Tech London Advocates Feature

Tech London Advocates, a community of black women Tech advocates in London, works to support and empower diversity and inclusion of black women in tech. I was honored to be featured in their most recent spotlight. Read the full interview here, and catch some highlights below.

What are your business and lifestyle rituals to stay ahead?

Center the practice of curiosity to design a career that is not only unique and meaningful but also reduces your blind spots. When you rely on patterns, it can be easy to default to what you know and stop innovating. By remaining curious, you expose yourself to new data or different points of view which can enrich your perspective.

SheDistinction Interview (Sept. 2019)

Many thanks to Vera Ng’oma, who interviewed me for SheDistinction, a platform to inspire and enable young women learn to lead and flourish professional. Full interview available here and some highlights below:

Most people associate marketing and communications with products/private sector but you use it for social impact. How does that work in practice?   

91% of global consumers expect companies to do more than make a profit but also operate responsibly to address social and environmental issues. But how do they hear about it? That’s where marketing and communications come in — storytelling is a fundamental part of social impact. Successful stakeholder engagement requires communicating what you as an organization have been doing to both internal and external stakeholders such as employees, policymakers, and customers. Brand storytelling is multi-layered. From messages from marketing to product innovation and customer interaction, it’s critical to tell genuine stories that are anchored around messages of community. For that story to resonate, the tone can’t be too promotional or self-congratulatory — it has to be honest, balanced, and most critically, transparent. 

You work across business, culture, politics, etc with quite a wide range of stakeholders. What’s your ‘success-kit’ for working with groupings as diverse as for example farmers on the one hand and multinationals on the other?

Learning how to communicate with different cultures and personalities can go a long way not just in the workplace but outside it, too. In a multicultural, global society, code-switching is becoming a more regular occurrence. But to do this genuinely and credibly, it’s important to take time to understand the culture you are operating in — from history to etiquette, and more. Remember that people appreciate the details, and respectful curiosity about another person’s culture not only demonstrates your commitment to learning about their working environment and cultural context but it can also be a great icebreaker!

Op-Ed: Getting African Women into the Boardroom (Project Syndicate / World Economic Forum / Arab News)

In recent years, African women have made great strides in getting their voices heard in politics and government. It is time for businesses within the region and around the world to embrace this trend and bring more African women into their executive teams and their boardrooms. In this piece co-written with Marcia Ashong, I look at how businesses might make more strides in getting more African women into the boardroom. It was originally published by Project Syndicate, and re-published in the World Economic Forum Agenda and Arab News, Saudi Arabia’s largest English-language daily.

By 2050, one-quarter of the world’s population will be African, which means that one in eight people will be an African woman. Yet, within the continent, let alone internationally, Africa’s women lack the economic clout their numbers might suggest. That disconnect has severe adverse implications for Africa’s prospects. In fact, the only way to tap Africa’s full potential is by dramatically improving women’s representation in the workplace, including in senior executive roles.

The contribution women can make to Africa’s future should be obvious. Worldwide, consumer spending – which is growing three times faster in emerging markets than in developed economies – is largely controlled by women. This implies a powerful incentive for companies to bring more women into their decision-making processes.

Yet, even as the number of women sitting on the boards of global companies rises, progress is slow, and African women have been largely left out – with notable exceptions, such as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister and World Bank managing director, who was appointed to the board of Twitter last year, undoubtedly because of the platform’s growing popularity in Africa. But Okonjo-Iweala is an outlier – few African women hold similarly influential positions at global corporations.

African women are barely present even in boardrooms within Africa, where 95% of CEOs are men. According to datafrom the African Development Bank, women hold only 12.7% of the board seats in Africa’s top listed companies.

This reflects a broader lack of gender equality across the African private sector that is preventing the continent’s economies from reaching their full potential. New research from the International Monetary Fund shows that countries ranked in the bottom 50% for gender equality globally – including large African economies like Ethiopia, Morocco, and Nigeria – could add a whopping 35% to their economies, on average, by bringing more women into the workplace. Having more women in senior leadership roles is critical to catalyzing a shift, given the powerful role that diversity at the top plays in shaping organizational priorities. As Africa is already home to six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies, achieving gender balance in the workplace could deliver a significant boost to global growth.

Read more here.

Op-Ed: The Future of Africa’s diaspora is in Africa (CNBC)

With over 30 million Africans living outside of their home countries, migration will play a big role in shaping Africa’s future. While the vibrant and growing diaspora communities in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom and France are gaining in visibility, it is communities of Africans within Africa that will have the most transformative impact on the region’s future. In 2012, the African Union proclaimed the African diaspora as the continent’s sixth region. This population, often presumed to be in the West, is likely to grow quickly as more Africans put down roots in countries beyond their own.  The social, economic, and cultural capital they bring will be vital to ensuring Africa’s demographic boom yields dividends as the continent’s share of the global population doubles by 2050. In this piece I look at how migration and trade will expand diaspora communities on the continent.

