<h6>SHERYL SANDBERG</h6>
<h6>$1.05 billion</h6>
<h6>US, Self-made</h6>
<h6>Age: 44</h6>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-6121" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Apr-May-032-035-FLIST-Billionaires-001-188x300.jpg" alt="" width="188" height="300" /></p>
<p>In the world of self-made, hoodie-wearing technology billionaires, Sheryl Sandberg has pulled off something improbable: She has joined their ranks without founding her own company or writing a single line of code. The fact that Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer is a woman is incidental, of course, but it’s also noteworthy: Of the 268 newcomers to the 2014 FORBES Billionaires list, 42 are women – a single year record and, more notably, the highest-ever percentage of newcomers (and of women billionaires overall – 172 out of 1,645). That’s progress. But only a bit. Only 32 billionaire women – or 1.9% of all the globe’s billionaires – had a meaningful hand in building their own fortunes, as opposed to inheriting one from a parent or husband. Sandberg joins the dozen women, including Spanx’s Sara Blakely, fashion designer Tory Burch and Oprah Winfrey, who accomplished this feat without the help of a husband or sibling. And only she and Meg Whitman, who worked at Hasbro and FTD before joining eBay, accomplished this feat as hired hands of tech companies. Thus Sandberg’s perspective, distilled in her bestseller, Lean In, seems doubly apt. In a recent interview with FORBES she said she was “real optimistic” about the dialogue and debate generated by her book, which exhorts professional women to pour more energy into their careers, stop tolerating that high achievers are termed “bossy” while their male counterparts are praised as “aggressive”, and pick partners who will share in parenting and household duties.</p>
<p>“Businesses are going to care about diversity not because they want to do good in the world,” says Sandberg. “They’re going to care about diversity if it’s going to change their bottom line.” She says that she hosts private “Lean In Circles” and, in her book, advocates for others to do the same. Over dinner at her home, other leading women hear from special guests. One speaker: Cisco CEO John Chambers.</p>
<p>“What he understood is that it wasn’t about having women in your company but about having women in leadership roles. If you have the best talent, you’re going to have the best performance.” That presumably will translate to more women like Sandberg shattering the ten-figure ceiling.</p>
<h6>Folorunsho AlakIja</h6>
<h6>$2.5 billion</h6>
<h6>Nigeria, Self-made</h6>
<h6>Age: 63</h6>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-6122" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Apr-May-032-035-FLIST-Billionaires-002-212x300.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="300" /></p>
<p>Daughter of a wealthy man who had eight wives and 52 children, Alakija is Nigeria’s first female billionaire, thanks to her own lucrative oil-producing asset. After working as a secretary in a Nigerian merchant bank in the 1970s, Alakija quit her job to study fashion design in England. She subsequently founded Supreme Stitches, a Nigerian fashion label that catered to upscale clientele, which reportedly included Maryam Babangida, wife to Nigeria’s former military president Ibrahim Babangida. The government awarded her an oil-prospecting license for a 620,000-acre plot in 1993. She hired Texaco to assess the oil potential three years later, creating Famfa Oil. It went on to become OML 127, one of Nigeria’s most prolifc oil blocks. Famfa Oil owned a 60% stake in the block until 2000, when then President Olusegun Obasanjo tried to take back as much as a 50% interest. Famfa Oil went to court to challenge the acquisition. The Nigerian Supreme Court reinstated the stake to Famfa Oil in May 2012; it is now the bulk of her fortune. Says Alakija of her fate: “My entry into this [oil] business was God’s own way of leading me down a particular path.”</p>
<h6>denISe CoaTeS</h6>
<h6>$1.6 billion</h6>
<h6>UK, Self-made</h6>
<h6>Age: 46</h6>
<div id="attachment_6116" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6116" class="size-medium wp-image-6116" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Apr-May-032-035-FLIST-Billionaires-003-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /><p id="caption-attachment-6116" class="wp-caption-text">Denise Coates, chief executive of Bet 365</p>
<p></p></div>
<p>While still in school, Coates worked for her father, Peter, as a cashier crunching numbers in his betting shops. She finished school, trained as an accountant and then took over some of those shops, turning around their fortunes before selling them to large bookmaker Coral. She had noticed the success of online gambling businesses around the time of the dot-com boom and steered her family in that direction. In 2000, she bought the domain Bet365.com and launched the website in March 2001 after being shunned by traditional venture capitalists. Today, she is joint CEO (with her brother John) of online betting firm Bet365 and is by far its largest shareholder, with a 50.3% stake. Sales hit $1.6 billion last year for Bet365, which also owns British Premier League soccer team Stoke City. Her fortune comes primarily from her stake in the private betting company (based in Stoke-on-Trent) and dividends earned from over 13 years of operation.</p>
<h6>AerIn Lauder Zinterhofer</h6>
<h6>$1.1 billion</h6>
<h6>US, Inherited</h6>
<h6>Age: 44</h6>
<div id="attachment_6117" style="width: 233px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6117" class="size-medium wp-image-6117" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Apr-May-032-035-FLIST-Billionaires-004-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /><p id="caption-attachment-6117" class="wp-caption-text">167080839SH00055_The_Americ</p></div>
<p>The much-watched style maven joins the rich list thanks to the surging value of her stake in the $10 billion (sales) Estée Lauder cosmetics firm, founded by her late grandmother. The elder daughter of philanthropist and World Jewish Congress leader Ronald Lauder, she now presides over her own lifestyle empire. In 2012, she launched her eponymous brand, Aerin, starting with makeup (of course) and now encompassing perfume, accessories, jewelry and even decor, fabrics and lighting for those wishing to emulate her modern Manhattan-via-East Hampton aesthetic. While the beauty line was launched in collaboration with Estée Lauder, she operates the rest as a separate company. She remains image and style director at her family’s conglomerate, where she has worked for over two decades, starting during summer breaks from the University of Pennsylvania. Lauder often mentions her grandmother in interviews and recently tweeted a favorite saying of Estée’s: “I didn’t get there by wishing for it or hoping for it, but by working for it.” She’s married to her college sweetheart, Eric Zinterhofer, a Harvard M.B.A. who cofounded private equity firm Searchlight Capital in 2010 after 12 years at billionaire Leon Black’s investment powerhouse, Apollo.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h6>jane lauder</h6>
<h6>$1.15 billion</h6>
<h6>US, Inherited</h6>
<h6>Age: 41</h6>
<div id="attachment_6118" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6118" class="size-medium wp-image-6118" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Apr-May-032-035-FLIST-Billionaires-005-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /><p id="caption-attachment-6118" class="wp-caption-text">FINANCO RETAIL</p></div>
<p>The granddaughter of cosmetics legend Estée Lauder became America’s youngest female billionaire in 2013, joining the ranks following a transfer of shares in the family cosmetics empire. In April, Lauder will take the helm at Clinique, a mall-staple skin-care line and one of the 30 brands under the Estée Lauder umbrella. Her new gig as global brand president marks the culmination of 18 years at her late grandmother’s company; she joined in 1996, a year after graduating from Stanford. Before being appointed to run Clinique, she oversaw business at natural-makeup company Origins. She replaced her father, Ronald, on the Estée Lauder board in 2009 and now serves alongside big sister Aerin and cousin William. Her husband, Kevin Warsh, also a Stanford grad, was the youngest-ever appointee to the Federal Reserve Board; he’s currently a visiting fellow at their alma mater’s Hoover Institution. The couple lives in Manhattan’s trendy Nolita.</p>
<h6>Carrie Perrodo</h6>
<h6>$10 billion</h6>
<h6>France, Inherited</h6>
<h6>Age: 63</h6>
<p>Singapore native Ka Yee (Carrie) Wong was already a top model when she met French entrepreneur Hubert Perrodo in the early 1970s. At the time, Perrodo was traveling the world drilling for oil and gas. Soon they got married. Sharing the entrepreneurial bug, Carrie launched her own agency, Carrie Models, while Hubert started his first business. In time, Perrodo formed Perenco, which has become one of the world’s biggest family-owned oil companies, with estimated annual revenues of $6 billion and far-flung operations in the likes of Gabon, Peru and Cameroon. Hubert and Carrie enjoyed the good life; he was a keen polo player and wine lover who bought up Bordeaux vineyards, including Château Labégorce. Perrodo died in 2006 while hiking in the Alps. Carrie and her three children, François, Nathalie and Bertrand, are heirs to the company, though a breakdown of their stakes is not clear. François now chairs the company and likes to race cars. Nathalie oversees the wine investments. Carrie sold Carrie Models years ago, but the agency remains active to this day.</p>
<h6>Sandra ortega Mera</h6>
<h6>$6.1 billion</h6>
<h6>Spain, Inherited</h6>
<h6>Age: 46</h6>
<div id="attachment_6120" style="width: 238px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6120" class="size-medium wp-image-6120" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Apr-May-032-035-FLIST-Billionaires-007-228x300.jpg" alt="" width="228" height="300" /><p id="caption-attachment-6120" class="wp-caption-text">OLEIROS, SPAIN &#8211; AUGUST 17: Sandra Ortega Mera, daughter of Amancio Ortega and Rosalia Mera, attends her mother funeral on August 17, 2013 in Oleiros, Spain. (Photo by Xurxo Lobato/Getty Images)</p></div>
<p>A daughter of Inditex clothing retailer Amancio Ortega, the world’s third-richest person, Ortega Mera enters the ranks sooner than she had hoped, taking the place of her late mother, Rosalia Mera, who died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage while on vacation with Sandra last August. Her parents, who started the apparel business in their living room, divorced long ago. While her half-sister Marta works at her father’s investment arm, Ortega Mera devotes her time to Fundación Paideia, the non-profit her mother started to support vocational training for people with mental and physical disabilities. (Her brother Marcos, who shares the fortune, has cerebral palsy.) She has a psychology degree from the Universidad de Santiago and lives in the Galician town of La Coruña, on the Atlantic coast, with her husband and three kids.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>


