Diaspora Matters

1 Speech The first words by humans were spoken by Africans. ”Using statistical methods to estimate the time required to achieve the current spread and diversity in modern languages today, Johanna Nichols — a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley — argues that vocal language must have arisen in our species at least 100,000 years ago. Using phonemic diversity, a more recent analysis offers directly linguistic support for a similar date. Estimates of this kind are independently supported by genetic, archaeological, palaeontological and much other evidence suggesting that language probably emerged somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Stone Age, roughly contemporaneous with the speciation of Homo sapiens.”

2 Writing In 1999, Archaeology Magazine reported that the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs date back to 3400 BCE which “…challenge the commonly held belief that early logographs, pictographic symbols representing a specific place, object, or quantity, first evolved into more complex phonetic symbols in Mesopotamia.” Who were these original Egyptians? The Greek historian Herodotus.. described the Colchians of the Black Sea shores as “Egyptians by race” and pointed out they had “black skins and kinky hair.” Apollodorus, the Greek philosopher, described Egypt as “the country of the black-footed ones” and the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus said “the men of Egypt are mostly brown or black with a skinny desiccated look.” In his book ‘Egypt’, British scholar Sir E.A. Wallis Budge says: “The prehistoric native of Egypt, both in the old and in the new Stone Ages, was African and there is every reason for saying that the earliest settlers came from the South.” He further states: “There are many things in the manners and customs and religions of the historic Egyptians that suggests that the original home of their prehistoric ancestors was in a country in the neighborhood of Uganda and Punt [present day Somalia].” ”Greek historian Diodorus Siculus devoted an entire chapter of his world history, the Bibliotheke Historica, or Library of History (Book 3), to the Kushites [“Aithiopians”] of Meroe. Here he repeats the story of their great piety, their high favor with the gods, and adds the fascinating legend that they were.. the founders of Egyptian civilization, invented writing, and had given the Egyptians their religion and culture.” (1st century B.C., Diodorus Siculus of Sicily, Greek historian and contemporary of Caesar Augustus, Universal History Book III. 2. 4-3. 3) To summarise: “Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilisation. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in the air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt. The African historian who evades the problem of Egypt is neither modest nor objective nor unruffled. He is ignorant, cowardly and neurotic. The ancient Egyptians were Negroes. The moral fruit of their civilisation is to be counted among the assets of the Black world.” – Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilisation.

3 Medicine ”The earliest known surgery was performed in Egypt around 2750 BC…. The Ebers papyrus (1550 BC) is full of incantations and foul applications meant to turn away disease-causing demons, and also includes 877 prescriptions. It may also contain the earliest documented awareness of tumors.. Homer (800 BC) remarked in the Odyssey: “In Egypt, the men are more skilled in medicine than any of human kind” and “the Egyptians were skilled in medicine more than any other art”. The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt around 440 BC and wrote extensively of his observations of their medicinal practices. Pliny the Elder also wrote favourably of them in historical review. Hippocrates (the “father of medicine”, Herophilos, Erasistratus and later Galen studied at the temple of Amenhotep, and acknowledged the contribution of ancient Egyptian medicine to Greek medicine.

4 Architecture The African empire of Egypt developed a vast array of diverse structures and great architectural monuments along the Nile, among the largest and most famous of which are the Great

Pyramid of Giza and the Great Sphinx of Giza The pyramids, which were built in the Fourth Dynasty, testify to the power of the pharaonic religion and state. They were built to serve both as grave sites and also as a way to make their names last forever. The size and simple design show the high skill level of Egyptian design and engineering on a large scale. The Great Pyramid of Giza, which was probably completed c. 2580 BC, is the oldest and largest of the pyramids, and is the only surviving monument of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The pyramid of Khafre is believed to have been completed around 2532 BC, at the end of Khafre’s reign.

