Diaspora Matters

Do we have African brands that are loved across the continent? Multi Choice, MTN, Econet, Kwese Tv , Shoprite, Standard Bank, Nedbank or Dangote Cement? We are however not concentrating on the above brands for now but will post for you the official top brand list compiled by the World Economic Forum for 2016. The list can be found here Brand Africa’s 2016/17 list of Most Admired Brands in Africa.

For entrepreneurs you need to know what brands sell in Africa -work with them and also develop own brands.

So the conventional way of doing business is to start with a business plan, get funding and then launch your business? Does this  approach work? If it works why is the failure rate for most startups at 75%? In order to answer the question, we highly recommend a book by Eric Ries called The Lean Start Up, this is a must read book for every entrepreneur and covers some interesting stuff. Below we feature a summary of the key concepts in the book.

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything

Steve Blank

Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.

The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally mainstream, however, and we have yet to feel its full impact. In many ways it is roughly where the big data movement was five years ago—consisting mainly of a buzzword that’s not yet widely understood, whose implications companies are just beginning to grasp. But as its practices spread, they’re turning the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship on its head. New ventures of all kinds are attempting to improve their chances of success by following its principles of failing fast and continually learning. And despite the methodology’s name, in the long term some of its biggest payoffs may be gained by the large companies that embrace it.

Sketch Out Your Hypothesis
This business model canvas lets you look at all nine building blocks of your company on one page. Alexander Osterwalder shows how it’s done, using Nespresso as a case study.

In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. Most important, I’ll explain how, in combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new entrepreneurial economy.

The Fallacy of the Perfect Business Plan
According to conventional wisdom, the first thing every founder must do is create a business plan—a static document that describes the size of an opportunity, the problem to be solved, and the solution that the new venture will provide. Typically it includes a five-year forecast for income, profits, and cash flow. A business plan is essentially a research exercise written in isolation at a desk before an entrepreneur has even begun to build a product. The assumption is that it’s possible to figure out most of the unknowns of a business in advance, before you raise money and actually execute the idea.

Once an entrepreneur with a convincing business plan obtains money from investors, he or she begins developing the product in a similarly insular fashion. Developers invest thousands of man-hours to get it ready for launch, with little if any customer input. Only after building and launching the product does the venture get substantial feedback from customers—when the sales force attempts to sell it. And too often, after months or even years of development, entrepreneurs learn the hard way that customers do not need or want most of the product’s features.

After decades of watching thousands of start-ups follow this standard regimen, we’ve now learned at least three things:

1. Business plans rarely survive first contact with customers. As the boxer Mike Tyson once said about his opponents’ prefight strategies: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
2. No one besides venture capitalists and the late Soviet Union requires five-year plans to forecast complete unknowns. These plans are generally fiction, and dreaming them up is almost always a waste of time.
3. Start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. The ones that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, iterating on, and improving their initial ideas as they continually learn from customers.

One of the critical differences is that while existing companies execute a business model, start-ups look for one. This distinction is at the heart of the lean start-up approach. It shapes the lean definition of a start-up: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

The lean method has three key principles:

First, rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses—basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas. Essentially, this is a diagram of how a company creates value for itself and its customers. (See the exhibit “Sketch Out Your Hypotheses.”)

Second, lean start-ups use a “get out of the building” approach called customer development to test their hypotheses. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed: New ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, they start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working. (See the exhibit “Listen to Customers.”)

Listen to Customers

Third, lean start-ups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which start-ups create the minimum viable products they test.

When Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden started Blue River Technology, they were students in my class at Stanford. They had a vision of building robotic lawn mowers for commercial spaces. After talking to over 100 customers in 10 weeks, they learned their initial customer target—golf courses—didn’t value their solution. But then they began to talk to farmers and found a huge demand for an automated way to kill weeds without chemicals. Filling it became their new product focus, and within 10 weeks Blue River had built and tested a prototype. Nine months later the start-up had obtained more than $3 million in venture funding. The team expected to have a commercial product ready just nine months after that.
Quick, Responsive Development

Stealth Mode’s Declining Popularity
Lean methods are changing the language start-ups use to describe their work. During the dot-com boom, start-ups often operated in “stealth mode” (to avoid alerting potential competitors to a market opportunity), exposing prototypes to customers only during highly orchestrated “beta” tests. The lean start-up methodology makes those concepts obsolete because it holds that in most industries customer feedback matters more than secrecy and that constant feedback yields better results than cadenced unveilings.