The Class Of 2014 Leans In

<p>It is a Saturday afternoon and like many other shopping malls, this Johannesburg center is thronged with people running errands and lugging shopping bags. Escalators and elevators are full. At the tills bored tellers ring up purchases as snaking queues of customers wait their turn, while others push packed trollies through chaotic aisles.</p>
<p>One would be forgiven for mistaking this scene for the Christmas rush, except that this is a weekend in mid-January. The number of shopping malls mushrooming around the country and the expansion of shopping centers cannot keep up with South Africa’s insatiable consumer culture. Shopping has gone from being a fun to an arduous and time-consuming task. It is no surprise then, that 2013 saw the largest increase in online shopping. This trend is bound to continue in 2014.</p>
<p>“It’s true that e-commerce in South Africa is booming and it’s incredibly exciting to be part of this adventure, which is partly what drove me to relocate from Germany: the opportunity to be part of this evolution,” says Kalahari.com’s new CEO, Caren Genthner-Kappesz, who relocated to Cape Town last year to head up the online retailer.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-6047" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/WXW_6326-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /></p>
<p>“There have been a number of new entrants to the market in the last few years, which is fantastic because the more players there are, the more innovation there will be, and the more reasons people will have to enjoy the benefits of shopping online.”</p>
<p>It is hard to believe that before 1999, the word Kalahari meant the desert located in the west of Southern Africa. Today, the word lends itself to a pioneer in South African online retail. Last year, the Online Retail Brands Report ranked Kalahari.com as South Africa’s leading online retail brand, ahead of Amazon. That global online giant has aggressively dominated the online retail market in the United States. It is currently establishing its global footprint with localized branches in Europe and South Africa. Kalahari’s timeous delivery and the ease with which online shoppers can order anything from appliances to beauty products, has placed the brand in a strong position, according to Acentric Marketing Research, the agency that compiled the report.</p>
<p>“Kalahari.com has managed to maintain our lead as South Africa’s number one online store, and we believe that the key to doing this is to always keep your customer at the core of your business. We are extremely sensitive to our customer base and utilize various means to maintain open dialogue with them and actively action necessary innovation to improve the kalahari.com experience.”</p>
<p>With nine years of experience as general manager at shopping.com and as a director and general manager for eBay Express, both in Germany, Genthner-Kappesz fine-tuned the customer experience. She has also worked as a chief operations officer at brands4friends, an eBay subsidiary and market leader in flash sales in Germany. Genthner-Kappesz, who holds a PhD in Mathematics, maintains that the human element is what drives Kalahari.com’s success.</p>
<p>“It’s also essential to have the right team, and I’m very proud to say that I believe I am supported by some of the best and brightest available.”</p>
<p>Spurred on by the growing online shopping environment in South Africa, fashion vendor Style36.co.za and online furniture retailer 5rooms.com launched ‘Cyber Monday’ this December, as the festive season shopping frenzy began. The initiative was based on ‘Black Friday’, the day after American Thanksgiving in the United States, when items are marked down to a fraction of their price. With the tagline ‘One Day. One Sale. One Massive Discount’, the South African version was an exclusively online sale that offered discounts of up to 80%.</p>
<p>The inaugural ‘Cyber Monday’ sale was a bold move by the two smaller retailers that became an effective advertising vehicle as more South Africans turn to online shopping. The furniture retailer 5rooms.com had their biggest sale day since the site was launched in 2012, while fashion retailer Style36.co.za saw a record of 100,000 visitors in 24 hours and became one of the most-visited websites in the country on the day.</p>
<p>Despite the boom in online shopping, retailers still face stiff competition from shops and have to be a step ahead.</p>
<p>“At the end of the day retail is retail, and pricing is a key element of that. Obviously online retailers need to plan and negotiate very carefully in order to offer value,” she says.</p>
<p>“We are very big on malls and we like to taste and touch and see and feel. The more you move down in the pyramid the more tactile they are with objects. They’re looking at the stitching on the shoe, they’re feeling the fabric for how thick it is. They’re testing the stitching, they’re yanking and pulling and you can’t do that online. I don’t think that the trust is there yet for online shopping, and that’s understandable because we don’t even trust the stores we’re going into, we’re still inspecting everything very closely,” says Genevieve van Vuuren at the Consumer Insight Agency</p>
<p>The Cape Town-based consumer trends analyst also recalls the challenges faced by a Kenyan client who established an online shoe shop. While the website had a fair share of visits, customers preferred to try on the shoes before buying them. This made the website more of an advertiser than a vendor.</p>
<p>“I think as a culture we’re getting there, especially with electronics and stationery and stuff that you don’t have to try on like clothing,” says van Vuuren.</p>
<p>Building trust and a desire to purchase are key to building an online presence. In aspirational cultures like South Africa, products that consumers can’t purchase in their home country are most popular, but this has its drawbacks.</p>
<p>Kalahari.com has launched a cellphone application that could prevent customers from ever wanting to leave their couches. The Kalahari.com Scan and Shop app allows customers to find the best deals by scanning the barcode of a book, DVD, CD or gadget they’re eyeing out in a shop. The app compares the shop’s price to that of the online retailer’s price. Following in the footsteps of Amazon, Kalahari also offers a mobile shopping app as well as its own e-book reader.</p>
<p>“We believe that mobile internet is really the future in South Africa and we aim to be at the forefront of this. A recent survey of our customer base indicated that over 95% of smartphone users either already use shopping apps or would consider doing so. The development of a proprietary app allows us to deliver a much more sophisticated user experience to the user and also opens up the native technologies of the device to us.”</p>
<p>Since joining Kalahari.com in March last year, Genthner-Kappesz has tried to harness the popularity of mobile internet in South Africa.</p>
<p>Smaller retailers have fewer resources to throw at advertising and consumer innovations rely heavily on word of mouth. My Sister’s Closet is a popular women’s fashion boutique in Johannesburg, owned by sisters Sharna and Louise Darko. The shop carved a niche for itself by offering London’s latest trends to Johannesburg’s fashionistas. Last year, the Darko’s felt that the only way to expand the shop was through cyberspace.</p>
<p>“Going online was a natural progression for us as we were avid online shoppers back home in the UK. That coupled with the emerging global trend of online shopping, we knew South Africa would soon be jumping on the bandwagon. We were already getting requests from our customers to courier items to them if they couldn’t get to the store,” says Sharna Darko.</p>
<p>In February 2013, the sisters launched their e-commerce website. While they entered a market that was already dominated by online clothing fashion stores, such as Zando.com as well as retail giants Mr Price, it was well received. After observing a noticeable dip in their boutique’s foot traffic, they decided to trade solely online from August of that year.</p>
<p>“I think the size of our business works in our favor as we’re able to add that personal touch to our customer service. We also offer exclusivity, as we’re not shifting thousands of units of the same item,” says Sharna Darko.</p>
<p>Many e-commerce websites are reaping the benefits of engaging online with their clientele. My Sister’s Closet actively uses social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to communicate with their customers. The online fashion retailer also sponsors the wardrobes of popular television presenters. So, if a potential customer liked the kente cloth pencil skirt that they saw on the box, they can tweet the boutique. In minutes they’ll know about the availability of their size and will be directed to the online website – all from the comfort of their lounge. If the skirt is not the right fit, it can be easily returned without the hassle of an in-store exchange or the unforgiving harsh light of a fitting room.</p>
<p>Online retailers still need to build unfaltering consumer trust, as ultimately this will encourage customers to shop from the comfort of their homes rather than the inconvenience of bustling shopping malls. This means no pushing or shoving, no long queues when you have so many other things to do. One thing online retailers are getting right is that the customer’s time is limited.</p>