5 Mathematics The invention of mathematics is placed firmly in African PRE-HISTORY ”The oldest known possibly mathematical object is the Lebombo bone, discovered in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland and dated to approximately 35,000 BC. It consists of 29 distinct notches cut into a baboon’s fibula. Also prehistoric artifacts discovered in Africa and France, dated between 35,000 and 20,000 years old [respectively], suggest early attempts to quantify time. The Ishango bone, found near the headwaters of the Nile river (northeastern Congo), may be as much as 20,000 years old and consists of a series of tally marks carved in three columns running the length of the bone. Common interpretations are that the Ishango bone shows either the earliest known demonstration of sequences of prime numbers or a six month lunar calendar. Also, Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium BC pictorially represented geometric designs. ”Numeral systems have been many and diverse, with the first known written numerals created by Egyptians in Middle Kingdom texts such as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. The earliest uses of mathematics were in trading, land measurement, painting and weaving patterns and the recording of time. More complex mathematics did not appear until around 3000 BC, when the Egyptians and Babylonians began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for taxation and other financial calculations, for building and construction, and for astronomy”

6 Mining of minerals The oldest known mine on archaeological record is the “Lion Cave” in Swaziland, which radiocarbon dating shows to be about 43,000 years old. Much later on, the Africans of Egypt mined malachite….Quarries for turquoise and copper were also found at “Wadi Hamamat, Tura, Aswan and various other Nubian sites”..The gold mines of Nubia were among the largest and most extensive in the world, and are described by the Greek author Diodorus Siculus. He mentions that fire-setting was one method used to break down the hard rock holding the gold. One of the complexes is shown in one of earliest known maps. They crushed the ore and ground it to a fine powder before washing the powder for the gold dust.

7 Iron Smelting Iron smelting is a form of extractive metallurgy; its main use is to produce a metal from its ore. This includes production of silver, iron, copper and other base metals from their ores. Smelting uses heat and a chemical reducing agent to decompose the ore, driving off other elements as gasses or slag and leaving just the metal behind. Early iron smelting: ”Where and how iron smelting was discovered is widely debated, and remains uncertain due to the significant lack of production finds.. [but] there is a further possibility of iron smelting and working in West Africa by 1200 BC. In addition, very early instances of carbon steel were found to be in production around 2000 years before the present in northwest Tanzania, based on complex preheating principles. These discoveries are significant for the history of metallurgy.”

8 Religion Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. From his own statements we learn that he traveled in Egypt around 60 BC. His travels in Egypt probably took him as far south as the first Cataract.He wrote about the ”Ethiopians” south of Egypt. “They further write that it was among them that people were first taught to honor the gods and offer sacrifices and arrange processions and festivals and perform other things by which people honor the divine. For this reason their piety is famous among all men, and the sacrifices among the Aithiopians are believed to be particularly pleasing to the divinity,”

9 Laws Stephanus of Byzantium, who is said to represent the opinions of the most ancient Greeks, says: “Ethiopia was the first established country on the earth, and the Ethiopians were the first who introduced the worship of the Gods and who established laws.” Quoted by John D. Baldwin, Prehistoric Nations, p. 62.

10 International Trade In 1825, Arnold Hermann Heeren (1760-1842), Professor of History and Politics in the University of Gottengen and one of the ablest of the early exponents of the economic interpretation of history, published, in the fourth and revised edition of his great work Ideen Uber Die Politik, Den Verkehr Und Den Handel Der Vornehmsten Volker Der Alten Weld, a lengthy essay on the history, culture, and commerce of the ancient Ethiopians, which had profound influence on contemporary writers in the conclusion that it was among these ancient Black people of Africa and Asia that international trade was first developed. He thinks that as a by-product of these international contacts there was an exchange of ideas and cultural practices that laid the foundations of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world. Heeren in his researches says: “From the remotest times to the present, the Ethiopians [ancient name for blacks south of the Sahara] have been one of the most celebrated, and yet the most mysterious of nations. In the earliest traditions of nearly all the..civilized nations of antiquity, the name of this distant people is found. The annals of the Egyptian priests are full of them, and the nations of inner Asia, on the Euphrates and Tigris, have interwoven the fictions of the Ethiopians with their traditions of the wars and conquests of their heroes; and, at a period equally remote, they glimmer in Greek mythology. When the Greeks scarcely knew Italy and Sicily by name, the Ethiopians were celebrated in the verses of their poets, and when the faint gleam of tradition and fable gives way to the clear light of history, the lustre of the Ethiopians is not diminished.”