Those two fundamental precepts crystallized for me during my career as an entrepreneur. (I’ve been involved with eight high-tech start-ups, as either a founder or an early employee.) When I shifted into teaching, a decade ago, I came up with the formula for customer development described earlier. By 2003 I was outlining this process in a course at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 2004, I invested in a start-up founded by Eric Ries and Will Harvey and, as a condition of my investment, insisted that they take my course. Eric quickly recognized that waterfall development, the tech industry’s traditional, linear product development approach, should be replaced by iterative agile techniques. He also saw similarities between this emerging set of start-up disciplines and the Toyota Production System, which had become known as “lean manufacturing.” Eric dubbed the combination of customer development and agile practices the “lean start-up.”

The tools were popularized by a series of successful books. In 2003, I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany, articulating for the first time that start-ups were not smaller versions of large companies and laying out the customer development process in detail. In 2010, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur gave entrepreneurs the standard framework for business model canvases in Business Model Generation. In 2011 Eric published an overview in The Lean Startup. And in 2012 Bob Dorf and I summarized what we’d learned about lean techniques in a step-by-step handbook called The Startup Owner’s Manual.

The lean start-up method is now being taught at more than 25 universities and through a popular online course at Udacity.com. In addition, in almost every city around world, you’ll find organizations like Startup Weekend introducing the lean method to hundreds of prospective entrepreneurs at a time. At such gatherings a roomful of start-up teams can cycle through half a dozen potential product ideas in a matter of hours. Although it sounds incredible to people who haven’t been to one, at these events some businesses are formed on a Friday evening and are generating actual revenue by Sunday afternoon.

Creating an Entrepreneurial, Innovation-Based Economy
While some adherents claim that the lean process can make individual start-ups more successful, I believe that claim is too grandiose. Success is predicated on too many factors for one methodology to guarantee that any single start-up will be a winner. But on the basis of what I’ve seen at hundreds of start-ups, at programs that teach lean principles, and at established companies that practice them, I can make a more important claim: Using lean methods across a portfolio of start-ups will result in fewer failures than using traditional methods.

A lower start-up failure rate could have profound economic consequences. Today the forces of disruption, globalization, and regulation are buffeting the economies of every country. Established industries are rapidly shedding jobs, many of which will never return. Employment growth in the 21st century will have to come from new ventures, so we all have a vested interest in fostering an environment that helps them succeed, grow, and hire more workers. The creation of an innovation economy that’s driven by the rapid expansion of start-ups has never been more imperative.

In the past, growth in the number of start-ups was constrained by five factors in addition to the failure rate:

What Lean Start-Ups Do Differently
1. The high cost of getting the first customer and the even higher cost of getting the product wrong.
2. Long technology development cycles.
3. The limited number of people with an appetite for the risks inherent in founding or working at a start-up.
4. The structure of the venture capital industry, in which a small number of firms each needed to invest big sums in a handful of start-ups to have a chance at significant returns.
5. The concentration of real expertise in how to build start-ups, which in the United States was mostly found in pockets on the East and West coasts. (This is less an issue in Europe and other parts of the world, but even overseas there are geographic entrepreneurial hot spots.)

The lean approach reduces the first two constraints by helping new ventures launch products that customers actually want, far more quickly and cheaply than traditional methods, and the third by making start-ups less risky. And it has emerged at a time when other business and technology trends are likewise breaking down the barriers to start-up formation. The combination of all these forces is altering the entrepreneurial landscape.