Online’s Fine, So Manic Malls Decline

<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-6041" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_8435-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“The iPad is used in addition to, not in place of traditional learning. The children learn by doing,” she says.</p>
<p>The teachers also use the iPads to communicate with the youngsters’ parents, and even take photographs of the learners during the school day.</p>
<p>“All our communication happens via email, so parents have an idea of what their kids do on a daily basis,” says Hoffman.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-6042" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_8442-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></p>
<p>Mukina has ambitions to expand across South Africa, especially into Angola and Malawi, but the sensitive nature of early childcare means expansion is slow.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Early education is an essential, if we are going to have a better education system,” she says.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>If Mukina’s ambitions are anything to go by, we have reason to be optimistic about the future of Africa’s youth.</p>


Pencil, Eraser, iPad

<p>Technology has made everything we do each day easier. We can navigate our way to a meeting, host a video chat with a client in Dubai, and check work emails from the golf course.</p>
<p>But all of this instant access has a price. As workers struggle to adapt to a workplace teeming with smartphones and tablets, it’s easy to make mistakes that can not only annoy co-workers, but damage reputations and destroy careers. If you find you’re focusing on your devices more than the people around you, you may be breaking the rules of technology etiquette. Here are a few guidelines for using technology in the office.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol>
<li>
<h5>Don’t check email mid-conversation</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Don’t allow your attention to drift to your computer screen or your smartphone while in a conversation with someone. When you ignore the colleague in front of you to check your buzzing cell, you’re actually sending the message that something else is more important than the conversation at hand. You’re also making it clear that you don’t value your co-worker’s time, which may soon result in that person seeking conversations with someone else.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="2">
<li>
<h5>Don’t wear headphones in communal areas</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>For some employees, headphones are a great way to tune out distractions to focus on the task at hand. But when you step away from your desk to use the restroom or drop off something in the mail room, leave the headphones at your desk. This is also true of Bluetooth headset. Nothing annoys co-workers more than trying to decipher whether you’re on a phone call or not every time they see you.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="3">
<li>
<h5>Lose the speakerphone</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>A Bluetooth headset is far more preferable to speakerphone. Speakerphones are for conference calls involving multiple people in a room with a closed door. Speakerphones are not for one-on-one calls held in a cubicle because you can’t be bothered to hold the handset to your ear. Believe it or not, other people in your office have work to do, as well. One other thing to keep in mind: your clients and vendors may not be so happy with being broadcast through your building.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="4">
<li>
<h5>Pay attention during meetings</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, your BlackBerry’s buzzing. Yes, it could be important. But if you think no one in the room is noticing you’re spending entire meetings on your phone, you’re wrong. If you must be reachable at all times, give your phone only cursory glances when you’re in a meeting, saving your responses until later. It’s important your co-workers feel you’re part of the team, which includes being an active participant in every meeting you attend.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="5">
<li>
<h5>Silence your cell phone</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>These days, movie theater audiences can’t get through the previews without at least one reminder to put all cell phones on silent. The same rule should apply to any business meeting. If your work-related cell phone must stay on vibrate, be sure it’s on the lowest setting and keep it holstered. Buzzing cell phones can be just as distracting as</p>
<p>ringers. In fact, as a courtesy to co-workers, you should leave your cell phone on silent at all times while you’re in an office setting. Nobody wants to hear your ringtone 700 times a day.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="6">
<li>
<h5>Use your inside voice</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>For some reason, people feel the need to speak more loudly when they’re conversing on a cell phone, especially if the connection isn’t as strong as it should be. The person at the other end of the line can hear you clearly if you speak in a normal tone of voice and those in the office around you will thank you for your courtesy.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="7">
<li>
<h5>Be sparing with “Urgent” emails</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>If you mark everything as “urgent,” eventually nobody will pay attention to anything you send. Before upping the importance of an email, ask yourself if the person at the other end will see the message as a high priority. Also, make sure each message’s subject line clearly states the purpose of the message inside to prevent messages being accidentally discarded as irrelevant.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="8">
<li>
<h5>Be sparing with CCs</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Before copying everyone from the cleaning person to the CEO on an e-mail, consider whether the information is relevant. While there are some issues certain key parties need to know about, if you involve the higher-ups in everything, you may be perceived as someone who is unable to make decisions without assistance. Workers should also use caution when CC-ing co-workers’ supervisors on emails. When done a certain way, this can have a tattletale-like impact that rubs those co-workers the wrong way.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="9">
<li>
<h5>Avoid text shorthand</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>While it might be okay to send a message to a buddy or spouse with text shorthand, avoid such behavior at work. Even if you’re instant messaging or texting a business associate, use proper grammar and complete, well-punctuated sentences. “U busy” doesn’t look as professional as, “Are you busy?”</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="10">
<li>
<h5>Keep emails professional</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Email is not the place to share office gossip. As a general rule, never put anything in email you wouldn’t say to someone directly. In many cases, once someone hits “send” on an email, there’s no way to get that email back. An email can easily be forwarded or misdirected, inadvertently ending up in the inbox of the very person who is the topic of conversation. If that happens, be prepared for years of awkward staff meetings and company parties.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="11">
<li>
<h5>Look up</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Sure, constantly staring at your phone can make you look like you’re a busy, important person, but if you’re staring down at the device in your hand while you’re navigating through the office, running headlong into something or someone is the least of your worries. Hallways and elevators provide the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation with someone, possibly making a connection that can help your career.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<ol start="12">
<li>
<h5>Stay away from co-workers on social media</h5>
</li>
</ol>
<p>If at all possible, set your social media profiles to private and avoid befriending colleagues on your personal social networking sites. You may want to set up a professional site on Facebook and Twitter to accommodate your networking needs. If you must add co-workers, be sure to avoid posting anything you wouldn’t want your boss to know about. Even a private social media page won’t be private for long if co-workers decide to show your boss what they’ve found.</p>
<p>Technology has come a long way since the first books on etiquette were published. One thing hasn’t changed, though. Etiquette is simply being considerate of those around you and treating others the way you would want to be treated. By doing that, you can continue to move forward in your career while using the best tools available today.</p>