11 Philosophy Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. Philosophy in Africa has a rich and varied history, dating from pre-dynastic Egypt, continuing through the birth of Christianity and Islam. Arguably central to the ancients was the conception of “ma’at”, which roughly translated refers to “justice”, “truth”, or simply “that which is right”. One of the earliest works of political philosophy was the Maxims of Ptah-Hotep, which were taught to Egyptian schoolboys for centuries…Ancient Egyptian philosophers made extremely important contributions to Hellenistic philosophy, Christian philosophy, and Islamic philosophy. ”Ancient Egyptian philosophy has been credited by the ancient Greeks as being the beginning of philosophy”.

12 Art The oldest art objects in the world—a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave.
 

Though the term “family business” may call to mind visions of local mom-and-pop firms, family-controlled companies play a huge role on the global stage. Not only do they include sprawling corporations like Walmart and Tata Group, but they account for more than 30% of all companies with sales in excess of $1 billion. And over the long term, their financial performance exceeds that of traditional public companies, according to a new study by BCG and École Polytechnique.

Family-controlled companies surpass their peers because they focus on resilience, not short-term results. During economic booms, this approach leads them to forgo some opportunities (and hence do slightly worse than their counterparts), but it puts them in a position of strength during downturns, when they shine. The researchers identified seven specific ways in which family-run businesses build their resilience:

They’re frugal in good times and bad.

1. They set a high bar for capital expenditures.
2. They carry little debt.
3. They acquire fewer (and smaller) companies.
4. They’re more diversified.
5. They’re more international.
6. They retain talent better than their competitors do.

Though these practices come more naturally to executives who feel an obligation to be stewards for the next generation, executives at any corporation can adopt them. Indeed, the researchers uncovered a number of nonfamily-controlled companies that mimicked the behaviors of family firms and saw very similar patterns of performance.

To many, the phrase “family business” connotes a small or midsized company with a local focus and a familiar set of problems, such as squabbles over succession. While plenty of mom-and-pop firms certainly fit that description, it doesn’t reflect the powerful role that family-controlled enterprises play in the world economy. Not only do they include sprawling corporations such as Walmart, Samsung, Tata Group, and Porsche, but they account for more than 30% of all companies with sales in excess of $1 billion, according to the Boston Consulting Group’s analysis.

Conventional wisdom holds that the unique ownership structure of family businesses gives them a long-term orientation that traditional public firms often lack. But beyond that, little is known about exactly what makes family businesses different. Some studies suggest that, on average, they outperform other businesses over the long term—but other studies prove the opposite.

To settle that question, we and Sophie Mignon, an associate researcher at the Center for Management and Economic Research at École Polytechnique, compiled a list of 149 publicly traded, family-controlled businesses with revenues of more than $1 billion. They were based in the United States, Canada, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Mexico. In each business a family owned a significant percentage, though not necessarily a majority, of the stock, and family members were actively involved both on the board and in management. We then created a comparison group of companies from the same countries and sectors, which were similar in size but not family controlled. (We didn’t look at Asian companies because so many of them are family controlled that it’s difficult to find a suitable comparison group.) Then we did a rigorous analysis of the ways in which those two sets of companies were managed differently and how that affected performance.

Our results show that during good economic times, family-run companies don’t earn as much money as companies with a more dispersed ownership structure. But when the economy slumps, family firms far outshine their peers. And when we looked across business cycles from 1997 to 2009, we found that the average long-term financial performance was higher for family businesses than for nonfamily businesses in every country we examined.

The Long-Term View of Family-Business Performance

Though family-run companies slightly lag their peer group when the economy booms, they weather recessions far better.

The simple conclusion we reached is that family businesses focus on resilience more than performance. They forgo the excess returns available during good times in order to increase their odds of survival during bad times. A CEO of a family-controlled firm may have financial incentives similar to those of chief executives of nonfamily firms, but the familial obligation he or she feels will lead to very different strategic choices. Executives of family businesses often invest with a 10- or 20-year horizon, concentrating on what they can do now to benefit the next generation. They also tend to manage their downside more than their upside, in contrast with most CEOs, who try to make their mark through outperformance.

