months ago, I suddenly found myself dropping to the ground and crouching in long grass with bullets whirring overhead. Minutes earlier, I’d been following a group of pro-Russian fighters conducting a sweep of an area in eastern Ukraine to make sure it was ‘clean’ of the Ukrainian military. For a few frozen moments, my world stood still.
Everything was deathly quiet aside from the frighteningly close cracking of gunfire. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking and the commander was shouting&#8230; Yes, I was afraid.
Last May, I was sitting in a hotel room, warm water lazily filling a bath tub nearby. I switched on my phone and instantly paled. I was just as afraid.
“Scum of the earth”, “f*** her”, “take a knife and pull out all her Russian shit”.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-31873" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/facebook-profile-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/facebook-profile-300x169.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/facebook-profile-600x338.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/facebook-profile-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/facebook-profile.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
My Twitter feed had gone into overdrive and as I scrolled down each message, the abuse intensified.
I was on assignment in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, reporting for the Moscow-based broadcaster, Russia Today. The two countries were at war with each other and a local activist had picked up on my location and started a manhunt – “not just to catch her but to kill her”.
Within hours, I was on a plane out of the country. I arrived at the airport with dark glasses and a scarf. If I hadn’t been so afraid, it might have been funny.
Ukraine is currently the third most dangerous country for journalists to work in. The online harassment I faced, and continue to face, is not unique to Ukraine though, or for that matter, to journalists in general.
But what the threats uniquely focus on is my gender – the fact that I’m a woman – and the explicit threats are of extreme violence to rape and assault me. Most of my so-called online detractors focus their criticism less on my work and more on me.
My experience echoes the stories of other female journalists, writers and bloggers. A staggering 72.5% of online harassment is targeted at women, according to the Organisation for Safety and Co-operation in Europe.
The issue is of such concern that a special panel has been set up to address it. Trolling has become a favorite past-time for people buoyed by the anonymity and safety the online world offers. It is easy to sit in your home and spurt threats at anyone with views you don’t like. Legislation is far from water-tight in preventing it and what gives these words so much power is the incitement they can evoke and the very real possibility for them to be carried out in the real world.
I was in a taxi, lost, in an outlying suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. The driver had been circling the same neighborhoods for more than an hour and it was starting to get dark and I was getting concerned.
In such a situation, GPS tracking is a godsend – not just for finding one’s way but for alerting one’s editors to a possible abduction attempt. Today, journalists are seen as legitimate targets – no longer do we merely cover the story; in many instances we’ve become the story – whether online or in the real world.
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The number one fear we all share is that of being kidnapped. Paradoxically though, while switching on my cellphone’s GPS that day in Beirut and increasing my security, I also decreased it by alerting online detractors as to where I was.
The risks are greater when you’re a woman in the field than a man. In many parts of the world, women journalists are a strange persona for those with preconceived ideas of where a woman’s place should be.
Once, during an embed (term for a journalist attached to a military unit in conflict areas) with American soldiers in the Afghan province of Zabul, a group of children came running after us, laughing and joking. I was weighed down by a bulletproof jacket, helmet and backpack, but through the military sunglasses that kept slipping down my nose I could see the children pointing at my red-painted finger nails.
When we eventually took a breather and I removed my helmet, one of the more courageous boys plucked up the courage to step forward and ask: “Ma’am, do your parents know you’re here?”
All voices need to be heard, whether male or female, whether for or against the views one holds. Courage lies not only in speaking out for what one believes in, but for making sure the views of those we disagree with are given a platform.
– The writer is South African and the Middle East bureau chief of Russia Today. She was reporting for the channel in Kiev when a manhunt started against her and she had to exit.