Cubicle etiquette:  12 Ways Technology Can  Hurt Your Career

<p>A recent study from the 50,000-member strong B2B Technology Marketing community on LinkedIn showed that 85% of B2B Marketers say LinkedIn is the most effective social network in delivering content. That study also showed that 71% of B2B Marketers say audience relevance is the most important element of content marketing and 88% of B2B Marketers cite case studies as the most effective form content marketing.</p>
<p>Yet, most business owners and most marketing, sales and business development professionals have a LinkedIn profile that reads like a resume. Their profiles do not show why a decision-maker or influencer should connect with them. Right there, they are not demonstrating their relevance. And, they’re not effectively showing their relevance in the content they are sharing.</p>
<p>Let me show you how four women are effectively using content and LinkedIn to generate more leads and profits.</p>
<h4><strong>How the founder of Wizard Media gained hundreds of leads and $60,000 by mixing content marketing with LinkedIn marketing</strong></h4>
<p>If you look at the profile of Jimena Cortes, you’ll notice we’ve included case studies. For example, you’ll find a case study on how Jimena built a Neiman Marcus jewelry designer’s Facebook community to 45,000 members in nine months (something retailers would find very interesting). Within that case study, Jimena shows why her strategies took the client from 600 fans to 45,000 fans, zero engagement to capturing 37% of her fans’ information and from zero sales to $12,000 in three days.</p>
<p>Because her profile has content that resonates with her targeted audiences – her targeted audiences are accepting her LinkedIn connection. They’re joining her LinkedIn groups where she offers more content. The profile attracted a prospect that was ready, willing and able to spend $36,000 per year on her services.</p>
<p>Plus, when Jimena completes an email lead generation campaign through LinkedIn (using LinkedIn groups) about an upcoming webinar, prospects are signing up because they see that she has value to offer just by looking at her profile. By mixing LinkedIn marketing with webinar marketing (a form of content marketing), Jimena gained an additional $60,000 for her business last year.</p>
<h4><strong>IT marketing firm gains four new clients fast by challenging the way software and technology companies market their solutions</strong></h4>
<p>Conversion Copywriting President Susan Tatum creates thought leadership content for her clients so they can attract more prospects. But she was creating the same old, boring topics on her own blog. She was writing about topics like “Wow to write an awesome white paper”, “Why tech marketers must have a blog” and “Five signs you’re talking to the wrong content writer.” She was writing for the search engines – but she wasn’t writing content that would position her as an influencer within the different social media circles she belonged to, including LinkedIn. LinkedIn members are savvy, educated professionals, who are constantly looking for new and original ideas and ways of conducting business. As there are thousands of LinkedIn groups with hundreds of discussions happening every single day, your content will get ignored if you are providing the same old, regurgitated content that’s already all over the web. By creating thought-provoking blog posts, special reports and discussions that literally open the eyes of technology marketers inside her own Linked-In group and inside the 50 targeted groups she belongs to, Susan increased her website traffic by 300%. She went from zero LinkedIn shares to 90+ LinkedIn shares. And, she was able to recently gain four new clients including a company that serves 86% of the Fortune 100.</p>
<h4><strong>International coaching firm attracts more women business owners by telling stories</strong></h4>
<p>While working with Zee Worstell, President of AccelerateHer, I discovered that she and her clients had amazing stories to tell. Zee’s expertise is in showing women business owners how to price themselves appropriately. She knows first-hand how hard this is because she came across this issue when she was growing her recruiting business. When she was starting out, she would lower her prices in order to secure a client and wound up earning less than she was worth. This backfired because prospects would doubt her work because she was priced significantly lower than her competition. She was turning off prospects just by lowering her fees – and the clients she did get failed to show her respect. So, we had Zee create blog posts that discussed the “good girl beliefs” that held her back as a woman business owner. She discussed her own confidence issues within the articles and the mistakes she made. She also writes articles where she discusses the challenges her clients faced – and she tells their complete story and how they’ve become successful. As on average, women business owners make 45% less than male business owners, her target audience resonated with the discussions that were being created based on the blog posts. In fact, when she spoke to many of her LinkedIn connections on the phone (as she took the LinkedIn conversation offline) they felt like she was writing and speaking directly to them. As a result they signed up for her coaching program.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h4><strong>How the author of this article mixed LinkedIn marketing and content marketing to gain more PR, more exposure and more leads</strong></h4>
<p>You are reading this article right now because I invited the editor to connect and to join my Get Help with Linked Strategies LinkedIn group so she can see the value I have to offer her readers. After reviewing my LinkedIn discussions and blog posts, she asked me to write the article that you’re reading right now. How many leads do you think I’ll generate by being on one of the top business websites? Now, offer real value, challenge your prospects, start thought-provoking conversations, showcase your expertise by sharing case studies, demonstrate your relevance and connect with your audience with stories. And you will generate more leads with LinkedIn.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>


LinkedIn with  content marketing

<p>It’s a popular hubris that we live in an age of unprecedented technological innovation – that our ancestors lived in a time where there were fewer technological advances, blinded as they were by their primitive superstitions and lack of access to the resources we have today.</p>
<p>While we certainly live in an era of amazing technology, it’s not necessarily true that our level of innovation is unprecedented. The fact of the matter is that our ancestors were just as smart as we are (in fact, given the human brain size has been shrinking for centuries, they might have been smarter.) And as archaeologists uncover more about the past, they’ve also learned that many technologies we take for granted today were first developed centuries or even millennia ago, only to be lost.</p>
<p>Take, for example, plastic surgery. It’s something we think of as a relatively new technology, right? But in fact, plastic surgery was practiced in India centuries before the birth of Christ. It continued to be practiced for thousands of years, but wasn’t “discovered” in Europe until the 18th century, when British doctors learned about it from India.</p>
<p>Recently, there have been two recent engineering discoveries from Ancient Rome that have the potential to shake up some major areas of industry – discoveries that show we still have a lot to learn from our ancestors.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5775" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2013-Oct-084-085-TECH-Rome-002-1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></p>
<p>The first finding is rather astonishing. As noted earlier this month by Zeeya Merali, a 1,600 year old chalice known as the Lycurgus Cup have proved to be more than just a stunning work of art. It’s also an example of one of the earliest forms of nanotechnology.</p>
<p>The cup, as Merali notes, was actually a mystery for centuries. That’s because it appears green when lit from one angle, but red when lit from a different angle. It wasn’t until the 1990s, after decades of study in the 20th century, that it was determined how it was created. As it turns out, the glass itself was infused with particles of silver and gold that were only about 50 nanometers in diameter. The particular ratio of the mixture was definitely known, as other similar cups have been discovered.</p>
<p>In a paper from 2007, scientists who have studied the cup noted that “[e]ven using modern powerdriven tools, this type of vessel takes a great deal of time to complete.” But more than that, this technology might turn out to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry.</p>
<p>That’s because researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, using the same techniques the Romans used, earlier this yeardeveloped a device that enables them detect DNA and proteins without having to chemically modify them first. That lowers the overall costs and helps resist errors that occur in the process. The team estimates that their device is about “100 times better sensitivity” than any other similar product.</p>
<p>In their paper, published in Advanced Optical Materials, the research teams says that “We envisage extensive use of the device for DNA microarrays, therapeutic antibody screening for drug discovery and pathogen detection in resource poor setting and a low cost, higher sensitive alternative to existing SPR/LSPR instruments.”</p>
<p>But the Ancient Romans aren’t content to only revolutionize medicine. Soon, you may be living or working on a building or road that’s built with the same materials that the Romans built their own with – materials that, when created, also produce fewer carbon emissions.</p>
<p>That’s thanks to the work of a research team at the University of California at Berkeley, which has studied the ways that Roman concrete has managed to endure for over 2,000 years in the same conditions that cause modern concrete to degrade after about 50 years.</p>
<p>The key to the durability of Roman concrete was its mixture of lime and volcanic ash, which produces a concrete that includes aluminum, something most modern cements lack. Modern cements also rely on limestone, but the Roman recipe calls for much less of it. That means that Roman concrete can be created at temperatures nearly a thousand degrees lower than modern cements. As a result, using Roman cement means not only a more durable material, but also one that can be produced with less fuel in less time – making it both more efficient and more environmentally sustainable.</p>
<p>That’s a good thing, considering that “manufacturing Portland cement accounts for seven percent of the carbon dioxide that industry puts into the air,” as lead researcher Paulo Monteiro noted in a statement. The research team’s chemical analysis of Roman concrete was recently published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, and more of their research will be published later this year.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5776" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2013-Oct-084-085-TECH-Rome-003-300x209.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="209" /></p>
<p>These new applications of Ancient Roman technology have, I think, something powerful to teach us in the present day. Many of the problems that face civilization are as old as civilization itself. And as we look for innovative ways to deal with those problems, it’s a mistake to only look for guidance in new ideas. It may be that if we look backwards at what our ancestors did, we maWy find that they’ve already solved our problems for us. We just have to be humble enough to accept that.</p>