At a time when executives of every company are encouraged to manage for the long term, we believe that well-run family businesses can serve as role models. In fact, in our research we were able to identify several companies with dispersed ownership whose strategies mimicked those of family firms. Those companies also exhibited a similar performance pattern: below their peers during upturns but leading the pack in times of crisis. (See the sidebar “It Operates Like a Family Business—but It’s Not.”)

It Operates Like a Family Business—but It’s Not

 It makes sense that family-controlled companies would focus on resilience instead of performance, but why can’t other companies mimic that strategy?

In fact, some do. Consider Nestlé. It follows most of the golden rules of family firms. It slightly underperformed its three major competitors during the economic expansions of 1997–1999 and 2003–2007—but consistently outperformed them in periods of financial stress and crisis. Its leverage is lower: Debt accounts for 35% of its capitalization, versus an average of 47% among its competitors. Nestlé relies less on acquisitions: Annually, newly acquired businesses account for an average of 3.9% of its revenues, versus an average of 7.8% for its competitors. Nestlé is also the most diversified of the world’s four food giants, in terms of both geography (67% of its sales come from outside its home region, compared with 56% for its competitors) and product lines (which range from pet food to beverages, and from confectionary to pharmaceuticals).

Nestlé is not a unique example. Essilor, the world leader in optical lenses, is another nonfamily firm that mimics these behaviors. It has a culture of cost consciousness, maintains a very low level of debt, and has little staff turnover. Essilor is highly international—and has made many small acquisitions close to the core rather than pursuing big deals. Like Nestlé, it has weathered the recent downturn exceptionally well. In the United States, Johnson & Johnson isn’t a family-owned business, but it acts like one, with a low debt-to-equity ratio, a product line that allows its PR people to tout it as “the most diversified global health care company,” and a skepticism toward the large transformational mergers that other pharma players routinely attempt.

For years managers have been advised to “think like an owner.” The rules of family business show how to translate that thinking into actual strategies. What Nestlé and other nonfamily companies prove is that it’s possible to benefit from these rules regardless of ownership structure.

So how do family-run firms manage for resiliency? We’ve identified seven differences in their approach:

1: They’re frugal in good times and bad.

After years of studying family businesses, we believe it’s possible to identify one just by walking into the lobby of its headquarters. Unlike many multinationals, most of these firms don’t have luxurious offices. As the CEO at one global family-controlled commodity group told us, “The easiest money to earn is the money we haven’t spent.” While countless corporations use stock grants and options to turn managers into shareholders and minimize the classic principal-agent conflict, family firms seem imbued with the sense that the company’s money is the family’s money, and as a result they simply do a better job of keeping their expenses under control. If you examine company finances over the last economic cycle, you’ll see that family-run enterprises entered the recession with leaner cost structures, and consequently they were less likely to have to do major layoffs.

2: They keep the bar high for capital expenditures.

Family-controlled firms are especially judicious when it comes to capex. “We have a simple rule,” one owner-CEO at a family firm told us. “We do not spend more than we earn.” This sounds like simple good sense, but the reality is, you never hear those words uttered by corporate executives who are not owners. The owner-CEO added: “We make roughly €450 million of free cash flow every year, so we try to spend no more than €400 million per year, and we keep the balance for rainy days.”

At most family firms, capex investments have a double hurdle to clear: First a project must provide a good return on its own merits; then it’s judged against other potential projects, to keep spending under the company’s self-imposed limit. Because they’re more stringent, family businesses tend to invest only in very strong projects. So they miss some opportunities (hence their underperformance) during periods of expansion, but in times of crisis their exposure will be limited because they’ve avoided borderline projects that may turn into cash black holes.

3: They carry little debt.

In modern corporate finance a judicious amount of debt is considered a good thing because financial leverage maximizes value creation. Family-controlled firms, however, associate debt with fragility and risk. Debt means having less room to manoeuvre if a setback occurs—and it means being beholden to a nonfamily investor. The firms we studied were much less leveraged than the comparison group; from 2001 to 2009, debt accounted for 37% of their capital, on average, but for 47% of the nonfamily firms’ capital. As a result, the family-run companies didn’t need to make big sacrifices to meet financing demands during the recession. “People think we are rich and courageous,” one executive from a family firm told us, “but in fact we are cowardly—we leave most of the cash in the company to avoid giving away too much power to our banks.”