Today open source software, like GitHub, and cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, have slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands. Hardware start-ups no longer have to build their own factories, since offshore manufacturers are so easily accessible. Indeed, it’s become quite common to see young tech companies that practice the lean start-up methodology offer software products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web or hardware that’s built in China within weeks of being formed. Consider Roominate, a start-up designed to inspire girls’ confidence and interest in science, technology, engineering, and math. Once its founders had finished testing and iterating on the design of their wired dollhouse kit, they sent the specs off to a contract manufacturer in China. Three weeks later the first products arrived.

Lean start-up practices aren’t just for young tech ventures. Large companies, such as GE and Intuit, have begun to implement them.

Another important trend is the decentralization of access to financing. Venture capital used to be a tight club of formal firms clustered near Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. In today’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, new super angel funds, smaller than the traditional hundred-million-dollar-sized VC fund, can make early-stage investments. Worldwide, hundreds of accelerators, like Y Combinator and TechStars, have begun to formalize seed investments. And crowd sourcing sites like Kickstarter provide another, more democratic method of financing start-ups.

The instantaneous availability of information is also a boon to today’s new ventures. Before the internet, new company founders got advice only as often as they could have coffee with experienced investors or entrepreneurs. Today the biggest challenge is sorting through the overwhelming amount of start-up advice they get. The lean concepts provide a framework that helps you differentiate the good from the bad.

Lean start-up techniques were initially designed to create fast-growing tech ventures. But I believe the concepts are equally valid for creating the Main Street small businesses that make up the bulk of the economy. If the entire universe of small business embraced them, I strongly suspect it would increase growth and efficiency, and have a direct and immediate impact on GDP and employment.

There are signs that this may in fact happen. In 2011 the U.S. National Science Foundation began using lean methods to commercialize basic science research in a program called the Innovation Corps. Eleven universities now teach the methods to hundreds of teams of senior research scientists across the United States.

MBA programs are adopting these techniques, too. For years they taught students to apply large-company approaches—such as accounting methods for tracking revenue and cash flow, and organizational theories about managing—to start-ups. Yet start-ups face completely different issues. Now business schools are realizing that new ventures need their own management tools.

As business schools embrace the distinction between management execution and searching for a business model, they’re abandoning the business plan as the template for entrepreneurial education. And the business plan competitions that have been a celebrated part of the MBA experience for over a decade are being replaced by business model competitions. (Harvard Business School became the latest to make this switch, in 2012.) Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia are leading the charge and embracing the lean start-up curriculum. My Lean LaunchPad course for educators is now training over 250 college and university instructors a year.

A New Strategy for the 21st-Century Corporation

It’s already becoming clear that lean start-up practices are not just for young tech ventures.

Corporations have spent the past 20 years increasing their efficiency by driving down costs. But simply focusing on improving existing business models is not enough anymore. Almost every large company understands that it also needs to deal with ever-increasing external threats by continually innovating. To ensure their survival and growth, corporations need to keep inventing new business models. This challenge requires entirely new organizational structures and skills.

The biggest empowerment programme is underway in South Africa and if you are South African, you should not be left out in this once in a life time opportunity!  The biggest buzz word in the rainbow nation is land reform and it has two sides, those opposing it and those in full support. So to those interested in farming what steps should you take in order to benefit?

1. Follow all land issues especially debates in parliament and on local media.
2. Be the first one to benefit! Make this a commitment that when land is allocated you are not left out.
3. Check with your leadership and track progress in terms of land allocation.
4. Familiarize yourself with agriculture opportunities-read books, join farming groups etc
5. Form associations, register companies or NPOs

What if you do not have farming knowledge or funds?

Worry not, the government is perfectly aware that there are gaps in terms of farming knowledge and funding. They are going to design innovative models that will assist new farmers with technical expertise and access to funding.

Overview of farming opportunities

Agriculture has a lot of opportunities and the best way to analyse them is to look at the value chain which is a series of activities that add value from the inputs to the consumer. As illustrated in the above diagram-opportunities abound in the sector not only in farming operations but processing and distribution and marketing. Some will do the physical farming operations and some may find opportunities in the Agro-processing industries. For youths coming straight from college, you may need to consider the developing of startups to tap into the sector.

What happens to white farmers?