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‘Catch Her… Kill Her’

When Mike Lawrie fretted and sweated to connect Africa to the internet he expected a handful of dusty academics to use it. A quarter of a century on, African truck drivers, domestic workers and office clerks can’t live without it – the internet in Africa is as much a part of living as is breathing for millions.
“We know internet use in most of the continent has been growing. But it’s not even. So you have countries like South Africa and Kenya on the one hand where many people are using the internet. Then you have Ethiopia, the second largest population in Africa, and very few use the internet,” says Indra de Lanerolle, head of the South African Network Society project at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg.
De Lanerolle is the author of The New Wave, a paper released in 2012 that looked at the internet users of Africa.
“The internet has grown, but there is one thing that hasn’t… fixed lines. Traditionally you would connect with a PC. But only two percent of households have a fixed line. PC penetration hasn’t been going up much. In that context it’s not surprising that it leaves us with mobile and mobile devices.”
“It’s a success story in one way that this infrastructure works. But it’s also evidence of a failure in another. Many African countries have failed to deliver those other networks, or they are way too expensive.”
Internet on the move is expensive. Net costs are high, which means the poor, without PCs, surf less.
“You are buying data in sachet size bytes, 5MB at a time, and you are rationing yourself. Our research shows you are very biased against services when you know how much data they use. One of the good things about Facebook is lowering the data consumption in order to use it.”
Internet means economic growth, says Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, Senior Vice President Commercial Africa at SES.
“According to our research, if a developing nation has 10 percent more broadband connectivity, it results in a 1.38 percent GDP growth for that country. It is expected that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion people by 2050. In 20 years, the number of cities in Africa with over 10 million inhabitants will double. Remote areas are pulling African economies down. Today, over 300 million Africans live more than 50 kilometers from the nearest fiber or cable broadband connection – 400 million people have no internet access at all, that’s 700 million unconnected people. This equates to 60 to 70 percent of the African population living in remote areas, cut off from the bigger cities without access to information and the necessary facilities required for sustainable growth. These people, by no fault of their own, are pulling their country backwards as they are not able to contribute to the economy, as much as they no doubt would want to,” says Guimba-Saidou.
Language is also a barrier, says De Lanerolle. The language of technology tends to be in English, French or Portuguese, making it difficult for those who don’t speak them to navigate on their phones.
“At a bank machine you can get numerous languages but on an app its less. In general e-commerce is generally English in South Africa. If I am a Sepedi speaker in Polokwane, and I go to a shop, I can probably speak Sepedi to a shopkeeper. I can use Sepedi to transact. I can go to a post office and do the same thing,” says De Lanerolle.
“There are a lot of people in South Africa who do not read and write English easily. It’s a significant barrier, but is a solvable one. People, who design services and content, need to take account of that, especially when you have got these limits when you have reached the limit of your clientele.”
Internet users on the continent may be on the rise, but almost half the population lives below the poverty line. According to De Lanerolle’s research, in 2008, one in seven people in South Africa were online. In 2012, this grew to one in three. By 2016, there could be as many as two out of three, he says.
The research bears out that the younger you are, the more likely you are to use it. Almost 50% of those under 25 are internet users, while less than 20% older than 45 use the net. Businesses need to be cautious when it comes to developing apps.
“When people are launching the business they say let’s design an app for an IOS system. First, ask why do an app? If your target market is a low-end income user, they are most likely using a BlackBerry. Why use smartphones?”
“Research, from the US, shows that most users use only 10 apps. It’s quite hard to develop an app that is quite easy to use. More seriously, it’s harder to make an app absolutely necessary that will be in that top 10. Most apps will be used and then dropped in a very short time, like games,” he says.
For those who have dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and designing a multimillion-dollar app in their garage in Africa, the road may belong and rocky. There is a shortage of developers in Africa, for a start.
“By far our biggest constraint is developers. I was speaking to a CEO of a fairly big company in Sandton; they alone have a hundred vacancies for developers. The problem is we don’t have enough, especially at an entrepreneur level. Because they have such shortages in Sandton, they are offering pretty good salaries. You have to be pretty brave and pretty confident to say ‘screw that I am going to do my own thing and hope I score.’”
Social media is the king of the internet. Seventy five percent of users have at least one account on Facebook, Twitter, Mxit or LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at Wits, has taught students to use the internet in journalism for four years. The growing generation of internet users are far less computer savvy than they are made out to be, she says.
“Students these days don’t even know how to burn a CD. I feel like the generation we have now, that deals in apps, don’t learn how to troubleshoot on a computer. Back [in 2000], if you stuffed up on a computer you had to fix it. Even a software error, you had to fix it. Now you just try something else, or reinstall. The way in which we learn about computers has completely changed.”
“I think social media has changed the game for everyone. What’s shifted drastically is initially when the internet came out it was very top down. Those who had power, money and influence were the people producing content. So you had very exclusive content producers. Then you shifted to Web 2.0, where internet users were producing internet content of their own. Now you have moved to a situation where it’s not very clear what production content is. Is a tweet content? Is a Facebook comment content? The individual matters now more than ever.”
The language of computers could be more important than learning Mandarin, she says.
“With me, my general rule with my kids is that they need to read and write properly first and then they can have access to a computer. If you look at people who became tech innovators, they played computer games. People have this aversion and get scared of games and computers, but we should be teaching our kids how to code through games,” says Balliah.
It may be for a privileged few, but it’s clear Africa is set to be changed even more by the growing, dynamic power of the internet.