4: They acquire fewer (and smaller) companies.

Of all the plays a manager can make, a sparkly transformational acquisition may be the hardest to resist. It carries high risks but can pay large rewards. Many family businesses we studied eschewed these deals. They favored smaller acquisitions close to the core of their existing business or deals that involved simple geographic expansion. There were significant exceptions to this rule—when the family was convinced that its traditional sector faced structural change or disruption or when managers felt that not participating in industry consolidation might endanger the firm’s long-term survival. But generally, family companies aren’t energetic deal makers. On average, we found, they made acquisitions worth just 2% of revenues each year, while nonfamily businesses made acquisitions worth 3.7%—nearly twice as much. Family businesses prefer organic growth and will often pursue partnerships or joint ventures instead of acquisitions. As the HR director of a leading family-owned luxury goods company described it: “We don’t like big acquisitions—they represent too much integration risk, you may get the timing wrong and invest just before a downturn, and more importantly, you may alter the culture and fabric of the corporation.”

5: Many show a surprising level of diversification.

Plenty of family-controlled companies—such as Michelin and Walmart—remain focused on a core business. But despite a generation’s worth of financial wisdom that diversification is better done by individual investors than at a corporate level, we found a large number of family businesses—such as Cargill, Koch Industries, Tata, and LG—that were far more diversified than the average corporation. In our study 46% of family businesses were highly diversified, but only 20% of the comparison group were. Some family firms had expanded into new lines of business organically; others had acquired small entities in new fields and built on them. The CEOs we spoke with say that as recessions have become deeper and more frequent, diversification has become a key way to protect the family wealth. If one sector suffers a downturn, businesses in other sectors can generate funds that allow a company to invest for the future while its competitors are pulling back.

6: They are more international.

Family-controlled companies have been ambitious about their overseas expansion. They generate more sales abroad than other businesses do; on average 49% of their revenues come from outside their home region, versus 45% of revenues at nonfamily businesses. But family businesses usually achieve foreign growth organically or through small local acquisitions—without big cash outlays. And they are very patient once they enter a new market. “We accepted that we’d lose money in the U.S. for 20 years, but without this persistence we would not be the global leader today,” says one executive from a family-run global consumer products company.

7: They retain talent better than their competitors do.

Retention at the family-run businesses we studied was better, on average, than at the comparison companies; only 9% of the workforce (versus 11% at nonfamily firms) turned over annually.

The leaders of family companies extol the benefits of longer employee tenures: higher trust, familiarity with coworkers’ behaviors and decision making, a stronger culture. These businesses have a lot in common with what the academics Karlene Roberts and Karl Weick call “high-reliability organizations,” in which long-serving teams of specialists develop efficient team dynamics and a collective mind-set that helps them achieve goals. Says the CEO of one $10 billion diversified group: “We don’t have the smartest guys out there, but they know their job like nobody else, and when a problem hits they can act immediately as a team—one that has been there before.”

Interestingly, family businesses generally don’t rely on financial incentives to increase retention. Instead, they focus on creating a culture of commitment and purpose, avoiding layoffs during downturns, promoting from within, and investing in people. In our study we found that they spent far more on training: €885 a year per employee on average, versus an average of €336 at nonfamily firms.Examine these seven principles, and it becomes clear how coherent and synergistic they are: Adhering to one of them often makes it easier to follow the next. Frugality and low debt help reduce the need for layoffs, thus improving retention. International expansion provides a natural diversification of risks. Fewer acquisitions mean less debt. Money saved through frugality is invested wisely if the company keeps a high bar on capital expenditures. Instead of working in isolation, these principles reinforce one another nicely.

When we talk with executives at family-controlled firms, they speak derisively about competitors who “bet the farm” or “swing for the fences.” They talk about what keeps them up at night. Though they realize they are missing opportunities by being overly prudent, they hope to generate superior returns over time as business cycles turn from good to bad.

It’s evident that those cycles are speeding up. If that trend continues, the resilience-focused strategy of family-owned companies may become more attractive to all companies. In a global economy that seems to shift from crisis to crisis with alarming frequency, accepting a lower return in good times to ensure survival in bad times may be a trade-off that managers are thrilled to make.

