INNOVATION
Africans Must Reclaim
The African Brand
Pronto!
By Eugene Wanekeya
A
couple of months back, Jumia
CEO found himself on the
receiving end of backlash from
across the African continent after
sensationally claiming that Africa did not
have enough developers. He said this in an
attempt to justify his company’s preference
for foreign developers over African
developers to handle the tech aspect of
their ecommerce platform. Whereas as
a private business entity, Jumia was fully
within its rights to make its own staffing
decisions, the irony was that the company
had days earlier made history as the first
‘African’ tech startup to be listed on the
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Critics have argued that it’s not appropriate
for Jumia to be considered as an ‘African’
tech startup for the simple reason that
Africans have played no part in the
development of the technology that runs
this ecommerce platform. In as much as
the platform serves the African continent
and relies on an African workforce for
the day to day warehousing and logistical
operations, the company’s ownership
prior to going public was almost entirely
European, with its entire technology
workforce sourced from Portugal.
This therefore forms the subject of my
piece if you will indulge me for the next
few minutes. Is it about time we as a
continent set a threshold for what should
be considered as an African company? I
believe so and I think that it’s about time
Africans reclaimed the African brand.
The reason I bring this up now, many
months after the Jumia IPO, is that this
situation was not a one-off. In fact, there
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seems to be a trend whereby non-Africans
are setting up shop in Africa in order to
leverage on the African brand to give
their enterprises more appeal to potential
investors. Such companies are so adept at
selling the narrative of being African that
they are taking away the limelight from
actual African companies that are doing
an amazing job in terms of home grown
innovation.
This is especially evident in the technology
space where foreign owned companies are
bold enough to lease a tech solution from
a global service provider, repackage it, and
introduce it to the market as an African
product. Such companies will often have
one or two Africans as part of their
Board but when you dig deeper, they are
often foreign registered companies with
majority ownership being non-African.
I however see a silver lining in all this.
There is a famous quote that goes, where
there is smoke, there is fire. This is true
of the African continent in the sense that
all this interest we are seeing in foreign
companies looking to leverage on the
African brand to attract investors goes
to show that Africa is a valuable brand
globally. There is therefore a need for us
as a continent to reclaim and protect this
brand before its value is watered down.
Drawing from lessons learnt from our
colonization, we must not let history
repeat itself by allowing our continent to
be milked dry before we finally act.
So, how can we reclaim our African
brand? The answer is simple. Buy Africa,
Build Africa. Our continent is home
to innovations that even the West finds
impressive. Here are two case studies for
you. In the first, Facebook Founder Mark
Zuckerberg was recently in Kenya to learn
more about how M-Pesa worked as he
sought to borrow some ideas for a Crypto-
currency his company plans to launch.
In the second, Atlancis Technologies,
a Kenyan IT company has also made
headlines recently as the first African
ICT company to pioneer open compute
technology used by the likes of Facebook
and Microsoft, for its Cloud services.
This is actually the first Cloud computing
service that has been developed in Africa
from ground up, by African ingenuity,
and hosted in Africa. It is such amazing
milestones coming out of Africa that we
as Africans should take ownership of as
we seek to reclaim our African brand.
If non-Africans are finding our brand so
valuable, why aren’t we? It’s time we start
trusting African ingenuity and embrace
our home grown solutions. Reclaiming the
African brand will enable us as a continent
to keep the benefits on our home soil.
Eugene Wanekeya is the Head
of PR and Communications at
ATLANCIS Technologies, an
Innovative IT Solutions provider
transforming the ICT landscape in
Africa. To interact with and get to
know more about this trend spotter,
you can reach him via mail at:
GWanex@gmail.com