These two ancient Roman techs could disrupt modern industry

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


The Bandwidth Queen

<p>While Harvard Business School nurtured his entrepreneurial spirit, even as a youngster Chinedu Echeruo wanted to change the world. He believes that technology is the key to doing just that.</p>
<p>Fresh out of business school, over a decade ago, Echeruo teamed up with several partners to set up a financial services company to trade money market instruments. The venture failed to meet their aspirations, leaving Echeruo and his partners to rue what could have been.</p>
<p>He took a job at AM Investment Partners, a New York-based hedge fund, until he left in 2005 to establish HopStop. It was the decision of a lifetime. This online city transit guide offers door-to-door subway and bus directions as well as maps for more than 140 cities. This time, Echeruo steered the company to a million-dollar valuation before it was sold to Apple in July this year.</p>
<p>Within this time, he also co-founded Tripology of which he was CEO, before it was acquired by Rand McNally, the 157-year-old American maps and navigation company. Having had a few shots at batting in the global leagues in the world of technology start-ups, Echeruo has proved to be a heavy hitter, who has scored two home runs.</p>
<p>“It feels great because you also remember that a few other ventures I was also involved in didn’t quite go as planned. The very first venture I did right after business school was a company called Afridaq, and our goal was to create a marketplace for financial securities such as FX and money markets in Africa, but that didn’t work out quite as well. So there have been good successes and there have also been setbacks, but it’s still part of the journey.”</p>
<p>Born in Nigeria, where he attended secondary school at King’s College in Lagos, Echeruo recalls, with much laughter, his earliest entrepreneurial effort: to breed rabbits to solve food shortages in Africa.</p>
<p>“I had read somewhere that rabbits procreated a lot, and I thought if I could create a farm to [breed] rabbits, that would solve Africa’s food problem. So I convinced my mum and was able to start with two rabbits and we built a cage and all. They ended up dying though so it was a big failure, but that was my very first effort.”</p>
<p>In the early 1990s, Echeruo moved to the United States, where he studied finance and accounting at Syracuse University; the college counts American vice-president Joe Biden and Saudi Royal Investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with a net worth of $20 billion, as alumni. After graduating, he worked at J.P. Morgan for two years as an analyst; before gaining admission to Harvard Business School’s MBA program.</p>
<p>His experiences on Wall Street shaped his understanding of world finance that helped seal deals with Rand McNally and Apple.</p>
<p>“Billions and trillions of dollars are moving in world financial markets and most people don’t really understand the impact they have on their personal lives, but it’s very significant. So it kind of broadened my view of the global economy.”</p>
<p>Yielding to the entrepreneurial urge, which he harbored from childhood, Echeruo founded HopStop with seed capital from the bonus he received after exiting the hedge fund. The years he spent running the company brought different experiences to those in the financial sector, and allowed him to identify his strengths as an entrepreneur. In 2009, Echeruo stepped aside as CEO of HopStop to pave the way for someone else to lead the company.</p>
<p>“What I thought, and I persuaded our board to consider, was that at that time I thought that another CEO would be better at running it going forward. I think that’s a decision that many entrepreneurs struggle with because usually the company is something they’ve invested lots of money in, their personal time, lots of things go into the early stages of starting a business and to give that to a stranger is something that is very difficult to do. But from my perspective, I thought it was the best decision for the company, and I think the new CEO has done a very good job of growing the company since I left.”</p>
<p>Looking back, the decision was a wise one—the company has continued to grow under the new management team of which Echeruo is chairman. Their performance caught the attention of the folks at Cupertino California, Apple’s homebase. While Apple declined to disclose how much it paid for HopStop, analysts estimate the deal to be worth a few million dollars. The HopStop deal and the acquisition of another company, Locationary, are viewed as Apple’s response to Google’s recent acquisition of Waze, an Israel-based company that provides traffic information based on crowdsourcing.</p>
<p>Echeruo is smiling all the way to the bank, however, he admits that his primary motivation is to solve problems.</p>
<p>“What I’m doing right now, in Lagos, is taking that approach and looking at the several problems that we have in Africa and specifically in Nigeria and seeing how I can apply technology to solve those problems. What we are doing at Constant Capital [a private equity firm where Echeruo is a partner and head of investments] is that we are essentially incubating a few ideas, which we think will resonate with the Nigerian marketplace to start, then evolve, then grow those businesses. I currently look at all the problems in Africa as an opportunity to leverage technology to solve them. We are working at a few companies right now to address some of those problems.”</p>
<p>He is a firm believer that technology holds the key to solve most of Africa’s problems.</p>
<p>“If you look at every sector of the African economy, and Nigeria specifically, you see inefficiency. What I really look forward to doing is exploring how we can use technology to solve those problems. If you look at it from every perspective: from governmental, corporates, consumers, lots of the challenges that people face have to do with information and information technology. People could definitely argue that the rise of mobile phones in Africa has contributed to probably 3-5% increases in annual growth rates in these economies. I don’t think you can underestimate how the ability to exchange information contributes to economic growth. But from my perspective I think of the challenges I am facing in Nigeria in the process of running a business, in my personal life, all these are real opportunities for entrepreneurs to fix and find business models to exploit them profitably, so that’s what I am focused on.”</p>