Credit: Harvard Business Review.

Our question of the week is when is Uber coming to Zimbabwe? Does it mean there is no business potential in Zim? They are already in South Africa  and Tanzania, how about Zim?

More ZBIN members are inboxing your admins looking for cars for hire during the festive season. Some of the people in need of cars for hire are returning Diasporans and some are locals looking for cars for hire for wedding functions.

If you have not registered with us we are encouraging you to put your details below:

Contact Name:

Location:

Vehicle Type:

Phone Number:

All the best

Good Morning to ZBIN Family, we hope that you are doing fine. Its exactly 10 days before Christmas how are you doing in terms of festive business preparations? Did you follow the advice we gave you on festive season business preparations?

Have you seen that we cover all business areas? Some of the investment areas covered require millions of dollars in terms of capital for instance investment in Energy that we covered last week, some may require as little as $50 in the case of Rabbit Farming. We cover everything as requested by our members.

We hope to improve in terms of business ideas and tips that we give you. So far we our work is only 2% where we just indicate areas to invest in without providing deep analysis reports, feasibility studies and even test runs of business ideas. We look forward to being organised in 2017 and providing value for money in terms of the depth of business advice provided to members.

So what do we have this Thursday morning? Well it’s a simple idea and targets our ZBIN Baking Group members. You guys have been active with a lot of recipes being shared, a lot of business generated. One are of weakness is that you failed to organise a Field Day as planned, you also failed to host a Festive Season Baking Day for Fathers. Iam confident that  we will do better in 2017.

Our idea of the day is that of establishing a home bakery as a starting point before going fully commercial. Instead of only baking cakes why not cover buns, biscuits, samosas, chocolates, bread and have your neighbourhood as your customer base?

You start with neighbours, church members and with time you reach out to schools in the neighbourhood. Your small buns vanopfuura vachinhonga.You can even make it more like a drive inn bakery…a place where folks pass through  vachitora fresh bread vachienda kumba….good parking space is  key..with time ana amai vanowana nzvimbo yekutandarira vachinwa havo tea nema biscuits or coffee nema small cakes.

Minimum Requirements

1.Bakery equipment for small to medium scale operations
2.Professional display racks-or fridges (check out our main photo)
3.Neat and tidy home (Presentation-presentation-presentation)
4. Good Parking space
5. Friendly environment.

6. Relevant City Council approvals and permits

So consider this as a possible option if you are into baking. We hope to cover more business related topics targeting the one thousand member ZBIN Baking Community.

All the best

So you have secured a residential stand? Congratulations to you for getting a legit residential stand. Last time on ZBIN when we tackled Real Estate Issues we covered ‘how to avoid losing hard earned money by buying dubious residential stands’. If you have not read the post then we urge you to go on the search button and look for this very helpful post.

Anyway the aim of this post is to help first time home builders especially in terms of what to avoid. So you have secured your stand, you have an approved house plan and you are raring to go. Below we will help you in a few critical areas. More areas will be covered in next instalments.

Searching for builders: No doubt a difficult talk and we encourage you to search widely and make sure that you have the right personnel for the job. Do not pick anyone from the street but consult friends or relatives, check adverts on newspapers. Shortlist at least 4 builders and ask them to bring details of who will be working with them (their teams). Once you have details of team composition then do a background check and ask for referrals. We urge you to get at least 4 referrals. The reason you will be doing this is because you do not want inexperienced people to be doing anything on your residential site.

Builders with many contracts: On what to avoid is a situation where the builder has too many jobs such that they subcontract the work to someone else. This is why its important to find who they will be working with. You will need to check this when doing referral work and it may be useful to always check whether they are on the site or not.

Stolen Building Materials: Perhaps your biggest risk, get this fact right-these guys will definitely steal building materials-mostly cement and bricks and it will be hard to know that you have been conned. The end result will most likely be a house that has walls that crack in the long run. So how do you reduce the risk? Its difficult to pinpoint a sure-fire way that reduces risk-sometimes you can opt to have someone who can oversee the project implementation. It can work provided there is no collusion between someone whom you have chosen and the builders. A friend of mine once assigned a relative to provide checks and balances-the relative ended up finding buyers of cement! Our recommendation on the issue is that you should be available on the ground to see certain house construction stages such as the construction of the foundation.