White farmers have the best skills and knowledge of farming operations and they have done extremely well and their expertise will be crucial for the success of new farmers. Already some pairing programs where new farmers were being trained by white farmers have been in place since 2012-although done on a small scale we expect the successes recorded to help in scaling up the model.

The white farming community can also benefit through provision of training colleges, agriculture consultancy, development of farming manuals or materials to assist new farmers because the biggest gap is KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS. Anyone who can fill this gap is going to reap rich rewards. Developing of farming apps, farming weekend classes, field day presentations etc

Where can you get more resources?

Our first book ‘Business Opportunities for Zimbabweans’ was distributed to more than 60.000 Zimbabweans. Our second project is ‘Business Opportunities for South Africans’ . The book covers a lot of opportunities in areas such as ICT, Tourism, Education, Construction, Mining and Agriculture. The Agriculture chapter is the largest and takes into consideration opportunities to be brought by the land reform. From poultry rearing, dairy farming-maize, paw paw, tobacco farming and a lot more. The book is your bible of opportunities in Mzantsi and comes after 8 months of researches which saw our team visiting Nelspruit, Joburg, Polokwane, Durban, Mtata, Bloemfontein, East London, Klerksdorp, Queenstown and Port Elizabeth. The book costs R120.00 and will be available on this site and several other online platforms.

So remember the number one rule of land reform empowerment: Be the first on the queue when land is redistributed! 

You can also join our Mzantsi Farming Groups by sending an app message to +263 774 081 808

Did your college lecturers cover how to identify business opportunities? How to develop a business plan or how to win tenders? Were you ever given an assignment on Digital Marketing or Big Data?Did you discuss how to pitch for investment or how to benefit from cryto currencies? If you are fortunate to have covered this theoretically and practically, then thank your college and lecturers because these skills are not covered by many colleges.

Students graduate without knowing how to write a business plan, they complete college without a lot of entrepreneurial skills and this gives them a great disadvantage. How to identify business opportunities is something we take for granted and yet its an important skill that will set you apart from competition. You need to know about opportunities-know when they are coming and strategically place yourself so that you can benefit.

Legend has it that a Nigerian coming to Zimbabwe for the first time was overhead shouting ‘ I can see money, money- money everywhere’ Confused, a passerby asked the Nigerian where the money he kept referring to was? The Nigerian coolly responded ‘ Every vehicle iam seeing presents great opportunities for car spares, with Harare having more than 700.000 cars-this means money and more money’

So to a Hararian, a car does not mean much but not so to a Nigerian brother in car parts business!

Inorder to help you be skilled in Business Opportunities Identification, we have developed a simple checklist which is found in the book of ‘Business opportunities for South Africans’

Have you ever wondered why investors are interested in Zimbabwe? What is is that they see that you may not be aware of? In this article, we let you wear an investor mindset and analyse how investors view opportunities in Zimbabwe.

A look at the industrialization development key stages

First Industrial Revolution
Introduction of mechanical production processes with the help of water and steam. First stage introduced in 1784.

Second Industrial Revolution
Characterised by division of labour and mass production aided by electricity. Second stage introduced in 1900.

Third Industrial Revolution
Characterized by introduction of electronic and IT systems(automation). Third stage introduced in 1969.

Fourth Industrial Revolution
Involve the use of cyber physical systems (Robots). This is the status today and for the future.

Where does Zim stand?
With 70% of the population staying in rural areas and using traditional ploughs, scotch carts and hoes for tilling land…we have a lot of our activities anchored in stage one! A few farms are on stage two. Our manufacturing industries are a mixture of Second and Third Revolution. Our economy is more than 70% informal and you have examples of Siyaso’s, Gazaland, Glenview furniture still struggling in the Second Revolution. The conclusion is our manufacturing systems are still in the second stage.

The good news
The good news is we have a lot of personnel with experience in the 3rd revolution, some have been to the diaspora, some working locally for multinational companies. We can leverage on this human capital to develop the country and leapfrog from the second and third stage industrialization stages to the fourth.

The showing of interest by foreign companies in Zimbabwe means they are going to do one thing….bring latest world technology that will pull our systems to world class standards.