From Failed Rabbit Breeder  To Millionaire

<p>Taiwo Otiti and his twin brother had plans of settling and pursuing their careers in Canada, after completing their studies. Their father, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, had other plans in mind—that his sons would return to Nigeria. Otiti embraced the advice and left his brother behind: a decision he does not regret.</p>
<p>Otiti is now the country general manager of International Business Machines (IBM), in West Africa. He joined the technology and solutions provider in August 2010, four months before the firm’s centennial celebration. It was also the time when the firm was experiencing a decade of slow growth. The firm traces its roots to the 1880s, when a group of inventors who designed and patented breakthrough tabulating machines and punch clocks came together to form IBM. The firm’s success was accelerated by the construction of the legendary Watson Research Center. This marked the start of research labs throughout the globe that churned world-changing products in the technology space. For years IBM became synonymous with innovation. However, the emergence of venture capital backed entrepreneurs, such Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, in the past two decades, overshadowed the post-World War Two success of IBM.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1557" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_0065-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" /></p>
<p>However, there is a dramatic shift today. Evidence is increasingly showing the dwindling growth of the venture capital-backed start-ups and the comeback of former technology giants. Scott Anthony, contributor to the Harvard Business Review, wrote, “…Apple’s inventiveness is no anomaly; it indicates a dramatic shift in the world of innovation. The revolution spurred by venture capitalists decades ago has created the conditions in which scale enables big companies to stop shackling innovation and start unleashing it.”</p>
<p>Because of its resources, IBM is able to embark on projects that many venture capital-backed startups cannot afford. Leveraging on past innovations, IBM strategists (or catalysts) are taking over were the blue chip start-ups have left off. IBM’s master inventor, Colin Harrison, is a pioneer strategist who recalibrated the company’s philosophy. He and fellow catalysts in the company conceptualized ‘Smarter Cities’ which is part of IBM’s ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative. The ‘Smarter Cities’ initiative saw IBM providing solutions in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Beijing, Dublin, Singapore and New York.</p>
<p>“…the company would offer infrastructure and services that will help cities save money and improve lives by managing energy, water, traffic, parking, public transit and other resources,” wrote Scott Anthony.</p>
<p>The Smarter Cities concept has become the hallmark of IBM. In 2011, the company invested $50 million in the three-year Smarter City Challenge, as part of its commitment to its expansion strategy in growth markets. In July, the technology and solutions provider dispatched a team of top employees from around the world to Accra, under its Corporate Citizen Corps program. The team spent a month with the Accra municipality officials consulting on making Accra a smarter city. A white paper report, based on the recommendations of the service core team for a smarter city, will be released in the first quarter of this year. Lagos and Cape Town were the only cities in Africa selected for the 2013 Smarter Cities Challenge grant.</p>
<p>Beyond these initiatives the firm is continuing to invest significantly in growth markets to expand capacity, develop talent and deepen its research and development.</p>
<p>“IBM spends just over $6 billion in R&amp;D every year [excluding other expenditures such as marketing] and there is nobody that spends that kind of money,” says Otiti.</p>
<p>This investment is driven by a strong cash flow, which stood at $16.6 billion in 2011. Part of the research and development expenditure was allocated to Africa and the first IBM research lab was built in Kenya. It is expected that this lab will support the science and technology skills base in Sub-Saharan Africa. This investment is justified by the constant revenue increase from growth markets. Cumulatively, these markets have contributed 22% of IBM’s geographic revenue in 2011, up from 11% in 2000 and company is expecting a further 30% growth by 2015.</p>
<p>In Nigeria, Otiti has expanded IBM’s market share through the diversification of company’s brands, which include services, software, information technology system, and research except finance services.</p>
<p>“Today, we control 70% of the high-end servers that run all the banking hosts in Nigeria, which gives us control of 80% of the transaction volume in banks. We have basically taken out SUN. There is only one bank remaining on SUN and four are running on HP,” says the optimistic IT expert.</p>
<p>The firm also partnered with Bharti Airtel to provide mobile services across 18 Sub-Saharan countries. In this partnership IBM runs the IT system of which Nigeria accounts close to a third.</p>
<p>IBM’s success is being buttressed by the decentralized structure that embodies creative leadership.</p>
<p>“IBM is a matrix organization. Under me, I have the four main brands, which is hardware, system and technology group (STG), software group, global technology services (GTS), which run things like strategic outsourcing and managing services and lastly the consulting group GBS (global business services). They report to me and they also report to verticals. The strength of IBM is the cross brand placement. We can actually provide solutions across board from consultancy down to delivery,” says Otiti.</p>
<p>Otiti is not a newcomer to the IT industry, having plied his trade with many banks in Nigeria. When he returned to Nigeria in the mid ’80s, the banking sector was going through major transformation. Over three decades, he moved from bank to bank. He first worked in the IT department for Citi Group. During his four-year stay, he started the software development work as part of the group’s localization program. He joined Fidelity Bank for three years and later Society General for a brief period.</p>
<p>The highlight of his career came with his appointment at First Bank: the oldest and one of the largest banks in Nigeria. His first task was to put in place a real-time online plan to centralize the bank’s 300 branches operations.</p>
<p>“One of the reasons they recruited me was because I was the first to do the first online ATMs at Society General. I was thus requested to give direction on how to do their channels infrastructure, which included things such as ATMs, Point of Sales (POS) and bankcards,” says Otiti who spent almost a decade at First Bank working on various projects that forever changed the Nigerian banking sector.</p>
<p>The efforts of his team led to the birth of Interswitch, which has enabled organizations and individuals to access their funds across 20 banks in Nigeria and across a variety of payment channels.</p>
<p>In his eight-year stay at First Bank he established an ATM consortium, which licensed Master Card to use its switch, and was also part of the team that negotiated Visa’s 20% acquisition of Valucard (now Unified Payment Services Ltd) and worked with the Central Bank of Nigeria on the vision 2012 payment system. He joined Afribank in 2009 for a short period before the bank’s closure.</p>
<p>Otiti wants the West African region to develop into an independent region like South Africa or Egypt.</p>
<p>“For West Africa to be an independent region, we should be able to generate over $200 million in revenues in the next five year,” says Otiti.</p>


The Return Of The Technocrat

<p>Njeri Rionge and Joe Mucheru, her then colleague, traveled around the most remote parts of Kenya in 1999 to research the demand for telecommunications. They found that rural communities, alive to the value of the mobile phone, represented the mass market potential for a technology that was relatively nascent in the region.</p>
<p>They reported back to their employer, Interconnect, that the country had a huge latent demand for information. This was well before the massive undersea cables brought broadband capacity to Africa’s east coast; well before the privatization of the crumbling national telecoms operators injected life into the moribund sector and well before the world had woken up to the potential of Africa’s appetite for technology.</p>
<p>Interconnect did not share their view. The two found an angel investor the following year and created Wananchi Online. It was the region’s first internet service provider to offer ‘triple play’—a new concept that combined internet, television and telephone down a single line.</p>
<p>The process of acquiring licenses became tangled as the company refused to slip brown envelopes into their bids. This culminated in an episode that demonstrated Rionge’s mettle. As they waited for approvals, 17 men arrived at her office with the intention of extorting a bribe. Intimidated, she told them, at length, of the need for Kenyans to do business the right way, to work with integrity. After 15 minutes, one said in Swahili, “She doesn’t get it”. They left empty-handed.</p>
<p>More than a decade later, Rionge and Mucheru stand among the founding members of what may be Africa’s most vibrant technology scene. Today, Nairobi is the center of a thriving community of entrepreneurs, incubators and venture capitalists; driven, first by the massive expansion and innovation in the mobile telecoms sector and then by the arrival of undersea fiber optic cables which deliver international data connectivity. Kenya has exported world-leading technology products—most famously the M-Pesa mobile money transfer system—to the rest of the world. The country has moved fast, but if anything, she says, things have gone too slowly.</p>
<p>“We did have a very big vision for the industry. 2000 to 2004 was an amazing time for us and we were constantly ahead of our time. A lot of the stuff we were talking about then is just now happening,” says Rionge.</p>
<p>Infrastructure, policy and knowledge and “understanding what this internet beast, at the time, was really about” has held back the industry.</p>
<p>“Today things are really different. People get it. People have moved on from thinking about connectivity to thinking about what’s going to be on the bandwidth.”</p>
<p>In August, IBM opened its first African research center in the city, the latest blue chip company to put its weight behind the ‘Silicon Savannah’. As the hype around Nairobi increases, Rionge warns that many entrepreneurs are struggling to take the step from great ideas to commercial businesses. That, she says, will take the community to the next level.</p>
<p>So many “techies” lack the commercial skills and acumen to make their ideas saleable. Rionge and her colleagues turned Wananchi into the region’s largest internet service provider, before she moved on to a senior role at the part-privatizing national phone company, Telkom Kenya. “The likes of Safaricom, the Telkoms, any of the big guys, the CEOs or the strategists need to see that there is a pool of experts or a pool of engineers who can actually develop their back office tools,” she says.</p>
<p>A recurring theme in her discourse is the problem of discerning noise from signal in the hype-fuelled tech space.</p>
<p>“You have to be careful where you’re hearing [the hype] from. If you’re hearing it from Google, they’re definitely doing it. If you’re hearing it from [business accelerator] NaiLab, it’s a different conversation. A lot of the techies I know, they’re still sitting on their grand idea and it hasn’t gone to market successfully. If you sit down, one-on-one, you can actually see it’s going somewhere. But if it’s not picked up by Google or Safaricom or Nokia, it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still a great idea, but there’s no uptake in the market,” she says.</p>
<p>Today, Rionge works with and sits on the boards of a number of successful enterprises. She has also started an incubator on Ngong Road, the city’s technology cluster, to help those with ideas to take the step to becoming businesspeople. Part of her message is that technology is not an end in itself but rather an enabler of other sectors. The successes in the African technology space have been in areas that plug gaps in the infrastructure or the market—creating solutions for the specific context of the continent. M-Pesa solved the problem of moving money in a cash-based economy with little infrastructure to support it.</p>
<p>Africa, with as many opportunities as it has challenges, needs entrepreneurs who can use technology as an enabler in key sectors, such as agriculture, manufacturing and education, while entrepreneurs need real applications for their grand ideas.</p>
<p>This is sometimes where international investors and observers fail to see the true value in the Kenyan, and wider African, technology opportunity. Measuring existing and potential successes by the experience of Silicon Valley, or other developed world technology hubs, misses the point.</p>
<p>“There will be people who have great ideas and grand ideas on the ground. The difference, in terms of developing them and scaling them, is whether we are creating criteria that have worked in developed markets to identify them, or whether we are going to get on the ground and recreate the criteria, so that the criteria is suitable for the local environment. That’s what’s not there. Because that local idea or local criteria is not structured yet, we continue to completely miss the opportunity. So the reengineering of the mindset in terms of the approach, I think, is what needs to take place for emerging markets or Africa.”</p>
<p>It is for this reason that she is cautiously critical of some of the initiatives in Nairobi, which seem to focus more on attracting international capital to the country than on building the domestic opportunity. The government’s ‘Vision 2030’ lays out an ambitious plan to greatly increase the value and depth of the IT sector. It has spawned ideas such as Konza City, a proposed development backed by Kenya’s ICT Board, which is designed to give a physical home to the country’s technological talent. Rionge is skeptical.</p>
<p>“That’s bricks-and-mortar. The ideas, the technology phase, are not about bricks and mortar. The investments we need are not about bricks and mortar&#8230; The bricks and mortar is really for international investors, that’s all it is. The innovators and entrepreneurs need to scale up pretty much on their own through some genius way.”</p>
<p>For all of her reservations, however, she is optimistic. The government support may be slightly misdirected, but it is not misguided. The city is fast becoming a hub for the entire continent and the heart of a technology revolution that is made in Africa.</p>
<p>“Nairobi happens to be the location but when you’re there, you’re thinking Africa. And Africa is the next economic frontier. If that is the case, you want to be in Africa, you want to be investing with Africans.”</p>