Eat, Pray, eMail

When Mornay Walters met FORBES AFRICA in 2013, he was the cellphone wielding Jeremiah who warned that your business wasn’t safe from hackers. This was the year when Edwin Snowden, the former CIA employee, blew the whistle on global government surveillance programs. From the streets of Sandton to the stock markets of New York, Snowden revealed that no text, email or Facebook account was safe, unless you had military-style protection.
“You are fighting a shadow war. It could be a kid in a basement or it could be a highly skilled team; you don’t know,” says Walters.
“The reality is communication in the internet has changed drastically from where we were five years ago, to where we were two years ago, to where we are today. Ultimately it’s about one thing, data.”
Walters went into business at the right time, with the right app, to protect classified government installations; he realized he could do the same for businesses. With a team of 15 programmers, he created Seecrypt. It protects metadata, the information embedded in every SMS and email, to make it almost impossible for hackers, or governments, to get your precious secrets.
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Two years on, Walters’ small team of 15 has grown into a $130-million company that is home to 130 geeks; another world for the man who grew up in a Free State farming town that you would struggle to find on Google Maps.
“If you look hard yes, when I lived in Sasolburg the population was only 26 thousand people, today there is only 113 thousand people, 20 years after I left for the big city,” he says.
There are plenty of people to protect: whether it’s Facebook’s 1.49 billion users; WhatsApp’s 800 million users; Twitter’s 316 million users; or Instagram’s 300 million users.
“Personal data is the new black gold,” says Walters.
“You don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it. Ask any A-list celebrity what’s the first thing they want back, privacy… We can tell you horror stories about the perceived way how they take information from you, how they can harvest your address book for example. Listed companies have made billions, yet don’t charge a cent for their product. One has to ask where the money comes from, is your privacy worth the price of your app?”
Think of the app like armor-plating on a Range Rover, says Walters.
“The smallest grain of information that leaks out of that process could affect what we have… Every night, we have what we call sweep attacks. It could be a kid, an automated bot, or a person that hits our system. We spend an enormous sum of money on unified threat management. We do our own penetration tests.”
“We see it as flattering. We are getting interest from the US and China. Literally every modern nation is tapping on our front door or poking us from the side.”
Believe it or not, the company also encourages the people they want to crush.
“We have what we call honeypots, where we trap hackers, and they think they are getting into the system, so we can learn more about them,” says Walters.
So even if you are shopping in Africa, look over your shoulder, he warns
“Credit card SMS notifications can betray you. With SMS notifications you can track someone through a shopping mall. But that information is sent in the non-secure to me. If you are a high-end user, then these texts could make you a potential target. They display bank balance, your name and location. It’s a problem.”
“That’s the thing about cybercrime. It’s invisible. It’s only when I use your information publically against you that you will find out about it. While tech is making our lives easier we are exposing ourselves in a glass box. You are literally walking naked in the streets.”
Whether it is on your child’s Xbox or their cellphone, Walters believes access to the internet is an integral part of our lives, like oxygen and water.
“Your TV has a camera on it; your Xbox has a camera on it. It’s been demonstrated that one can be hacked and you could see into a living room. These things most people are oblivious to. We don’t even realize it,” he says.
It’s a thriving business that has taught the international market never to underestimate an Afrikaans accent from the Free State.
“We are dealing with customers who have never dealt with South Africa. We are naturally underdogs&#8230; The benefit of South Africa becoming the next Silicon Valley is that we’re cheap. We can develop software cheaper and pay developers more,” he says.
“I spend more time in an airplane than at home. But we are so excited about the opportunities coming our way; we expect to become a 500-man company in the next two to three years. It’s not an easy road. But we have made some good impressions.”
Walters’ business is a far cry from the start-up app run by a crew of 15. His next stop: becoming th

