Out Of Africa

Returning With Know-How

On my first return to England, the country of my birth and childhood, I was visiting to acquire equipment and software for a company in which I held a 30% stake as the Technical Director. We called the company NextStep, and the know-how I was bringing to it was large-scale desktop publishing, intended to replace antiquated printing workshops.

Every computer shop I walked into looking for a high-spec computer, a laser printer and a scanner was staffed with people who could lay out the spiel. Rarely could they answer my technical questions, and least of all demonstrate the early SCSI interface to the scanner I wanted to buy. It fell to me, with my technical and hands-on repair knowledge, to do what I needed to do to see things work.

The Phrase Du Jour

What this also revealed to me was that I had expertise and marketable skills, and it accelerated my decision to return to the UK soon after I had accomplished my mission. Finding a job, however, was difficult. Beyond the difficulty of accepting that out of Africa came this vastly knowledgeable chap, there was the pushback that I did not have "UK-acquired experience"; that was the phrase du jour.

What use is experience if you do not know how and why things do not work in the first place, and then how to fix them? I was apparently of no use if I was not going to drive to customer sites replacing electronic boards and panels by trial and error. I was not going to waste my knowledge on that. Eventually, I was given an opportunity where most of my knowledge of hardware and software was useful. Out of Africa too easily gets ignored.

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Dipping A Toe

Almost forty years later, I asked a question of a professional services firm that considers itself global, yet whose footprint in Africa and South America amounts to little more than dipping a toe in the water and withdrawing it before the temperature has registered. I phrased the question along the lines of whether there was no concept of talent or of a market in these geographies, and I was given the concession that talent exists.

The company, however, was more determined to grow its market in the United States. That was where the money and the opportunity were. I appreciated the answer, candid as it was to my hearing, and I do not pretend the difficulties are imaginary. The cost of entry is real, currencies move against you, regulation varies from one border to the next, and fees do not always compare with what the same work commands elsewhere. None of that is trivial, and anyone who waves it away is not being serious.

Still, I read more between the lines: the firm had offices in only four countries in Africa, three in South America and two in Central America. A global company in 50 of the 195 recognised countries in the world today, which is to say a quarter of the world, and the richest quarter at that. That is hardly global. And in a professional services firm, the people are the product. There is nothing else on the shelf.

Share Or Creation

What I heard in that answer was a preference for taking business from competitors rather than creating business where none yet exists. These are not the same ambition. One is a contest over an existing pot, where every gain is someone else's loss and the margins are argued down year on year. The other is the harder, slower work of being first, of shaping how a service is understood in a place before anyone else has bothered to turn up.

The first is defensible. It is measurable, it reports well each quarter, and nobody loses their job for pursuing it. The second is how firms become institutions. I would only observe that a business which only ever competes for share eventually inherits the market it fought over, and little else.

The Circle Closes

What struck me was not that an old phrase had survived, but that the assumption behind it had. In 1991 the objection was that my experience had been acquired in the wrong place, though it exceeded by some distance what was being asked for. Almost forty years later, the objection is that there is no one to hire, no bench, no pool to draw from. Both are versions of the same refusal to accept that out of Africa comes expertise.

The loop is neat, and it is self-sealing. A firm with no presence in a place has no sight of the people there. Having no sight of them, it cannot staff a project. Unable to staff a project, it does not bid. Not bidding, it books no revenue. Booking no revenue, it concludes there is nothing there. The absence confirms itself, and the conclusion arrives dressed as evidence.

More Than Raw Materials

It made me wonder what the Global South was good for, apart from the extraction of raw materials and resources. Yet for those too myopic to see opportunities in Africa, because the lure of spenders in other domains is too attractive to ignore, it is worth remembering that many seeds of human progress, knowledge and development were sown there.

The Romans had a phrase for it, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, out of Africa always something new, though they offered it as a remark about novelty and oddity rather than as praise. Two thousand years on, the continent is still credited with producing surprises and rarely with producing competence.

The richest man in the world today, who has at times recently breached the trillionaire mark, came from Africa. So did the yellow fever vaccine, and the mathematics behind the CT scanner that sits in almost every hospital you will ever visit. The first human heart transplant was performed in Cape Town in 1967, when the continent was supposedly incapable of such things. Mobile money was ordinary in East Africa years before tapping a phone to pay became unremarkable in London.

Nobel laureates in the sciences have come out of Africa too, by ancestry, by birth, or by having spent part of a childhood there, regardless of ethnicity. The point is not that any one of them proves anything. The point is that the list spans medicine, physics, surgery and finance across seventy years, and that it is still read as a series of exceptions.

Someone will say they left in order to succeed, and many of them did. Their African origin remains significant all the same. Something in that background gave them the impetus to strive, to persevere and to succeed in places that were initially alien to them, and that something did not travel with the aeroplane; it was already there before they boarded. Talent departing is not evidence that none exists. It is evidence that someone else saw it first.

The Buy Side

The talent argument is only half of it, because Africa is also a market, and a young one. The median age across the continent is under twenty, which means the customers of 2045 are already in school.

The habits of a market are formed long before its spending power is. Much of that market has leapfrogged a generation of infrastructure altogether: it never had the branch network, the landline or the chequebook, so it went straight to the handset. By 2022, roughly 28% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa held a mobile money account, against 13% across developing economies as a whole. That is not catching up. In places, it is being ahead.

Then there is the question of whether a market exists at all in the regulatory sense, and a continental free trade area signed by some 54 states is an answer to it, however unevenly it is being implemented. Add universities producing graduates faster than local economies can absorb them, and you have the two things a professional services firm claims to want: clients with problems, and people capable of solving them.

Out of Africa, for those who can see the potential beyond the easy pickings and low-hanging fruit of apparently developed economies, there is the scope to be a real global company, an early mover in certain domains as well as a matured competitor with the pedigree to seize the initiative. That is the case of having both the vision to see and the mission to accomplish.

A Poverty Of Need

Which brought me, unexpectedly, to an old line about how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I had always taken it as a warning about greed. I am no longer sure that is the whole of it. The difficulty with having a great deal is that you stop needing anything, and once you stop needing, you stop looking. Sufficiency is comfortable, and comfort is incurious.

That is the poverty in the riches: not a shortage of means, but a shortage of need, and therefore of attention. A firm with enough business in the places it already understands has no reason to learn a new one. It is not malice, and it is rarely even a decision.

It is simply what satisfaction does to curiosity, a self-sufficiency born of contentment with what you can already see. It comes at the cost of adventure and possibility in unexplored lands, where usurping others in saturated markets is thought worthier than creating entirely new markets.

So I am asking, and I am genuinely asking, because I do not think the answer is obvious: what would it take? If out of Africa is a difficult prospect, Africa is not the impossibly impenetrable continent it once was.

I come in peace.

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