Africapractice published this press release that reveals high expectations for African businesses in 2009:

Business leaders are still bullish about Africa for 2009. africapractice asked business leaders with interests in Africa about their investment plans for 2009; 62 per cent plan to expand significantly, while 38 per cent said they will expand slightly.
The global economic crisis [...]

Shanta Devarajan is the Chief Economist of the Africa Region at the World Bank. He gave a lecture yesterday at the Colombia Business School on how to stimulate the private sector in Africa. Here are the main points…

Despite relatively rapid economic growth, private investment in Africa is still relatively low
The proximate reasons are [...]

In the post “Can Freeconomics Work in Africa” I debated whether or not ‘freeconomic’ business models could flourish in Africa as they have for some companies like Google, 37Signals and Ubuntu in the U.S. and Europe. Recently a new debate was started when Andrew Keen of internetevolution.com boldly challenged, “The hungry and cold unemployed [...]

Being back in the Valley revealed several trends of the tech community when it comes to their motivations for social change initiatives. The title of this post lays them all out from my perspective…

Niche-driven
Companies that are trying to segment out a very vertical slice of the market or technology so as to differentiate their [...]

One of the things that baffles me about the Ugandan ITC space is the lack of collaboration among the people and businesses here. In an area where internet costs are high, IT resources are low and educated workers are sparse, there’s not a whole lot of communication between the various groups. Even among [...]

The goal of this article is to provide insight for those of you interested in starting businesses in Africa. I’ll break down all the costs associated with what I’ve done in my first month here so that you have an accurate, first-hand account. All the prices are in U.S. dollars with Ugandan Shillings [...]

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who does a lot of business in Africa. He mentioned one of the things he hates most about doing anything here is the lack of customer service he experiences as a client of many African businesses both large and small. I hate [...]