Making Millions From Paranoia

Watching Allegro Dinkwanyane irrevocably hooked to the internet, one would be encouraged to say that the world of the millennial, really, is the World Wide Web. And for the enterprising amongst them, this is where the heart – and all the money – is.
You could call her a poster child of social media; Dinkwanyane makes a living off it offering PR services for the rich and famous.
Her entrepreneurial journey started not in an MBA classroom, but in journalism school, when she was given an assignment to start an online blog. Impressed, her lecturer encouraged her to keep at it.
After diligent research, planning and a lot of soul-searching, Orgella Media was born out of her university dorm in 2011. Orgella? It’s her name spelt backwards.
“I was inspired by Oprah’s Harpo because it’s her name spelt backwards. From the time I saw it, I started writing my name backwards and realized there is a good ring to it,” says Dinkwanyane.
Orgella Media started as an entertainment blog and has now diversified to include public relations (PR), charity and property divisions.
The world of PR today is no longer merely handing out paper press releases in five-star summit rooms. PR strategies are aggressively built around blogs, tweets, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Google+. And this world Dinkwanyane most understands as she aspires to be one of the online world’s greatest PR mavens.
“The world of online never stops. You need to know what is happening in the world and most importantly sharing some news with the world,” she says.
Dinkwanyane’s public profile increased in 2015 representing the likes of South Africa’s hip hop sensation Anatii, news anchor Thabile Ngwato and Nigeria’s singer Saeon and hip hop artiste Yung6ix.
The 25-year-old runs her business in Johannesburg; a long way from home. She was raised in Limpopo, South Africa’s northern province. Life was not easy. Her parents divorced when she was 12.
“I knew my parents were going to divorce. As a kid, you can always sense these things. It was hard for my mum moving from being a housewife and now left alone with four children. My dad basically decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore. I haven’t seen him since I was 12. He didn’t want us. He woke up one day and decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore,” says Dinkwanyane.
After her parents’ divorce, being daddy’s girl, Dinkwanyane often called him on the phone, even though he never returned the gesture.
“I knew his number by heart and always called but after two years I asked myself ‘I am the kid here and why I am the one making all the effort’, and I stopped. I haven’t spoken or seen him since.”
Watching her mother transition from housewife to bread winner inspired her.
“Our standard of living changed. We went from having everything we needed while staying with my father in Pretoria to moving back to Limpopo. My mother is a qualified teacher but had been a housewife for years so she didn’t have a job. I didn’t let that put me down. I worked hard in school and everything I did.”
Time came for Dinkwanyane to enrol into university, but there wasn’t enough money for it.
“I knew I wanted to study at the University of Johannesburg but my mother didn’t have money to pay for student residence accommodation on campus for me. I had to travel from my sister’s house in Kempton Park to class every day which is in the east of Johannesburg yet the University is towards the north.”
Dinkwanyane’s mother worked hard to give her a university education. When the opportunity presented itself for her to start Orgella Media, she knocked on all doors to find mentors – and experience – in the media industry.
“TV personality Carol Manana mentored me for about two years. I got to see how TV is made and I enjoyed it,” says Dinkwanyane.
But success was still elusive. Money began flowing in with Orgella Media, but Dinkwanyane realized she could not fund it fully. Clout was important in the impenetrable corridors of business, so her contacts referred her to people with deep pockets willing to invest.
“I went to them but all the people did not believe or understand social media or what a blog was. I knew the blog will run with or without them. I had to find other means.”
She taught herself graphic design and learnt to make business cards. As she endeavored to grow her business, Dinkwanyane received an offer to work for TRACE MUSIC as a journalist. She worked here for two years whilst running her business on the side.
In November 2014, she quit.
“There comes a point when you see that in whatever job you are in there is no longer any opportunity for growth. I needed to concentrate on growing my brand than helping the success of someone else’s,” she says.
From then, she fully committed to her business. The sacrifice paid off, as it has grown “tremendously”, she says. Her website gets five million hits on average every month, and she has had 50 clients since inception.
Her advice to start-up entrepreneurs? “Love what you do, ask questions, be patient, find a mentor and engage with your target market.”
Cyberspace – Dinkwanyane has found her niche in it, and looks like she is here to stay.

