The Prepaid Economy: African Edition

“From studies, the market certainly exists. We are looking at Somalia … we just came back from Nigeria and hopefully in August, we will do our first shipment. Export markets are already up 60 per cent this year,” said Mr Walmsley.

He said that the company expected to open its Burundi subsidiary which will have a retail tyre centre and a depot, on June 15, and that that subsidiary, together with the one in Uganda and Tanzania were expected to contribute at least 20 per cent of revenues. The Burundi subsidiary will be used to re-export to eastern DR Congo while the company was also looking at increasing its export sales to Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.

Other export markets were expected to contribute another 20 per cent, bringing the total contribution of the non-Kenya subsidiaries and export markets to 40 per cent.

The Ugandan business community will join their counterpart in the Diaspora to showcase their products and services a course aimed at promoting and attracting investments.

This will be at the forth coming Diaspora Business Expo in Boston, USA scheduled for July 6-7.

The expo is organised in partnership with the Uganda Investment Authority (UIA), Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Promote Uganda- a company that produces investment promotion materials about Uganda’s investment potential.

Speaking to the Media in Kampala on Friday, UIA Executive Director, Eng. Frank Ssebowa said Ugandans in the Diaspora have proved to be an invaluable source of investment for the country. Therefore, he said, the Expo is aimed at encouraging Diaspora-led investment at home and also to improve on the level of exchanges between the Ugandan business community and those in the Diaspora.

Eng. Ssebowa said: “We are looking to our Ugandan Diaspora to actively engage in technological skills and best practices transfer from their host countries.”

The Expo Patron, Dr. Maggie Kigozi said many times Ugandans in the Diaspora spend huge sums of money on relatives without investing at all

Perceiving opportunities like these and many others, however, will first require a revolution in American thinking about Africa. I have spent the last few years working on a book about China’s relationship with the continent, and could not have been more struck by the differences in attitude in the United States and China toward Africa. More than a million Chinese have moved to Africa in the last decade, largely because they see the continent as an arena of almost limitless opportunity. This holds true from big company executives to mom and pop entrepreneurs from China’s inland, second tier cities.

Americans, meanwhile, despite their far deeper historical associations with the continent, including 13 percent of the population that traces its ancestry to Africa, cling to deeply engrained attitudes toward this part of the world, as a place of war, of misery, of strife, etc. For this reason, and because we cannot get over a long-running sense of Africa as a place to be aided, we are ill equipped to see or appreciate the opportunities that Africa offers.

The American press perpetuates old patterns of coverage even as Africa rapidly grows and changes. The work of Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times, a recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the most prominent and arguably influential example of this tendency. In a 2012 essay in the New York Review of Books that broadly reflects the focus of his work as East Africa bureau chief for the Times, he wrote:

“What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, and harder to define… Today the continent is plagued by countless nasty little wars, which in many ways aren’t really wars at all. There are no front lines, no battlefields, no clear conflict zones, and no distinctions between combatants and civilians.”

What the facts tell us about Africa is quite the contrary.

As Jonathan Berman wrote in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, titled “Africa is more stable than you’ve been led to think,” which drew its data from the Economist:

“Across Africa, successful coups are rare and getting rarer. This Economist Intelligence Unit has tracked the trend since 1960, shortly after colonial withdrawal began. Given the preconceived impression of Africa as coup crazy, many lose sight of the decline of coups… Africa’s governments aren’t just becoming more stable. They’re becoming more representative, albeit in an irregular pattern, as befits a continent with 54 countries. The Polity IV Project measures political regimes on a spectrum from fully institutionalized autocracies (low scores) to fully institutionalized democracies (high scores)… The trend since 1990, across all of Africa, has been towards more democracy.”

No one expects the press to abandon conflict as a topic, but the American media are long overdue for a re-set in terms of the ways they habitually frame African coverage.

This should start with a repudiation of the way that African events are denied specificity. Things are routinely said to take place “in Africa,” or “across Africa” instead of in actual countries or places with real names. The eternal pretext is to “make it easier” for the reader, who can’t be bothered with too many unfamiliar names.

This kind of factual looseness, though, is not practiced toward any other part of the world, and bespeaks a casual and persistent ghettoization of Africa.

Another example of this is the fact that virtually no American news organization offers business coverage of Africa.

Return on investment in Africa is among the highest in the world. Trade with each region of the continent is booming. And recently, big U.S. companies like Walmart, IBM and Google, to name the most prominent examples, have been expanding their presence in Africa.

But because the media speaks mainly in terms of conflict and aid, the general public has no perception of the growing opportunities on the continent, unlike the large numbers of Chinese newcomers.

Ed’s note: And that’s why we started Prepaid Economy: The African Edition over 3 years ago.

LONDON (Reuters) – Developed world mining and energy companies operating in Africa should pay more taxes to help the world’s poorest continent climb out of poverty, the president of the African Development Bank said on Sunday.

“The reality is, Africa is being ripped off big time,” African Development Bank president Donald Kaberuka told Reuters, a day after attending a meeting in London with other African representatives ahead of the G8 summit of rich countries on the “triple-T” agenda of trade, transparency and tax.

“Africa wants to grow itself out of poverty through trade and investment – part of doing so is to ensure there is transparency and sound governance in the natural resources sector.”

Britain hosts this year’s G8 summit, which takes place in Northern Ireland on Monday and Tuesday.