The Rionge Person  To Ask For A Bribe

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<p>Technology is changing the entertainment industry so quickly that it’s difficult to predict where the next media fortunes will be made. There is no shortage of entrepreneurs in this field, one of whom is Emma Kaye. Kaye is a leader in African animation and filmmaking. Her credentials are undisputed—she’s the co-founder of Triggerfish Animation Studios, producers of the award-winning Sesame Street and founder of the Sithengi Cinema Festival in Cape Town. But her focus has shifted from producing content for television and film to finding new ways to distribute entertainment content.</p>
<p>The late Steve Jobs epitomized this type of entrepreneur. The introduction of the iPhone was the game changer: Apple sold 128 million handsets earning the company an estimated $76.6 billion. The smartphone fueled the surge in mobile application use, changing the pricing and the distribution of entertainment forever. In 2008, a year after the iPhone’s launch, 18 billion apps were downloaded from the iTunes store earning the company $4.3 billion. Soon after competitors Larry Page and Sergey Brin—the founders of Google, created the Android platform increasing the amount of app content available to cellphone subscribers.</p>
<p>Kaye watched the evolution of mobile devices, then abandoned the old media platforms she’d relied on and immersed herself in new media; first as the CEO of Breakdesign and then as the founder of Gate 7 New Media, a mobile media, entertainment and content company. Under her stewardship, Breakdesign became one of Nokia and Adobe’s top seven global Flash Lite developers.</p>
<p>She was frustrated that there was a lot of generic content to download which had little relevance for Africa. She wondered whether people were downloading this content only because it was available or whether they were demanding it. So she co-founded Mobfest—Africa’s first user-generated mobile content platform. The first channel, Novel Idea, is a text-based mobile entertainment channel featuring serialized fiction—a first in Africa.</p>
<p>But it didn’t ease her frustration—soon, she had started a new mobile app called bozza.mobi.</p>
<p>“I have worked in the mobile industry for a considerable amount of time and during that time, there was a big gap in the market for content that was relevant for an African community. At the same time, there were barriers to media platforms for people who could produce relevant content. Although there was no shortage of content, there were barriers to producing and distributing that content on a mobile platform,” says Kaye.</p>
<p>She decided to conduct a proof of concept in Khayelitsha in Cape Town and Alexandra in Johannesburg, South Africa. She worked with individuals who could produce content but found access to traditional media prohibitive. The feasibility study was launched on MXit using seven minute mobile spec video content. Within three days, there were 40,000 downloads. Three months later, this number had risen to 170,000.</p>
<p>After the successful proof of concept, Kaye secured investments to build a customized mobile application. Aimed at feature phones, with plans to upscale to smartphones, the application features music, videos and poetry from across the continent.</p>
<p>Move over Nigella! Bozza.mobi recently launched Africa’s cooking channel. Users of bozza.mobi have been glued to the popular episode on ‘how to cook a sheep’s head’ in South African townships. In this particular episode, an industrial blowtorch is used to burn the sheep’s hair, turning it into easily removable ash, which is scraped off with a stone or pot scraper. The head is then thrown into a big water tank to wash off the remaining ash. Then it is cut in half, cooked and served to the restaurant’s customers.</p>
<p>For Kaye, bozza.mobi is about access to self-expression. With over 300 artists, filmmakers and poets on its growing database and with new channels being released daily, bozza.mobi offers these individuals and groups a mobile platform through which to distribute their music, films and poetry. Check out the show about a Congolese woman who used a rundown caravan as her hair salon. She uses bozza.mobi to teach hairdressing. By offering tutorials, small businesses can earn revenue—50% of their channel earnings—while users get free access to content.</p>
<p>The provision of free local content has advantages for handset manufactures too. When Nokia was looking to sell their 3250 series in Europe, they asked Kaye for help.</p>
<p>“We worked with Nokia on creating relevant content for a particular demographic in Europe. We created the interface and content relevant for the skateboarding community. It contained video, news tips and travel guides. Because the content was relevant, the Nokia 3250 series phones sold out,” says Kaye.</p>
<p>Handset manufacturers are now embracing local application development as part of their growth strategies. Ericsson ConsumerLab recently found that the emerging app culture in high-growth markets is driving the uptake of mobile devices. The study showed consumers are not buying smartphones for their superior hardware such as the touch screen, memory capacity, attractive design and resolution size, rather, they want app functionality and faster internet access.</p>
<p>For this reason, Samsung is partnering with app developers such as bozza.mobi, which is working on a new version of their application to be released in six months’ time. Samsung is teaching bozza.mobi developers how to develop apps for different platforms. The improved version of bozza.mobi will be rolled out in Nigeria and Kenya. In Nigeria, Kaye has partnered with IT company, Iroko Partners, founded by Jason Chukwuma Njoku. The firm distributes Nollywood movies online—its services have been well received by the diaspora in the States, England, Canada, Germany and Australia.</p>
<p>Due to the fact that apps are becoming an integral part of cellphone users’ daily lives, Kaye says the new version will also serve as a commercial tool to facilitate informal trading in African communities.</p>