Saying It Backwards, Like Oprah

The state memorial service held in the driving rain for Nelson Mandela at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg drew the eyes of the world. There were thousands of South Africans and more than 91 heads of state. It also drew droves of journalists, with superzoom lenses, all vying for the picture of the day.
It was an odd image that attracted headlines; three world leaders messing around on a smartphone. I believe the saying, the camera never lies, is misconstrued and this image shows how pictures are all about perception.
The moment revolved around a selfie taken by United States president Barack Obama with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British prime minister David Cameron. On the social media side, people thought Michelle Obama, in the background, looked jealous of the Danish head of state; there was even talk of a split.
AFP’s Roberto Schmidt, the man who took the picture, has a different story to tell.
“I later read on social media that Michelle Obama seemed to be rather peeved on seeing the Danish prime minister take the picture. But photos can lie. In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself joking with those around her, Cameron and Schmidt included. Her stern look was captured by chance,” Schmidt writes on his blog.
My view is the context is just as important as the image. People at home read far too much into Michelle’s face. In the picture, she comes across as a distant wife, cold towards the fun. It is an easy assumption to make from the comfort of a couch.
Most of the time, wire photographers write generic captions and send through their photos in bulk to put on mass-media sites. Editors, hundreds of kilometers away, then choose a photo from the event. Sometimes, this leads to people losing the essence and taking the image on face value.
The caption for this image does not explain what Schmidt thinks Michelle is doing, leaving it for the reader to guess. This leaves the picture open to interpretation. For all the reader knows, Michelle could have merely been cold and wet in the rain.
The reality was, as the photographer bears, that Michelle was not distant at all; though the image alluded to this.
This is a classic case of how a photograph can mislead and also shows the importance to gathering the context of the image.   FL