We also need incentives to pull our diaspora communities to come back and plug the gaps in industrialization.

The SME sector needs incentives for linkages with established big companies so that it can also automate some of its operations through linkages.

The education system needs an overhaul so that it produces graduates with skills to pull up the country from the first and second industrial stages to the third and fourth industrialization stages.

Opportunities for investors
Does it now make sense why Zimbabwe is a rich investment destination? Movement from one industrial stage to the next brings opportunities.Remember our opportunities identification toolkit that says New Technology = New Opportunities!

We will need a lot of catching up, building new dams, construction of roads, new infrastructure, upgrading of communication systems. Mechanisation of farming and mining operations….the list is endless.Does it now make sense to you why Strive Masiyiwa is investing $250 million in a solar project?

Small business opportunities: Some of the major reconstruction will involve big companies with big pockets and you are only going to get crumbs if you ever consider eyeing them. You can focus on ‘tools’ of industrialization such as:

1. Hardware shops.
2. Construction companies.
3. ICT companies.
4. Consultancy companies.
5. Digital marketing|Graphic Designing| Websites development|Crypto Currencies.
6. Consumer products for a population moving through the industrial stages (changes in tastes)
7. Colleges introducing 3rd and 4th industrialisation skills.

Conclusion
Can a diasporan expect new opportunities in UK or Europe? There are very few new opportunities because these countries are the pioneers of technology. You cannot expect to set up a shop in London that sells ICT products and enjoy massive business expansion. The market is saturated with established brands with some shops having more than 40 years experience.

So where can the person make money? Simple….in emerging markets of which Zimbabwe is part of. Allow the Zimbabwe Business Ideas and Network to call them the ‘Industrialization Opportunities’. These are the opportunities investors are interested in!

In order to commemorate Africa Day. our forum reached out to South African Entrepreneurs on our sister forums  in order to hear their views on Africa and poverty. Our post became the major talking point across the rainbow nation with a lot of radio stations and business forums following up on it. Below are some of the responses from the thousands of people who responded. The responses are also included in our eagerly awaited book titled Business Opportunities for South Africans which is coming out next week

Why is Africa Poor?  

Edward: Africa is the richest continent, just that minerals are mismanaged by its people.

Nhlanhla : We are not united-tribalism and  xenophobia still exist.

Abdalla: Because more money leaves Africa than it comes in.

Bonga:  Africa is rich, Africans are poor. This is because most of our resources are in the hands of foreigners.

Gabriel:  From my experience, our motherland has a high shortage of resources and facilities.

Brenda:  If you poor you must not blame yourself, whatever the mind conceive and believe it will achieve.

Joseph: Most of us provide poor services and no one is willing to give us a chance because of that. We should learn render a quality of service at all times than cutting corners

Gilbert: We don’t celebrate the achievement of one another; we could do more to exchange our resources technology instead of getting money when we trade with the world powers.

Nhlanhla: Africa is held back by using development models which it did not design.

Dick : We do not want to accept responsibility but play the blame game. We busy hating each other ethnically, socially and morally. We let our politicians plunder and rob us and expect NGO’s to give us handouts. At one point or another other continents were colonised (Asia and Americas). We look down upon ourselves. We also don’t learn from mistakes.

Mohale : Capitalist Nigger….my Bible. ..Our problem as Black race is state of our mind.

 Motlogeloa: Africa is not poor, Africans are poor.

Musa: It’s because we are jealous of each other and endless fights. I have never heard a White or Indian calling another foreigner, Xhosa or Venda. They support each other no matter what.

Tawananyasha:It’s a struggle in Africa. Youths with ideas are not welcome into African politics. Rulers who have access to state resources will do whatever it takes to make sure youth do not benefit or have access to resources.

Zakhele : So much could be said to answer this question: but the two leading reasons why Africa is wallowing in poverty (in my view) are:
1. Leadership – everything rises and falls on leadership! Strong leaders, with an all encompassing and progressive vision are needed. Africa is very unlucky to be riddled with visionless leaders.