We will cover more Real Estate matters in the coming weeks such as new suburbs in Harare and Bulawayo, housing trends and a comparison of the Real Estate sectors of Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Wishing you a great day.

ZBIN Continues with the agenda of Diaspora Engagement  looking at possible areas Governments in Southern Africa can benefit from implementing Diaspora Strategies. Last time we brought you the advantages that can accrue to both parties- Home Countries and the Diaspora.

Today we cover 10 principles of good practice in drafting Diaspora Strategies.

A diaspora strategy should be centralized enough to ensure that a common identity, sense of purpose, collective consciousness, economies of scale, and strategic priorities can be achieved, but loose enough to let a thousand flowers bloom. Coordinated anarchy is not entirely indispensable.

1. A diaspora strategy cannot privilege economic ties over social and cultural networks and still be sustainable.
2. A diaspora strategy needs to be mutually beneficial for both home countries and diasporic populations.
3. Countries that know their Diasporas well will be better placed to engage them.

5. Diaspora strategies should define ‘diaspora’ as broadly as possible to avoid racializing national social, cultural, economic, and political policies – and should include affinity Diasporas policies where appropriate.

6. The diaspora needs to be consulted before any diaspora strategy is rolled out; diaspora strategies must be co-authored if they are to work.
7. Diaspora strategies need to be transparent and need to be held accountable, but given the specificity and the many intangible benefits of policy interventions, distinctive and unique policy impact analysis tools and evaluative frameworks and metrics need to be developed.

8. There is no ideal institutional framework for coordinating diaspora strategies; each country needs to devise forms of engagement which reflect their own institutional histories, social, cultural, economic, and political needs, and the histories, structures and organization of their diaspora.

9. Diaspora strategies need to be brought into the growing international conversation about best practice and should pro-actively affiliate themselves with networks involved in policy dissemination.
10. Diaspora strategies need to be underpinned by a philosophically grounded rationale which resonates with the country’s deepest social, economic, cultural, and political needs at any point in time. Shallow slogans might lead to short-term gains but will fail over the long term; a meaningful overarching identity will galvanise and energize.

Credit: Prof. Mark Boyle, Prof. Rob Kitchin, and Dr. Delphine Ancien, NUI Maynooth, Irelan

So Iam beginning to see GP plates on Harare’s roads? This is a welcome development, our brothers and sisters from the Diaspora are back. They are slowly trooping back home and we wish you well during the festive season.
So to those still deciding to come and you are not sure of what to buy and bring home, here is a very good tip. How about buying machinery or equipment that can help you or relatives back home in money making ventures? Below we look at some of the items you can purchase;
1. Gym Equipment: Gym equipment is unbelievably cheap in South Africa, not sure about Botswana and Zambia. You can consider establishing a backyard gym for your relatives back home-visit Game Stores for comparing prices. Do not buy all the equipment at one go, instead do the purchase on a piecemeal basis-some this holiday and the next during Easter or next holidays.

2. Events Management Equipment: Consider folding tables, cooking utensils, plastic chairs for hiring to churches, political parties, funerals etc

3. PA Systems for hire: A good way to make extra monies through hiring out to schools, churches and other functions.

4. Printing Machinery: So we are entering an elections period? During this period there is going to be a lot of printing services-tshirts,posters etc. Consider setting up backyard photocopiers-buy used photocopiers-zvinonobatsira muzukuru asina basa.
5. Mining Equipment for hire: This may need huge capital outlays, but research and find out from Auctions in South Africa, you may be fortunate to buy machinery at rock bottom prices.

6. Jumping Castles: Another source of passive income, research on the jumping castles and bring some home.

So safe travel to those coming to Zimbabwe, and to those already in Zimbabwe, enjoy your stay!

Happy Holidays

The biggest event on the forum was the trip to Tete by the ZBIN Portuguese Group and we thank the Almighty that all went well. The group lead by Clara Mapfumo was in the Mozambican City for a period of 2 days and I hear they did well and will follow up in the coming two weeks.

