Posted on 07/12/2011 1:32:17 AM PDT by spetznaz
When Jennifer Barassa started her business, she did not even have a computer. She thought she saw a gap in the market, set up in her sitting room and spent her first 30 shillings (35 US cents) paying someone to type a letter for her.
Fifteen years later, her marketing promotion agency, Top Image, turns over more than $3m a year and employs more than 300 people in three countries, hired to promote everything from mobile phones to bank accounts to the continent’s growing consumer class.
Nor does she intend to stop there: next she wants to take on multinational advertising agencies based in her homeland, Kenya, and break into the billboard market too.
“We have to be aggressive and push – Kenyans are very forthright and forward thinking, and we embrace opportunities,” says Ms Barassa.
Since independence, we saw [business success] from the white men and their big farms. Tanzanians don’t like us, Ugandans don’t like us, but it’s just our culture,” she adds.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
In Nairobi’s iHub, a technological centre funded largely by donors but taken up by private hopefuls, 3,000 such “innovators” sit developing their tech knowledge, delivering web applications to do everything from beating the traffic to checking the price of a cow. Home to four undersea fibre-optic cables, Kenya’s technology sector is already growing at 20 per cent a year, outstripping all other industries.
Today, nine in 10 adult Kenyans subscribe to a mobile telephone service and 15m people transfer $7bn a year – 20 per cent of national gross domestic product – by mobile telephone, paying everything from electricity bills and school fees to flights and salaries in what has become the world’s leading example in mobile banking.
ping 2
Number One ladies’ promotion agency.
:)
:)
Obama has given US secrets to Kenya, too?
This is the tip of the iceberg. While there are a lot of very poor African, there are a lot of very rich Africans doing good business.
My landlord,for example easily has assets in excess of $7 million.
i think they would be a good place to offshore, but it won't supplant India as the number of programmers is far less, but if the Indian companies like infosys, wipro, tcs, cognizant are smart, they will leverage this to build closs-shore teams and have a smart disaster-recovery plan.
Kenya, afaik (which isn't much I admit) is a mix of multiple groups -- from West African Bantu-speaking peoples to those from Somalia/Ethiopia Afro-Asiatic speaking peoples and many Arabs and Indians.
Don't they have any tribes that are split by the borders between Kenya and Tanzania/Uganda?
I just wikipediad it and saw that the Luhya tribe is split between Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. Also, Kenya’s population is 40 million. Assuming 200,000 engineers/programmers, that’s a good size as a supplement/complement for india’s numbers
Kenya has around 41 different tribes, which are split into roughly 3 groupings - the Bantus (eg Kikuyu), the Nilotes (eg highland Nilotes like the Masai, and lowland like the Luo), and Cushites (eg Ethiopians and Somalis). Some of the younger generation tend to have a mix of the different tribes (eg I have 4 tribes across all 3 groupings), and some of the smaller tribes are going extinct (as they get assimilated). There are also, as you mentioned, a lot of Indians who are Kenyan citizens. As for tribes across Borders, it does happen since a lot of those boundaries were largely drawn without any considerations. Thus some tribes like the Masai are in Tanzania and Kenya. Anyways, the main issues have always been political leadership. Get the bozos out and in another 1.5 decades things would be insane (in a good way).
Good for Kenya. There are some very sharp and educated Kenyans and if they can keep their country’s politics turned just far enough around to let such businesses grow, there’s some real potential for them to become a second business hub in Africa.
Is our Kenyan from the tribe of losers?
I don’t know.
I always been under the impression that there’s a lot of money in Kenya. What, with all the interior ministers, relatives of government officials, and other people who are always trying to get me to do some task for them in exchange for $10 million…
I always thought that they must be filthy rich over there!
That is the issue ...corrupt leadership that are always trying to come to some ‘understanding.’ The upper echelons in politics has a lot of money. However, so do the upper levels of the business and professional communities, and there has been a lot of push and shove between the two groups (the politicians wanting to stick their fingers into everything, and the professionals wanting to get things done with as little disturbance as possible). For the most part a working equilibrum has been established, and with the new constitution a lot has actually changed for the better in the last couple of months (e.g. the Kenyan government has gone electronic, with government documents and information available online. This is making it a little difficult for the corrupt to mess about - with land for example - since now simple checks can be done with a click). I believe there will probably always be corruption (and copious amounts of it), but hopefully now it will not be so overt and crippling as to have significantly negative effects on the real professionals running things. I guess it is all about the cow being larger than the ticks.
The traditionally dominant, most successful tribe has been the Kikuyu and Obama’s ‘family’ is from the Luo tribe.
LOL… sorry, I should’ve put the sarcasm tag at the end. I was trying to be funny and make a reference to all those silly e-mails I’ve received over the years. Once upon a time, I was going to start collecting those and cataloging them. I thought it would be kind of funny.
I always had this vision that there were all these people at Internet cafés with laptops pounding out these messages that said: “Hello Sir, I am the widow of the former interior minister of such and such… and I have $10 million US currency in an American bank that is tied up due to some and such regulation. If you can help, I would be willing to give you $5 million of that money…”
On a serious note, anything over Africa they can make money independently without requiring people in the West to just throw money down a rat hole, where it ends up directly in the pockets of corrupt officials is a positive development no matter what. I do know that they always have had an issue with severe government corruption, but given what’s going on in this country, I have lately felt less sanguine about chastising someone else’s country for it.
Wow, lol. Got it now. Although the ironic thing is that, due to the corruption that occurs in most of Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East, your story was actually quite plausible. I was only wondering why they are offering you $10m when $1m would be about the ticket size. Thanks rlmorel ...ya got me good!
West Africans are not Bantus.
There are many language groups in Africa but you could classify them as:
1. Arab: Egypt, Sudan etc
2. Berber: Morocco
3. Afro-Asiatic: Somali, Ethiopian, Hausa, Taureg
4. Niger-Congo: Yoruba, Igbo, Mandinka etc
5. Nilotic: Luo (Obama’s group), Southern Sudan etc.
6. Bantu: Largest by geographical area extends all the way from Central Africa (Cameroun) to South Africa. Includes both Gikiyu, Shona and Zulu. The word for person in most of these languages is “muntu” and the word for people is “bantu”.
7. Khoisan
There are several ethnic groups split by borders in most if not all African countries. For example, the “Kongo” people are split between the two Congos, Angola and Gabon.
Colonial borders were arbitrary and were set at the Berlin conference without consideration for the actual people on the ground - the Africans.
The British could have saved 2.5 million lives if they just did the obvious - separate the South and Northern part of Sudan at independence in 1956. Southern Sudan would have even been better off as part of Uganda than as part of the Arab State of Sudan. (Significant Nilotic populations exist there).
This is not to say that bloodshed would not have ensued (Uganda had a bloody post-colonial history), but the scale of what happened in Sudan staggers belief. The next part of Sudan to split will be Darfur - inevitable.
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