2. Profit offsets, illicit financial flows, tax evasion, transactions on African assets exchanging ownership with zero dollars being registered on African soil for those assets being sold, Africa accounts for 3% of global trade and 15% of the global population. That 3% is little compared to the actual value of assets being traded on African soil in which powerful countries and global companies evade registering that asset exchange on African soil. Even when some assets are reflected as sold in Africa, they are underpriced and their true market value lies hidden (and money exchanges hands outside of Africa) so that those global companies maximize their profits and African countries and people and governments lose out in the process!

Saul : Why is it seen as a Dark Continent, why Africa is in the state that it is today. Where failure seems to be a reality. Maybe if Africa can rethink it’s history it’s present state and rethink it’s future maybe Africa can forge a better future going forward.

Sibusiso :Because Africans are busy filling up churches and praying for God to solve their problems instead of taking full responsibility of their lives and the lives of their children.

Samu: Reading. Readers are leaders! Finish.

Sandy:  One answer: because us Africans, we don’t love each other.

Adelaide: Greed

Nhlanhla: Africans must understand that to survive and progress we need to put our race first and above all others. But again the programming we suffered won’t allow most blacks to do that.

Fay: Africa is not Poor…what is POVERTY?…We must start there!

Ralufhe : Most of African leaders  just possess poor brains, we are not poor.

Sebe: Selfish people, corruption at the highest level klaar.

Raboiyane: Africa is poorly managed.

Mangaliso: Africa is not poor. However, as much as we are quick to point out the reasons for the ‘poor Africa’ tag, we are thin on solutions to change that thinking. For an ‘Africa is Rich’ reality to be top of the mind, we have to be in charge of our destiny. We can’t change our past, but our future is in our hands. Let’s stop blame and start taking responsibility.

Opelo: Theoretically we are not poor but practically we are poor and the reason why you’ll keep asking this question is that you’ll are pointing at the theoretical way of us not being poor rather than focusing at the current situation we are in at the moment…

Abraham: The real facts about Africans are that we are happy with someone’s downfall, if someone makes it in life we kill him or her by witchcraft practice, also in Africa we believe in being employed than to be employers… we don’t want to appreciate good things done by our fellow Africans. We only appreciate good things done by someone when he or she is dead! Also Africans we sleep more hours -imagine someone sleeping 10 hours or more whilst in other continents they sleep for only 5 hour or less…

Alois: Africa MUST read!

Vuyani : Africa is the richest continent with the poorest  people.

Melc: Africa is very rich but because of corruption and greedy leaders that’s why we are poor.

Sole : Corruption, greediness, selfishness, egoism, etc. Leaders promise voters good life & when in power they unlawfully organise aviation bursaries for their kids, just to be in the lime light. No nation can progress effectively under those negatives. To simply sum it: poor governance is the reason.

Arion: Although I am a white African, in my humble opinion, both from experience and chatting to friends, and observation:
1) Letting go of negative self-beliefs that keep one in a cage of mental slavery is important
2) Over-emphasis on sex, producing children, lack of responsibility towards children
3) Addictions.. alcohol and drugs
4) In some cases witchcraft
5) Poor holding to account wrong-doers
6) And a false pride in being able to suffer so much
SADLY HISTORY HAS DONE WRONG IN AFRICA BUT IT ALSO HAS AFFORDED HELP TO AFRICA THROUGH EDUCATION.
Please…. my commentary is said in absolute love and without any racist vibe.

Phil : Poorly managed.

Chinoz: If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at will change and we will start to witness a change in our lives. We have got the wrong picture of life and we are not willing to look into it properly.

Lufuno  Who is that who can come with a solution on how we as blacks can love and respect each other? Africa is divided and we need to have have peace among ourselves as individuals.

Foyn  Africans are not united.

Lufuno :  The hidden truth is that us as black we don’t have respect for each other and we undermine each and we want prove points to each other while not noticing that us as Africans we killing our roots.

Thabani : Lack of info thats all.

Ria : Because of politicians who lack vision and focus on economic development. Ethiopia is the country to watch – they’re heading in the right direction. They are not suffering from liberation politics hangover.