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That Split Second Selfie

The shocking abduction, and no return, of the 300 Nigerian schoolgirls has entered its fourth month. Fears for the fate of the girls have been escalating since they were the stars of a viral video released by their captors, the extremist group Boko Haram, just a few weeks after they were taken. The minute-long clip panned in, then out, of a dry field in an undisclosed location. The girls sat fearfully, huddled together in long grey burkas which covered their hair, but not their faces. It remains the only proof the girls may still be alive.
Thus began the social media-driven ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ campaign. Despite its many controversies and false starts, it offered some international solidarity for not just the girls taken from Chibok but for other trafficked women around world. The global outrage highlighted the urgent need to fight for the rights of countless women lured from their homes, hideously exploited – and never returned.
Worries have begun to mount, especially after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s admission that he was going to sell his female captives, that the girls may have been separated, pooled into smaller groups, then trafficked as sex slaves to Europe, Asia or other African destinations. This, of course, is one of the many working theories on what might have happened to the girls. Nothing is confirmed.
Several weeks ago, unconfirmed reports from Associated Press flooded international news cycles claiming Boko Haram had struck once more. Allegedly the group kidnapped another 60 girls from villages close to Chibok along with a host of young boys.
All these incidents have turned the global attention to human trafficking – a multi-billion dollar international industry which operates in a hidden network of alleys and dimly-lit apartments, where women’s lives are traded alongside money, illegal drugs and weapons.
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Going Undercover To Report
Tobore Ovuorie, an investigative journalist with Nigeria’s Premium Times, says six out of 10 people trafficked to the West are Nigerian. She has spent the bulk of her career studying the human trafficking trade and even lost a friend because of the industry. Last year, with support from an Amsterdam newspaper, Ovuorie went undercover for seven months to find out how the African trafficking syndicates worked.
Posing as a sex worker, Ovuorie saw, first hand, the terrible realities of the trafficking world. There were the orgies, a seemingly endless supply of controlled drugs and bags full of hard currency. First Ovuorie was taken to a ‘boot camp’, which all the girls had to endure before being moved to Italy. It was there that she saw an even darker side of the business. Two of the women she was with were beheaded in front her. Ovuorie claims that the group that owned them also sold human organs on the black market.
“It was the worst moment of my investigation,” she says.
Eventually, Ovuorie escaped the syndicate at the Nigeria-Benin border. She says that she walked away from the experience, “bruised and beaten, but still alive”. She has since written about her time with the traffickers although some passionate skeptics have questioned the credibility of her account.
But that was the least of her worries.
“When I returned to write the story, I feared reprisal from the syndicates and I fear I will have to watch my back for the rest of my life. Forgive and forget isn’t written in the dictionaries of these monsters,” she wrote in an email.
Despite the controversy around it, Ovuorie says she does not regret telling her story.
“It was worth it. Human trafficking is increasing in Nigeria.”
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Lured For Work, Food, Even Love
A majority of human trafficking activity is far more insidious and calculated than the tactics of Boko Haram. In South Africa, the Durban-based anti-trafficking group, Umgeni Community Empowerment Centre (UCEC), understands this well. Their counselors have rescued scores of underaged girls soliciting on city streets especially within the local red light strip, Mahatma Gandhi Street. The girls come from a mix of backgrounds, some born in Durban while some were brought in from cities further afield like Harare, Dar es Salaam and Maputo.
It may be a different context from northern Nigeria but the impact is just as devastating. Far removed from the higher echelons of piling statistical reports and complicated legislation, counselors, like the ones at UCEC, deal with the gritty, often terrifying realities of the trafficking netherworld. The women they help are mostly drug addicts and emotionally-scarred. Trust is a rare commodity amongst these women and going home, full of shame, is never an option.
Joy Conradie, a UCEC counsellor, says these women are unwittingly drawn into the trafficking world by promises of work, money, food, clothing and, in some cases, love.
“The targeted victim is spotted, be it in a club or simply getting onto a taxi,” she says, “the traffickers will make contact and they are very charming and highly manipulative.”
Conradie says the women are usually force-fed drugs and once they become addicts, the “free party ends and the nightmare begins”. The traffickers then demand payment for the drugs. The trafficked women, now addicts and destitute, are trapped by the debt. Left with little choice, they are forced into prostitution to pay their dues. Often, refusing to sell their bodies leads to them being “beaten, raped, threatened and isolated until she gives in”. This, unfortunately, is only a single scenario. Trafficked women across the world face a diversity of abuses.
“The girls are often moved from city to city and even across borders,” Conradie claims, adding the youngest victim they have helped was just 12 years old. The irony of this kind of sexual slavery is that it is largely driven by a desperation to escape poverty which traffickers exploit with offers of jobs that don’t exist.
Conradie says it is not just poverty that allows trafficking syndicates to flourish. A lack of education and awareness within the communities where victims are sourced also contributes to the trafficking cycle. But the lack of economic options also exacerbates the situation.
“We also come across sheer desperation in child-headed households, where an older teenage girl will prostitute herself in order to feed her younger siblings,” says Conradie.
To combat human trafficking, she says, more safe houses need to be provided for victims, as well as far stricter border controls, skilled rapid response teams to investigate human trafficking cases, and comprehensive intelligence gathering to understand where and how trafficking outfits operate.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) said in May that forced labor in the private economy draws in around $150 billion in illegal profits each year. Two thirds of this figure comes directly from the sex trade.
The organization’s Director-General, Guy Ryder, said that this added “a new urgency [for] efforts to eradicate [this] fundamentally evil, but hugely profitable practice, as soon as possible”. The report also claimed that there are approximately 21 million people bound by forced labor and trafficking around the world.
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Legislation to fight trafficking syndicates has been, slowly but surely, implemented across Africa and the world. In South Africa, every province has an assigned Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force. However, their power is limited. The global nature of human trafficking implies not a local, but international solution.

She’s Not For Sale

Calling the american dream

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

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.

Tag: Social Media

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