Africa emerges as new standard-bearer of free trade

Some members of the WorldRemit team came together with predictions for fintech and trade in 2019. Here's my contribution on the future of inter-African trade in the New Year:

Prediction: Africa emerges as new standard-bearer of free trade

Ten years ago, the G20’s rejection of protectionism helped the global economy weather one of its most difficult periods. Now, a decade later trade protectionism seems on the rise. Recent research shows that world’s top 60 economies have adopted more than 7000 protectionist trade measures on a net basis since the financial crisis.

But as countries like the US and UK turn inward, Africa is opening up. In March, 44 countries signed the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area, the largest free trade agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organisation.

Africa, which covers approximately 30 million square kilometres, is the second-largest continent in the world. By 2050, 1 in 4 people worldwide will be African. But despite its vast geography and rapidly growing population, the region’s economy remains small. But as Africa grows by 2.7% annually (a figure that more than doubles if you exclude resource-dependent economies like Nigeria, Angola and South Africa), here are our predictions for African regional integration in 2019.

Inter-African trade is likely to rise by 8% in 2019. Small countries will lead the charge.

Inter-African trade (the share of African countries’ exports to destinations within the continent) was 17.6% of the total in 2017. On this metric, African economies have become substantially more integrated in recent years (see figure 1). This integration was driven by improvements in transport and communications infrastructure, falling trade tariffs (see figure 2) and the pull of economic ‘gravity’ as trade flows are diverted towards rapidly growing and often neighbouring economies. The IMF forecasts African GDP to grow by 3.9% in 2019 in real terms — 7.7% in US dollar terms. If the total export-GDP ratio rises part of the way back towards recent highs, and the share going to Africa does the same, the volume inter-African exports could rise by 8% or more in 2019, and by 12% in US dollar terms.

Countries with the highest levels of regional integration tend to be smaller and to import significant shares of their neighbours’ GDP, and so can drive growth at the regional level. This is particularly true in East and Southern Africa, where 20.6 and 20.3 of exports are exchanged within the region, respectively.

Progress on closing the infrastructure gap

Africa’s annual infrastructure gap — the difference between what it has and what it needs — is now estimated at around $170 billion. According to the World Bank, narrowing the region’s infrastructure gap in line with the rest of the developing world would increase GDP per capita by an estimated 1.7percentage points per year, with the largest potential growth benefits generated by improving access to electricity.

Growing capital deployment by Africa-focused multi-lateral finance institutions formed within the last decade such as Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), Africa50, and Anergi as well as the announcement of Allianz Global Investors (AGI)’s $120 million investment in the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund points to a bright future for African infrastructure in 2019.

Pictured: Opened in 2019, the Maputo-Katembe bridge, Africa’s longest suspension bridge, measures 3km in length and will connect travellers between South Africa and Mozambique in record time. Travel time now reduced from six hours to 90 minutes.

More Africans will find it easier to travel across the continent

2018 was a major turning point as the launch of the Single African Air Transport Market and ongoing progress of the African Union’s visa openness initiative made it faster, less expensive and easier than ever for Africans to travel within the region. Today, Africans do not need a visa to travel to 25% of other African countries and can now get visas on arrival in 24% of other African countries. Ethiopia, Africa’s diplomatic capital and one of the region’s key aviation hubs, for example, began offering visa on arrival to all Africans starting from November 9, 2018. Air traffic in Africa is forecast to grow 6 percent per year, twice as fast as mature markets and faster than any other region over the next two decades. Improved regional agreements and demand should help lower costs for consumers.

Regional financial integration through increased mobile money interoperability will rise

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that widespread adoption and use of mobile money could add $3.7 trillion to the GDP of emerging economies within a decade. Mobile money interoperability is common in East and Central Africa as well as between Zimbabwe and South Africa, but in 2019 we predict that this trend will accelerate.

In late November, Orange Group and MTN Group, leading African telecoms providers, announced a joint venture, Mowali to enable interoperable payments across the continent. The joint venture will bring together 100 million Orange Money and MTN Money users in 22 African markets.

Members of the West African Economic Monetary Union (WAEMU) — a group of eight primarily francophone West African states within the ECOWAS — are building an interoperable system that will connect 110 million people to more than 125+ banks, dozens of e-money issuers, and 600+ microfinance institutions by the end of next year.

These partnerships will help more Africans across the continent receive better access to financial services, particularly in under-served rural communities.

So what does this mean for Africans?

Although the continent’s youth bulge is often cited in negative terms in terms of net migration, it is also means that a young and eager workforce, increasingly educated and hungry for opportunity, has a brighter future.

Africa’s trajectory in 2019 is to be more interconnected, more dynamic than ever, and a place where entrepreneurs can find a market for their innovation. Since 2016, for example, the number of active tech hubs across Africa has grown by more than 50% to 442 according to the telecoms industry body, GSMA. Hurdles like the most expensive data costs in the world remain and cost of living can be high, but the long arc of development bends towards continued progress in the coming year.

Op-Ed: Move over G7. The future belongs to a more inclusive G20 (World Economic Forum)

This year's G7 didn't exactly go as planned, and was a reminder of the institution's increasing anachronism. Instead, it's time to look to the G20 as a leading global forum; however, it needs some reform to maximize effectiveness. In this piece I wrote for the World Economic Forum, I argue that the G20 membership should include more emerging economies like Nigeria, Iran, and Pakistan.