Lufuno :  (Africans) the time came for Africa to be free from this mess has come. Amanda to black leadership power brother and sister.

Ria: Spot on! What is currently happening in Cameroon is actually funny! The fight is between the English speaking Cameroonians and French speaking Cameroonians – why do Africans fight over foreign languages not their indigenous languages? Moving towards one Africa, how are we going to deal with the issues of language – Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa, and Lusophone Africa?

Collen : African consume and don’t produce. You will hardly find a product that is Black manufactured and on the Forbes list / New York Times.

Nokthula: Mental slavery.

Nndindeni : The philosophy of root cause analysis had proven that you can never come up with the effective corrective action until you have establish the correct root cause.

Zandile: We don’t support each other, love each other nor help each other.

Lwendo : And if people are not expanding their business horizons then rat race is calling. We need to export to each other. Let’s open African links and promote  foreign trade. Do not be scared to invest in Uganda or Malawi. It is our land as Africans let’s explore it.

Mahlatse: The dominating group,which is us BLACKS,we barely love one another…We inhibit the strength of diversification and it affects our economic strength, it is slowly leading us to poverty.

Lwendo : We are poor because we just chat on facebook instead of tilling the land. Too much beer drinking, eating pap and banking on miracles.

Naledi: Because we are not protecting our wealth.

Nervie : Our own African governments DO NOT own even half of our countries mineral resources, most mines in Africa are owned by foreign companies. Africa is the richest continent in the world considering our natural resources but ironically it’s the poorest continent when it comes to life quality.

Velaphi  We poor because we make too many babies with different mothers! Most children are raised by single parents.

Lwendo Africa is poor because it is divided.What systems do we believe in? Education system, religious systems,etc. Cooperation, why don’t we trust each other as Africans? Why do we have visas? Why do we hate each other as Africans? E.g Tunis and a Zulu,can they work together?Nigerian and a South African can they work together? Are all these not Africans? We have been brainwashed and this mindset needs to be adjusted that’s when we are going to develop. For now we are tails.waiting on the left overs.

Samuel : African countries are being robbed by political leaders.

Meshack: Because those who are in power of the resources are greedy and that plays a big part in a long run.

Mangaliso: Africa is rich in terms of resources. Africa is rich in terms of development opportunities. Africa is rich in terms of human capital, both skilled and unskilled.
The question is ‘how do Africans create synergy between all these and take charge of Africa going forward?’
Tata : I agree with Meagan Andrea’s comment. Africa is still rich raw mineral wise. Listen to the song ” a beggar sitting on the beach of gold” by Mike n Mechanics band. Hope the reader will have a kind of answer on why Africa is poor.

Thabo : Unemployment is the most cause why Africa is poor, it’s followed by lack of funding for people who want to start their own business, if they could at least create employment opportunities then crime will decrease and of course the endless strikes are destroying state property.

Oteng: We don’t use our inner knowledge, we give up easily. We spend most of our time on the complaining counter waiting for the right time, there is no right time to do what you want to do. The right time is now, don’t waste it!

Its Happy Africa Day to all Africans across the continent and instead of entrepreneurship stuff, we bring you ten great musical compositions from the continent. Most Africans only listen to music from their regions and as a result few know of music from areas such as Liberia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Sudan, Burundi or Rwanda. This post is a mixture of old classics and recent musical productions from the beautiful continent.

Happy Africa Day

Bandit Kame: Fode Baro|Guinea

Sweet Mother: Prince Mbarga |DRC

Ochestra TP Mazembe: Shauri Yako|DRC

Miriam Makeba: Patapata |South Africa

Zangalewa |Cameroun

Mulemena Boys: Lizzy |Zambia

Thomas Mapfumo: Vanhu Vatemwa |Zimbabwe

Africa: Salif Keita |Mali

Fela Kuti: Lady |Nigeria

Adia: Oliver Ngoma |Gabon

Sangue De Beirona: Cesaria Evora |Cape Verde

Bisa: Nanutu |Angola

Kulenyane: Culture Spears| Botswana

The whistling song:Lawi |Lawi

Nwahulwana:Wazimbo|Mozambique

Kamain switch: Maima Alphone Kioko|Kenya

Elections should be over within the next 3 months and we pray that they will be peaceful, free and fair so that the real work of rebuilding Zimbabwe can begin in earnest. The country has a lot of potential and the positive tone set by the new dispensation is likely to continue and attract more investment. Whoever wins the next elections is likely to put business first. We do not see anyone coming to reverse the Zimbabwe is open for business policy. So interesting times where the rebuilding of the country will be centred on business.