After the Tete visit we shift our focus to Beira. We are still at planning stage and deciding whether to travel to Beira or Chimoio from the 28^th to the 29^th of December. More details will be shared with the forum members during the next two weeks.

Interviews

So we continue to unlock business information from Zimbos based in the Diaspora and to date we have given you interviews from India, DRC, Namibia, Canada, Dubai and Cape Town. Today we covered another interview with a sister based in Pemba a city which few Zimbos know about. I would like to thank Mrs Kapitawo for agreeing to be interviewed and sharing a lot of photos from a city which is hard to pinpoint where it is on the map.

I have secured another interview with a ZBIN sister based in Germany, a successful business person and an Accountant working in Germany who has interesting stuff for the ZBIN community. Expect this interview on Wednesday-another interview of a sister based in Kenya should be coming during the end of the week.

Why Interviews? The reason is simple, to help you get official information about other areas where vana vevhu stay and show that you too can do it. The interview with Mrs Kapitawo shows that she has opened a new company in Mozambique and as a member of ZBIN Baking  she is going to get a lot of help from others who are in the business and she can also help inspire others. This is the founding principle of ZBIN, unlocking business opportunities through networking and business information exchanges.

Adverts Section

There are few takers for the free platform we have on the website where we are inviting members to place their adverts for goods or services for sale. This platform is much better than Facebook adverts where you have to compete with thousands of other advertisers. So use this platform for your own benefit.

Videos on the Platform

So I discovered a new way of putting Youtube videos on the forum this week and this has been helpful in telling the full story of any issue posted on our website. Kindly refer to Clara Mapfumo’s video on opportunities in Mozambique. We shot the video at our meeting held at Paramount a month ago. We invite members to improve in terms of marketing- in addition to photos, please shoot short videos and post on Youtube. If you have challenges in uploading on Youtube then send them to me during weekends.

Videos are going to help you explain fully your business story, they are going to help you identify new markets and potential partners. So  make short videos and don’t worry about quality, we will improve with time. A two to four minute is good enough for a start. Iam therefore expecting my inbox to be flooded with videos every Saturday or Sunday and promise to upload them all. If you like to see the impact of videos then compare and contrast a newspaper and a television! So from mining,baking,poultry,online forex trading – Iam looking forward to your videos.

Research

As promised, we will be making follow ups on Vending Machines and Crowd Funding and will share information with you during the week.

Online Newsletter

Have you registered on our website so that you can receive our newsletter? Don’t be left out kindly register on our website for weekly summaries of posts and new developments in terms of investment.

 The 2017 National Budget

We hope to look at the National Budget that was presented this week and will look at what this means for the ordinary ZBIN member-those in business and those considering investment. We will look at possible scenarios in terms of business, if you like financial modelling then here is your chance to participate as we develop more models for use by the group. This will only be distributed via our newsletter.

Group Logo

Vote of Thanks to the ZBIN member, a hardworking and innovative youngster who developed our forum logo for free. We will feature him on the website during the week. May God bless you abundantly for the efforts.

Holidays and Parenting

Are you a parent? Do you have kids? If your answer to the two questions is yes, then here is something interesting we are going to be doing-we will be covering topics to help young minds to appreciate business. A couple of researches will be coming your way and the first one is creating of a vending machine, please refer them to the vending machine post and show them how to make one. It will help them in sharpening their research,teamwork,innovation and business skills. All you need to do is to download the video, buy the materials and then give them a task. We will come up with a comprehensive list of projects for them next week.

 So till next week,  WaMdala signs off

Growth projected at 1.7% from 0.6% estimated in 2016

Agriculture and Mining to drive overall growth with sector growth of 12% and 0.9% respectively

Inflation projected at 1.1%, from a negative of 1.5% in 2016

Total expenditures projected at $4.1 billion

Financing Gap of $400m

Government wage bill takes $3.0 billion in 2017

Capital Expenditure amounts to $520 million or 3.6% of GDP

Trade Deficit of $1.5 billion compared to $1.985 in 2016

Debt Stock of $11,2 billion as at 31 October 2016, which is 79% of GDP