On The Up And App

<p>SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have long imagined a future in which facial recognition technology makes anonymity in public obsolete.  A research study at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that this Minority Report future has already arrived, thanks to facial recognition products now commercially available, combined with the 750-million-person identity database called Facebook.</p>
<div id="attachment_86" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-86" class="size-large wp-image-86" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_066-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="267" /><p id="caption-attachment-86" class="wp-caption-text">Carnegie Mellon prof Alessandro Acquisti—the real guy, with his biometric face print—worries technology may expose everyone to constant scrutiny</p></div>
<p>A CMU research team led by associate professor Alessandro Acquisti took candid photos of 93 random students on campus using a $35 webcam. Within seconds the researchers were able to determine the identities of a third of their photogenic guinea pigs, using of fthe- shelf facial recognition software from PittPatt, a software company recently acquired by Google, and publicly available profile photos from Facebook. The researchers had an even higher rate of success using the same technology to identify more than 100,000 Pittsburgh singles with otherwise pseudonymous accounts on a dating site, adding yet more complexity to the world of online dating. “We’ve been thinking about privacy in cyberspace, but we need to start thinking about it in the real world, with augmented reality,” says Acquisti. He was also able to determine the first five digits of some of the identified students’ Social Security numbers based on previous research he has done showing that those numbers are predictable if you know a person’s birth date and birthplace. That information is usually available on a person’s Face- book profile page.</p>
<p>It seems that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell was wrong. Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t being orchestrated by the governmental- Big Brother of 1984 but by advances in technology designed for convenience’s sake adopted eagerly by private citizens. Acquisti calls it the “democratization of surveillance”. And it’s coming fast. Soon after the riots broke out in London at the beginning of August, a technophile band of vigilantes formed a Google Group to discuss applying the methods pioneered by Acquisti’s research team to online photos and videos of rioters, in order to help identify looters for prosecution by law enforcement. Facial recognition tools identify a person by analyzing dozens of features, such as the length of a forehead and the distance between the eyes and the nose. Google, Facebook and Apple have already made them freely available for people to tag their friends and family in photo albums. But at what point will you have the option to snap a photo of a stranger and then pull up his or her name and whatever information the Internet offers up about them? The capability is there, but the willingness to unleash it isn’t. Yet. Google has said that its image search tool, Goggles—which uses a photo instead of text as a search term, letting you snap a photo of a painting, for example, and find out who its creator is—has the capability to find people’s identities based on a photo. But the search giant had chosen not to enable the feature because it was deemed too creepy.</p>
<p>When Facebook recently rolled out an internal facial recognition tool allowing friends to automatically tag other friends in photos, it inflamed some privacy advocates (whose combustion levels tend to be high around anything new that Facebook does). Those advocates seemed to overlook the fact that the very existence of Facebook’s extensive database of photos linked to people’s names creates the possibility for third parties to build a facial biometric print. While Facebook’s terms of service prohibit the scraping of information from its site, there are no technological tools in place to prevent it. And, even if there were, scraping is certainly not limited to Facebook.</p>
<p>“For most of us there are already identified photos of us somewhere on the Internet, and this trend will only increase,” says Acquisti. (Face.com did the doctoring on the photo on page 58.) The CMU researchers wrote a facial recognition iPhone app but decided not to release it to the public. “We developed the app to make a point,” says Acquisti. “A future in which we infer sensitive information from faces is already here, and we better start thinking whether we really want to live in that future.” Their tool, though, would be valuable only for those seeking to identify the 25,000 CMU students whose photos the researchers grabbed from Facebook. We’re still a few years away from an app that would work on a national or global scale. The two main hurdles, Acquisti says, are finding a large and reliable source of facial images (hello, DMV!) and securing enough computing power. Comparing a photo to a database of, say, 300 million photos would take many hours, whereas a functional app would need to do it in ten seconds. “If I had to guess, I would say that we are less than five years away,” says Acquisti.</p>
<p>Specialized facial recognition products are already on the market. BI2 Technologies has developed a $3,000 iPhone add-on called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System) that dozens of police departments across the country started adopting this year. Police officers can use MORIS to take photos of suspects, and the app, using iris scans and facial recognition, will identify anyone who already has a photo in a criminal database. Microsoft and Intel have worked together to create digital billboards with face-detecting cameras that pick up on the gender and age of passersby to show them relevant ads. A startup named SceneTap installed similar cameras in bars in Chicago earlier this year, so that Windy City nightlife lovers can use their smartphones to check the crowdedness, gender ratio and average age of patrons at a given bar before deciding where to go. So far law enforcement officials are tentative about using the technology to identify people not already in criminal databases.</p>
<p>Though a Canadian insurance corporation graciously volunteered the use of its driver’s license photo database to Vancouver police after the devastating post-Stanley Cup hockey riot there in July, authorities declined the offer after privacy advocates expressed concerns about violation of Canadians’ civil liberties. In London, Scotland Yard is using facial recognition tools along with tips from the community to identify rioters. As good as the technology has become, it still has accuracy problems that can cause significant harm. A Massachusetts driver sued his state DMV after his license was wrongfully revoked because he looked too much like another driver, leading to ten days of administrative wrangling to get it reinstated. “We are not the beautiful and unique snowflakes we think we are.</p>
<p>There are many people who look likeus,” says Acquisti. More than 30 state DMVs already apply facial recognition algorithms to driver’s license photos to prevent identity fraud. If you’re worried about your privacy, now might be a good time to change your Facebook profile photo to one in which you’re wearing ridiculously oversize sunglasses.</p>
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Hello, Stranger

<p>Indian companies like Bharti Airtel are pioneering the telecommunications industry in Africa using bold business strategy and the experience they gained from opening up communications in their own country 20 years ago.</p>
<p>“When we took charge of Zain’s African operations, we made a commitment to bring world-class, affordable mobile services to customers in Africa and take our networks deep into rural areas,” says Manoj Kohli, joint managing director and CEO of Bharti Airtel’s international operations. This radical move immediately established Airtel as the world’s fifth-largest mobile service provider, immediately gaining 42 million customers. This unique business trend is being employed by Indian companies in Africa, who have adopted a strategically integrated approach to doing business. By integrating socially, politically and economically into 15 African countries, they differ in strategy from their Chinese counterparts, who tend to operate in isolation, importing Chinese workers and goods. Arthur Goldstuck, an expert analyst in telecommunications in Africa, says Airtel’s aggressive marketing strategy of cost cutting and increased volumes is making inroads into the East African market.</p>
<p>According to Goldstuck, this approach to price fighting in Africa and bringing down the costs of calls, SMS and data has dropped the average tariff in Kenya from 12 shillings in June last year to three shillings. Kohli believes it is incorrect to look at tariffs alone. “We have simply corrected the 20-30% premium that Zain was charging over the normal price. This was unsustainable and we brought the tariffs to more affordable levels for the customers.”</p>
<p>The socio-economic spin-offs of Airtel’s presence has contributed greatly to improving the lives of people, especially in the remote areas, says Dobek Pater, telecommunications and market analyst at Africa Analysis. An increase of 10% in teledensity (the proportion of cellphones in use by every 100 people in an area) is almost equivalent to 1% of GDP growth in some of these countries. However, technical challenges on the continent can be enormous. Initial investment is required to develop infrastructure, which can be very high. Extensive rollout of base stations is necessary for any network to expand into Africa, which is both expensive and time consuming from a regulatory and infrastructural point of view. Airtel has received support from governments across all markets, who share its vision of taking the benefits of telecom to every corner of the respective countries.</p>
<p>The Indian business strategy of social and political integration is key to doing business in Africa, and is the ingredient that has seen Bharti and Neotel successfully expanding their networks and distribution to cover a larger population, particularly in rural areas. The sharing of passive infrastructure in African countries also avoids unnecessary infrastructure duplications and helps bring down costs for the industry. Sunil Joshi, CEO of Neotel, says their approach to human capital development is unique and effective. The establishment of the Neotel Training Academy, where 30 people are currently being trained in telecommunications, is a benchmark of social and economic integration as 70-80% of these people will be employed by Neotel. “We believe in leveraging local resources within South Africa and getting the local context by engaging with government and ICASA. Our approach is to socially align with what the needs in the country are. For example, currently we employ 1,000 people in South Africa, of which the majority is local. We are also very proud of the fact that in terms of BEE we have a level three listing, which shows that we give the right focus in terms of the local dynamic.”</p>
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