Looking at investment options for the diaspora community, lets assess feasibility of investment options.

1. Farming: Can you just come and get a farm and start farming? Its not feasible so try the business of supplying farming equipment such as solar irrigation equipment, tractors and trailers.
2. Mining: Can you just come to Zimbabwe and get an unused mine and commence mining activities? It is not feasible-all mineral rich mines are taken. Consider partnering with other miners especially on minerals such as chrome and gold. A lot of supplies needed in terms of mining equipment.
3. Education: Straight from the airport, can you just open a private school in Zimbabwe? Yes you sure can especially in new residential suburbs. So do track new areas being built where schools or colleges do not exist.
4. Real Estate: This is where all the money is! Why did Splash Paints invest $3.5 million in a new plant? Why is Dangote interested in investing in Zimbabwe? Why do we have new hardware shops being opened? Why is Harare getting a hardware warehouse? Why is there sudden activity of investors doing environmental assessments? The Indian community in Zimbabwe has strategically positioned itself so that they can benefit from the construction business. They know that construction has ground to a halt but after elections there will be a scramble for opportunities in the sector.

Diaspora and Real Estate Sector

Get organised, pool resources-form companies and invest in land for residential and commercial purposes. Already one of the leading real estate companies-Way Mark is busy finishing servicing residential stands in town. They are likely to put them on the market as soon as election issues are sorted. So get residential and commercial stands -invest in hardwares, register construction companies etc

Our forum has also organised members so as to create a one stop construction company-do watch out for its activities in the coming months.

Every entrepreneur needs to have a friend, partner or a mentor who is an engineer and this is because business is going through a digital transformation. When you talk of digital transformation, then the first field that is affected is engineering. Way back it used to be finance people controlling business but the power was taken by engineers who are now leading all new business innovations.

The best example of how engineers helped entrepreneurship

When it comes to investment-finance people think of capital first. How much capital is available for investment and then apply investment models such as NPV, IRR, ARR and Payback. When you start with capital, the weakness that you will encounter is that your thinking is restricted by amount of capital available. If $10.000 is available, then you cannot come up with ideas above the $10.000 threshold.

Engineer’s Perspective: Engineers came up with a reverse model to investment. Realising the shortcomings of the above model-they came up with a model that starts with markets with capital coming last. Coming up with markets means that your thinking is not restricted and you can come up with more investment options or ideas than the finance people model. After coming up with ideas that are not restricted by capital, one can therefore end with the capital question where you can consider the following options;

1. Raising funds from bank loans
2. Raising funds through crowdfunding
3. Raising funds through partnerships
4. Raising funds through salary advances
5. Raising funds through donor funds
6. Raising funds through government funds.

So engineers made investment easy for entrepreneurs-the one with access to markets is King, so the focus of business should first be on markets and not finance.

Other contributions to the finance field by engineers

Balanced scorecard model

Kaizen theory

Total Quality Management

Digital Marketing

Big Data Analysis

Six Sigma

So make sure you have an engineer in your team and use their expertise and apply to the business world. Now does this make sense why the richest person in Zimbabwe is an engineer? Not surprising because the future of business is technologically driven.

Most of the business models and concepts were designed by the West with none designed by Africans. The good news is that our forum has been researching on the ‘Art of Business Convenience’ and realized that there is no ‘Convenience Value Chain’ The good news is we have researched and developed one. A small achievement for our business forum and a challenge to many entrepreneurs, researchers and scholars from the continent-we need more business innovations from the continent.

We will officially launch the model by end of week.